The End of World War II

Today is the 75^th anniversary of the last act of World War II, the ceremony of Japan’s surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  (The actual surrender had happened earlier on August 15^th .)  I don’t know how many people will notice or care.  Most of the men who fought the war are gone. The youngest people legally serving in 1945 would be ninety one or two now.  

My contemporaries and I grew up in the shadow of the war.  Over fifteen  million men had served in it in the armed forces. My father and both his brothers were three of them. As a kid I heard their stories and the stories of the fathers of relatives, friends and schoolmates.  Every president of the United States from 1953 to 1993 served at least briefly in the armed forces during the war.

Now the war is as remote in time as the Civil War was when the Nazis invaded Poland. I hope Americans will remember it – honoring the valor of the men who won it,  understanding that civilization is not a given and  the  need for powerful and prepared armed forces to preserve it, and learning what is necessary to keep something like World War II from happening again. I hope, but  I have no idea whether I should expect. 

This is a good day to offer thanks to all the men of World War II – the young men and the old, the ones who came home and the ones who did not. They saved civilization and made our world possible.