Historian Will Durant once wrote that by his calculation, in only 29 years of human history has there not been a war going on somewhere. William T. Sherman, a Union general in America’s Civil War, famously said, “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
Nevertheless, our species appears to love war like addicts love crack. Nothing else catches us up in such singleness of purpose or gives us so righteous a high.
Every war, no matter how brief or locally contained, forever alters the lives of those who survive. For the past week, as the world observed the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we have collectively reflected on a war that eventually caught up nearly every nation on earth. Counting civilian casualties, 56 million people died in World War II. Affected survivors never forgot, though some surely tried. Only 3% of that generation remains to tell their stories at commemoration events today. We do have an abundance of photographs, however, and each adds its proverbial thousand words to their stories.
As a child, I studied those in the National Geographic issues that covered the war years. Some dads in our town had fought in the war, but they avoided talking about it. I pored over the photographs and pondered what they had witnessed and experienced. I could scarcely imagine the men I knew running about amid the carnage, nor could I see myself behaving bravely in the face of artillery and machine gun fire. Strangely, nearly everyone in the photographs, whether friend or enemy, looked like someone I already knew. None appeared evil.
My father, of prime age for soldiering in WWII, never wore a uniform. Profoundly color-blind and already a seminary student when the war began, he was exempt from military service, although like many seminarians, he attended classes during the day and worked an evening shift in a railroad car factory converted to tank manufacturing during the war. He welded armor plating on the right, front corners of battle tanks.
One can easily find online photos of wartime tank production, and while I could identify my dad’s “place” in the war era there, I discovered it instead, to my surprise, in a collection of D-Day photos the New York Times posted online this week. Among the always-chilling vistas of Allied troops storming Normandy Beach, a very different scene appeared. Several hundred German soldiers captured in the aftermath of D-Day stood inside a temporary, make-shift POW camp near the small French village of Nonant-le-Pin. One can make out a few of the faces, and I wonder if Dad knew them.
Three months after D-Day, my father began serving as pastor of a church at a desolate crossroads in western Wyoming. On Sunday mornings, he gathered with his flock of Lutheran Dust-Bowl refugees. On Sunday afternoons, he preached (in German), sang hymns, and led Bible study for German POWs, some of them Lutheran, at one of the nearby camps the U.S. constructed there. Years later, he told me how they wept as he spoke to them, and how they reminded him of the boys with whom he grew up. Now I can’t help wondering if any he came to know appear in that photo from Nonant-le-Pin, where they awaited shipment to somewhere far away.
War photos always make me sad. This one makes me weep. What a sorry, sorry host of horrors we inflict on each other before we finally stop the killing — and remember to sing.
Fred Niedner is a senior research professor at Valparaiso University.