Pride in June

 

In the summer of 1939 much of the world was either at war or about to be. Nazi Germany had broken its promises of the year before and occupied more of Czechoslovakia. Franco’s nationalists had won the Spanish civil war. Japan’s invading forces had seized much of the coastal and some of the interior areas of China. The three most powerful armies in the world were the German, Soviet, and French, with the French army along with the British navy considered to be the bulwark against Hitler’s Germany. The United States at that time had a powerful navy (though not one ready for a two ocean war) and an army far smaller than the one Belgium would field in 1940. In August Hitler and Stalin made an agreement of partnership, splitting up east central Europe between them. In September Germany and Russia invaded and partitioned Poland, starting World War II in Europe. In May of 1940 Germany attacked and defeated France, destroying the French army. By the end of that awful summer, Hitler was master of continental Europe with almost every continental nation allied with, occupied by, or friendly toward Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union as a de facto ally in the east, Asia’s greatest power Japan an ally in the Pacific, and only the British Empire as an active enemy. That was a crisis of civilization.

The United States responded by aiding and supplying Britain and later the Soviet Union after Hitler the broke the pact and invaded Russia and by strengthening its own defenses while remaining officially neutral in the war. Neutrality ended on December 7^th 1941 when Japan attacked the American navy base at Pearl Harbor, sinking or damaging the battleships of the Pacific fleet. In the next few days Germany declared war on the United States leaving America at war with great powers in both Europe and the Pacific. In less than four years after Pearl Harbor and despite early defeats, American forces accepted the unconditional surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, ending history’s greatest war in complete victory.

Over twelve million men served in the U.S. armed forces in the war, and millions of American women and older men worked on the home front to produce the arms and equipment for both America and its allies and co-belligerents. My father and most of my uncles served in the war. My mother and several of my aunts worked on the home front in various jobs. I am proud of them for it. Americans today should remember and be proud of all the Americans who helped win that war. Early June is an especially appropriate time to express that pride. Between June 4^th and 6^th in 1942 an outnumbered and outgunned U.S. naval force defeated the Japanese navy in the most decisive and historically important naval battle since Trafalgar, ending Japan’s offensive in the Pacific. On June 6^th 1944, American forces landed in Normandy, securing their beachhead and beginning the great campaign leading to the destruction of Nazi Germany.

It’s a free country, and people can select what they want to be proud of and when they want to show their pride. For me this June, it will be the men and women of World War II.