|
I think we tend to be rather critical here, of those who did not have the advantage of second guessing histroy before it took a terrible change in course. Pop who was on the recieving end of bullets made in war time Nazi Germany while trying to stay alive and dropping bombs all over the country, had a lot of admiration for the pilots who flew into massive bomber formations with thousands of 50 caliber machine guns shooting back at those same German fighter pilots.
How is it that many pilots and soldiers who actually fought against each other can now become friends, while we here, who never participated, decide to become self appointed judges and juries of situations we could not imagine, but so easily and so critically judge.
Henry Ford went bankrupt 3 times before he got to the point where he started to make money building cars. He had to fight the establishment tooth and nail to even get in the game and become competitive. Hardened by failure, then eventual succes, he believed what a hard man tends to believe and to many it ain't pretty.
Hitler took Germany from the ashes of the Versailles treaty to the point where Germany became a world power to be reconned with by any county. Then he took Germany to hell and dragged much of the planet with them.
We blasted Japan with nuclear weapons, but the fire bombing of Dresden killed more people than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I wonder what Germany would have done to Churchill and Bomber Harris if they had won the war.
I woke up at night as a teenager when Pop woke up from one of his nightmares, reliving what we can never comprehend, watching people get incinerated, blasted into a cloud of blood and guts. Death was always close, a mere fraction of a second between a near miss and a direct hit from flack.
Even if you have read a million pages of history, you can not comprehend the fear of almost certain death, but what is even worse is not knowing when it will come, whilel knowing that the odds are 8 to 1 against you ever getting home.
Pop almost never made it to Europe when they encountered icing and thunderstorms ferrying their plane across the North Atlantic in late november. It's best to learn from history and try very hard to avoid repetition of tragedies.
regards
Mech
|