VE Day

On this date in 1945, my father was on a flight to Europe as a member of the Armed Forces. He was a cog in the coalition of US military experts who would begin the restoration of Europe after it had been devastated by World War ll. Their efforts were called "The European Recovery Plan" which would eventually be called "The Marshall Plan", after the dynamic General George Marshall, who headed up the effort. 17 European economies, devastated by the previous war, were rebuilt from the ground up by the USA and mostly on the USA's dime.

I could go anywhere with that opening; the politics, the debt owed by Europe, the absolute class act that the Marshall plan was ...... But I won't. This is about my father.

As he related his experiences to me, he did not get to Europe in time to witness the signing of the armistice. Like I mentioned, he was on a plane at the time. But he did spend the next 4 years as one of the cogs that made the Marshall Plan a success. He toured Auschwitz only a week or so after he landed. He was taken off his detail as a budget officer helping to finance the recovery and loaned to the prosecution team at Nuremburg. He traveled all over Europe to assess the costs of resurrecting various areas as much as possible to their previous splendor. He knew what he was looking at and what it looked like before the war. He had spent 4 summers in college as a European tour guide for American tourists in the late 1920s. 

My father was a stoic, stiff upper lip kinda guy. I was somewhat taken aback when he told me he cried the first time he saw what the war had done to Europe. He took many pictures of the damage, but only rarely did he pull them out to look at them. I discovered them after his death when I was nosing around in the many boxes of slides, photos and photography equipment he left in the attic. I have yet to transfer them to a digital record.

His post war experiences he said were probably the best and worst times of his life. Everyday he had to deal with one type of post war damage or another. But he also found love and married a WAC he met. Sadly the marriage did not last as she was killed. I am not sure how she died. All I know is she died. He never talked about it.

The front page to the right is from the defunct Baltimore newspaper, the "Baltimore News-Post". I found it under a trashed linoleum floor in a factory worker house I lived in in Mt. Washington, a neighborhood in Baltimore. The house was perfect for two, just out of college guys. It had a yard and it was cheap.... Dirt cheap.

What makes the page unique is the color standard at the top and the unusual height of the Headline letters. That was some high tech shit back in those days. But what the page symbolizes is just how invested the planet had been in World War ll. Everything stopped worldwide for 4 plus years while countries from every corner of the globe lined up in factions and then proceeded to try to destroy each other. The Axis powers and the Allies. The Allies fought the Axis countries on two fronts, the Japanese in Asia and the Germans and Italy in Europe and  northern Africa. 

It was about this time 100 years ago that the World started warming up for another war. The first World War had ended badly for Germany. The treaty they were forced to eat was rather draconian. Many Germans wanted revenge. In 1923 Adolf Hitler and some 2000 malcontents marched into the city of Berlin hoping to overthrow the government. They failed. Adolf was awarded a 5 year jail sentence, thrown in jail where he wrote that wonderful Project 2025, ...uh, I mean "Mein Kampf", the workbook he would use that eventually put him on top of the world for a few years. The real World War ll began with a whimper in the 1920's and ended with world wide conflagrations and millions dead by 1945. The planet had never experienced anything like it before or since..........

So, I would say that this V-E day packs warnings and possible dire predictions of similar fates if we don't stop fucking around. The evil cycle of 100 years is looking for a repeat performance and so far, we seem to be welcoming it back.

There is no such thing as overreacting when History is not just threatening to repeat itself, it has begun the process.

Later ......................................

__________________________

An appropriate tune for this post would be a song that was popular during WWll. My mom loved this song. It made her cry every time she heard it. Maybe it was because her first husband, a Navy Commander, died during the War. It is also the song Stanley Kubrick chose to close his second greatest movie, "Dr. Strangelove". As the nukes go off destroying the world, this song kicks in. Perfect.

Here is "We'll Meet Again", by Vera Lynn,, released in 1943.