What we were handed, what we will make of it, and bouts of melancholy
Victor Davis Hanson, military historian, in conversation with Peter Robinson (from 24:05):
My father's first cousin, his mother died in childbirth, and his father was blinded in a farming accident, so he grew up with my father. They were inseparable. They went to the University of the Pacific under Alonzo Stagg and played as ends on the football team.They joined the Marine Corps. The family lore gets hazy here, [but] somebody hit a Marine officer. They were big Swedes and one of them had to take the blame. The military said, “either you’re gonna get kicked out of the Marine Corps, or we’re gonna fix you, Hanson, we’re gonna send you to this new B-29 program where everybody gets killed. We heard it’s just the worst thing in the world.”
So they kind of decided [that] my father was the one that hit the person, so [his cousin] Victor went on to the 6th Marine Division and fought the atrocious battle in Okinawa, where he was killed on the last day, of Sugar Loaf Hill.
When I wrote the book Ripples of Battle, one of the people who in his 90s read the book, [contacted me] and said, “I have his ring. When he was killed on the last day he was a big Swede and we couldn’t bring him down. His hands swelled, so we cut off the ring and when I got back I called your grandfather, and in broken Swedish he said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ So it’s on my mantle.” So he sent it to me.
My father, the irony is that he went to the B-29 program, went over to Tinian and he flew 40 missions as a central fire controller. Of the 16 planes in his squadron I think all but two were shot down or crashed due to engine failure. So the person who was supposed to die lived and a person who had a better chance of living died.
[So your dad named you Victor.]
I remember him saying to me, “it’s gonna be very hard, you’ve got a real burden because he was an all star athlete, and he was killed, I don’t know if you can live up to it, but you got to try.”
[You have kids, now you're a grandfather. How do you make them believe, how do you make them understand, that this happened?]
That's why I tried to write the book. When I go to downtown Palo Alto, I go to New York, or on my farm, it's nice to see the security, the prosperity, everything we have. I look at the world abroad and I see democratic governments all over Europe and Asia and all these miracles going on.
I say to myself, none of this would have happened if it wasn't for these people in the United States and their counterparts in Britain, in Australia, Canada, and the Soviet Union as well. And I think, wow, they were willing to give up everything for some idea.
And I ask myself, in bouts of melancholy, was it worth it? What if they came back and they looked at our culture today -- was this what it was all for, is this what dying in Okinawa was for, when you're 22? Or getting blown up in a B-29 when you're 18? I hope it was.
I think we have to take a deep breath and stop looking at history as melodrama, where we go back and look at the past and use the value system of the present to pick winners and losers. History is tragedy, and we should really instead say, “given the material constraints put upon them, and given what they knew at the time, how they did what they did in World War II is a miracle, and we are indebted every day of our lives to them.”
We need to start honoring people who in the past did things I'm afraid to say I'm not sure that I could do, that my generation could do. When I was 21 years old, I was in graduate school studying Greek. When my father was 21 he had ear infections, sinus infections, and he was in a B-29 high above Japan and emergency landed in Iwo Jima and almost everybody was killed. He got the highest medal of the Air Force, the Distinguished Air Medal, for taking a 500 pound napalm bomb with his hands that was locked in the bomb bay and throwing it out. I can't think of anything I've done in my entire life like that.
I think this generation owes a lot to the generations that came [before]. This is why I get so depressed with these contemporary controversies, where people don't want to do this [or that], or they don't think they have to honor the flag.
They don't understand that somebody just handed them a country. They think it's this -ism or this -ology, and it's not good because it's not perfect. They don't understand what they started with. That generation said, we just have to be better than the alternative. The alternative was Japanese Holocaust, German Holocaust and what the Italians did in Africa, it was a Holocaust. We didn't do that, yet we say, "well, we weren't perfect, therefore we weren't good." No, we were very good, what we did in World War II, and we need to remember.
There is a line between self improvement and self immolation, between clear, courageous honesty and distortive, depressive rumination. If we fail to honor and celebrate successs, if we indulge a compulsive urge to twist it into shame, we don't just become unhappy, but walk toward pointless destruction. This is true for people and societies. Victor Davis Hanson in his books and lectures documents well how the Second World War began because relatively strong powers believed themselves weak and weak powers believed themselves strong. It took 65 million lives to reveal the truth. Where do you walk today, and what beliefs guide you? Where are we leading one another, and how far are we from the path of truth?