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thedrifter
05-13-05, 06:15 AM
Sent to me by Mark aka The Fontman


Let's never forget the men who saved the world
By Jack Lessenberry
May 13, 2005

DETROIT - What's saddest is that they are dying now, at an ever-increasing rate, the men who saved the planet from being swallowed by unspeakable evil when they were young. Once, America held 16 million of them. Today, barely 3 million World War II veterans are left.

They're losing their lives faster now than they did in the heat of combat. Last week, as the world marked the 60th anniversary of the day the Nazis quit, most knew that they wouldn't live to see many more celebrations.

Many bear physical and psychological scars from what they did and what they saw. Yet in a lifetime of interviewing members of what Tom Brokaw called "America's greatest generation," I have yet to hear any say it wasn't worth it.

I have heard plenty of Vietnam veterans say that. I hear Michigan veterans of both Iraq wars say that now. But never a veteran of World War II.

Len Grossman hasn't heard anyone say that either. A property developer and longtime peace activist, he has spent more than half a century opposing most of the wars America has fought since then.

But he walks slowly, with a cane, a souvenir of the shell that fell on him and a buddy in a foxhole in Europe. The other soldier never got out.

Mr. Grossman had a long, painful, and operation-riddled recovery. Yet he doesn't have one regret. "We were fighting against an evil so pervasive that had we not stopped it, it would have changed the nature of the world culture."

He works with many left-wing and pacifist groups. Has he ever met anyone who thought it was all a mistake?

"No. Aw, everyone complained all the time about the decisions the brass made. But not about the war. And I really do call it 'the last good war.'?"

Mr. Grossman is a modest man who shuns publicity. Probably Michigan's two most popular personalities of the last half-century are Ernie Harwell, longtime Detroit Tigers broadcaster, and Sonny Eliot, the wacky weatherman who has been on TV and radio since 1947.

What few of their fans know is that both also fought in World War II, and had fate taken another turn, neither might ever have been heard of.

Mr. Eliot was a bomber pilot who was shot down over Germany in February, 1944. Shortly before the war ended, Heinrich Himmler told his commandant to kill all the Jewish prisoners before the Russians arrived. Fortunately, he was disobeyed. Instead, Sonny Eliot lost a year and a half of his life and gained a little shrapnel in his back. Was it worth it?

"Oh yeah," he says softly. "It was pretty clear to everyone what Hitler was up to. We all knew, and after the Japanese attacked us, we knew about them." Thrown into a prison camp with thousands of other allied fliers, he says he learned a lot about tolerance, and kept a secret diary, in which he wrote that he hated war, but would go again if his country called.

Ernie Harwell never thought once about a military career before Pearl Harbor. He had wanted to broadcast baseball since he first heard of radio.

After the attack, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines. "What young people don't realize today is pretty much everybody had to go," he said. "If you didn't, it was sort of a blot on your escutcheon. But most did want to go - very few wanted to get out of it." Seeing that he could write, the Marines made him a correspondent for Leatherneck Magazine, which was no guarantee of safety.

He was in on the retaking of Wake Island, among others. Had the atom bomb not been dropped, he would have likely been in on the invasion of Japan, which might have cost more American lives than the entire rest of the war.

Once, I met a veteran named Jim Cartwright. A radio operator, he was to have been dropped behind enemy lines the day we invaded, as part of a three-man team with two Japanese-Americans who spoke the language. "Excuse me, colonel," he asked. "How am I going to survive?"

You won't, he was told. Just send back as much information you can for as long as you can. "So I figured that's what I had to do. But don't ask me if the atom bomb was a bad thing," he laughed.

What all these men know is that World War II was a war, simply, like no other. But they also know kids soon will grow up without ever having met anyone who served in "the big one." A young radio sportscaster told Sonny Eliot he didn't even know we'd had a war with Germany, and asked who had won.

"Well, I guess that's inevitable," the easygoing Mr. Harwell laughed. "I think it is good to learn from history, though."

What those lessons are can be argued. What can't be disputed is that our world today exists because of men like these. And we owe it to them, and ourselves, not to forget.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade's ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.


Ellie