A Different Time a Different War
Preface
For America's youths growing up during WWII: those too young to be drrafted yet old enough to be affected by the war's impact on everyday life, it was to be a time of great confusion. Virtually all young Americans were induced or coerced into dropping their hyphenated status [a result of being indoctrinated in a call for patriotism with its sacrificial demands for the defense of God (the Protestant, Judeo/Christian One), country (that of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandberg) and the American way of life (as pictured by Norman Rockwell)]. They were inculcated with this when in the schoolroom, when reading the comics and war stories in the newspapers, when at the movies and when listening to the radio (no TV yet with its vivid dipictions of what war is really like). Novertheless, despite all this having had the intended effect, one that resulted in most ethnically-hyphenated teenagers' thinking of themeselves solely as Americans, few adults neglected to remind them of their "ethnic heriage", albeit usually in a very low-key manner, either as a means of inflating their own egos, or of deflating the thought-to-be overblown concept-of-self that the youths were acquiring - one that resulted from their believing themseves to be Americans, and only Americans at that.
The writer recalls the dumbfounded look on the face of a friend, a then recently-discharged, twenty-year-old veteran, who had been wounded (he lost his thumb) during the "Battle of the Bulge", when his German-born fathter, stated in an Eric Von Stroheim voice: "If not for the Russians ve vould taken your Statute of Liberty".
Page 1 of 209
>> Download the Complete "A Different Time a Different War" PDF (46 MB)