Best of Beth Ashley: Is a better world still in our grasp?

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. 

Last week I lived through World War II again.

When the Ken Burns series, “The War,” appeared on television last fall, I was in Canada. My friend and I searched on the local TV, but it didn’t appear.

So when I stumbled upon it one night last week, I cleared the decks and sat down to watch it for most of three evenings. This, after all, was my life. The history of World War II was my history, too.

As I watched, the clock moved mercilessly back, wrenching my stomach, icing my spine. Sometimes, truly, I had to close my eyes.

It was hard for me to acknowledge — seeing the slaughter on D-Day, the deadly climb on Okinawa — that all this had happened in my lifetime.

It was hard to appreciate what it must be like, for the men who lived through it, to have such horrors still lodged in their minds.

The six episodes I saw dwelt on the invasion of Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, the landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the inhuman events in Santo Tomas and the Nazi death camps.

Perhaps I knew, more than 60 years ago, that all these nightmares were taking place, but somehow the full truths escaped me.

At home we saw sanitized newsreels, the front pages showed maps not battle scenes, and the music was thick with patriotic sentiment and romantic pathos.

Could I have known how dreadful D-Day was — so dreadful that my dear boyfriend of the time still has no words to describe it? Even today, when my brother recalls his days as a B-17 pilot, bombing Germany and watching his fellow airmen die, his eyes still cloud up with tears.

Yet even as a college student on the home front, I lived through it, too. I saw how my parents suffered when my brother was wounded. I remember how we felt when boys in uniforms came for lunch at our dorm, some just back from overseas, others heading out the next day. I remember when my roommate, who wrote every day to her solder boyfriend Bud, got word that Bud had died after crossing the Rhine.

We were aware of the war every day.

College life had its pleasures but the war was all around us. We stayed up late to listen to radio reports of the Normandy landings. I still have the letter my boyfriend wrote from the beach. A Marine officer I knew wrote of his anguish over the inhuman acts his men had committed. Word came, over and over, that people we knew had been killed.

Whatever else went on, the war was the backdrop.

At last, of course, it was over — but not before we had been forced to confront the godawful pictures of Auschwitz, the hair-raising specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear angst that still lingers today.

Watching “The War” on the television, I could only reflect on the enormity of what the whole world lived through.

The casualties were staggering — among American infantrymen, only three out of 10 were unscathed. The moments of bravery were astounding – though one soldier denied his generation had been heroes: “We just did what we were sent to do.” World War II was certainly not glorious; wars never are.

But somehow as a people we survived it. In some ways we became stronger; our nation, untouched by bombs, became the strongest the world had ever seen.

Today that hard-fought triumph has retreated into history.

In parts of the globe, the respect we earned is a distant memory. Our national pride has in many ways been weakened. We squabble about our future, and search for a direction to believe in.

Today is a far cry from 1945, when a better world seemed to be in our grasp.

But heart-wrenching as it was to watch, ghastly as its revelations about human cruelty and suffering, “The War” somehow left me with hope.

I came away believing that Americans truly are a magnificent people, and our country still has a moral intention and strength that — though it sometimes gets lost — remains there for us all to rediscover.