Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.
World War II is still The Good War.
The celebration last month of the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in May, 1945 was the latest rush of World War II nostalgia, joining a similar timed anniversary last year of the D-Day landings in Normandy in June, 1944, and the 85th anniversary of the British evacuation from the disaster at Dunkirk in early June, 1940.
World War II still draws audiences. On American television, “Band of Brothers” remains a streaming sensation with a companion “Masters of the Air” released this year. Subscribers with enough channel power regularly call up Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017), both of which had enjoyed strong theater runs.
It’s not hard to see why Americans have maintained a nostalgic obsession with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. The European theater included the ancestral homelands of most Americans. The vanquished Nazis could be loathed without reservation and their end came without an unexpected shock that the atomic bomb provided for the defeat of Japan in the Pacific. Unlike the glorified truce of 1918, the victory over Germany in 1945 was decisive and total, not subjected to the “stab in the back” ruminations that fed later Hitlerian resentment.
At this stage of history, with our recent military engagements ending in frustrating stalemates and with future wars likely to be fought digitally or in outer space, it’s hard to envision another highly-visible total military victory on the ground and in the near-atmosphere that the Anglo-American forces achieved in Europe eight decades ago.
Unlike the obscure Pacific islands, a visit to the remnants of the European front provides proximity to longtime tourist magnets of London and Paris. For those willing to cross the Atlantic to see the remains of the war, there are pre-packaged “Band of Brothers” and “Normandy to Berchtesgaden” tours of European battle sites (“with time for shopping,” according to tour promoters). My wife Janet and I made our own self-directed pilgrimage in May, covering both the Normandy Beaches and Dunkirk, with another trip to Amsterdam where we visited the Anne Frank House.
The personal experience is more gripping than anything on celluloid.
Just inland from the D-Day Channel beaches are numerous cemeteries honoring the fallen. The etched dates tell of the lives of British and American men mostly in their early 20s who wouldn’t live to enjoy the fruits of life, love and prosperity that were the rewards to their nations as a result of their sacrifice.
In many cases the tombstones include messages from families. Typical was one from grieving parents from Sussex in England, whose carved words read “we remember the noise the laughter of your childhood. The house is quiet now but while we weep we remember your sacrifice.”
Words like those put the scripted wartime writings of Churchill, Roosevelt and Eisenhower in the emotional shade. Further sentimental punch comes from personal statements preserved in numerous museums from young American GIs and British Tommies, many of whom were teenagers when they sprinted as far as 500 yards across machine gun-raked beaches.
Those men tell of ordinary childhoods in Yorkshire or Iowa, in West Midlands or Minnesota. They weren’t professional soldiers and most had never before faced combat before the front deck plates of the Higgins Boats were dropped at water’s edge and they raced into German fire that in some sectors caused 80 percent casualties.
The victory securing the beachheads was a prelude to equally harrowing battles inland, where ground troops had to fight through Normandy terrain laced with stone walls and thick hedges that provided natural ambush cover for Nazi snipers. So difficult and dangerous was the battlefield in northern France that the Allies needed ten long and bloody weeks to force the 140 miles from Normandy to Paris.
Sixty-one percent of the 407,316 U.S. Army deaths in World War II were inflicted on the moving front from Normandy to central Europe in 1944-45.
The strong box office performance of the Dunkirk movie in 2017 demonstrated a heartening American appreciation of the crucial role the 1940 British evacuation from French beaches about two hour’s drive from the D-Day sites. The deliverance, 18 months before Pearl Harbor, saved Britain to provide the crucial staging ground for the Normandy invasion four years later almost to the day.
The Dunkirk ordeal was no less harrowing than Normandy. British Tommies endured several days trapped on the beaches, scrambling to avoid attacks by Stuka dive bombers as they awaited evacuation home. Where the British leadership originally hoped for no more than 25,000 rescues, the ultimate total of those saved came to 346,000. The Royal Navy was supplemented by thousands of small pleasure or fishing craft that braved the dangers of the English Channel battle zone to ferry their countrymen home.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, faced with the loss of defeated ally France, noted at the time that “wars are not won by evacuations.” But the existence of that threadbare Brit army ferried across the English Channel caused Hitler to abandon a seaborne invasion of Britain in favor of an air attack, foiled by the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain.
Physical evidence left of the achievement of what is called in the U.S. “The Greatest Generation” invites comparison to the present day. Birth dates on the Normandy tombstones state the unspoken realization that those heroes had endured the Great Depression a decade earlier, only to be denied their deserved opportunity to enjoy the boundless (and unexpected) prosperity of the U.S. in the two decades after V-E Day.
Later generations who didn’t have to storm the beaches but nonetheless reveled in America’s postwar riches are obliged to ponder their worthiness.
The men who died on the Normandy beaches would have heard, eleven years earlier, newly-inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt assert that in the depths of the worst economic calamity in U.S. history that “all we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified fear which paralyzes efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Those words likely instilled as much courage in young American souls than any of George Patton’s profane bluster a decade later.
FDR could have added that Germany had, just five weeks earlier, turned its government over to Adolf Hitler who had won 40 percent of the vote in the previous year’s elections on a campaign that was a checklist of things Germans to regard fearfully as the source of their lost war and present moribund economy. Those scapegoats were led by Jews but followed by the media, intellectuals, and scientists (whose talents would be put to use by his Allied enemies in the 1940s), foreign scoundrels and anybody else who dared question Hitler’s drive for unchecked power to make Germany great again.
Within a year, Germany’s democratic republic was no more. Hitler’s opponents and scapegoats were first hounded from the country, then herded into concentration camps. Germany’s wartime sacrifices at Normandy and elsewhere were done in the name of The Führer. The American troops who stormed the French beaches and dodged ambushes in the Normandy hedgerows followed the flag of a democratic republic that had prevailed through the dark 1930s, despite the fearmongering of potential autocrats such as Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin and even flying hero turned Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh.
Five months after the D-Day landings, with the war yet to be won, America conducted another presidential election. More than 3 million eligible American servicemen chose freely between their commander-in-chief or his Republican challenger.
Later generations of Americans who watched the seemingly endless documentaries of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany would assure themselves that, of course, the excesses of the Third Reich could never be replicated in the New World.
The world is a more stable place, we told ourselves, because we had abandoned tariff warfare that hobbled the 1920s and 30s. The subsequent free trade economy enabled devastated nations to find their international market niches and boost themselves to a prosperity unimaginable in the rubble of 1945. We also built a network of economic and military alliances where nations could play on each other’s strengths rather than prey on their weaknesses.
The U.S. government also encouraged a steady flow of foreign students into its universities, reasoning that the best way to create a democratically-inclined friend for the USA was to enjoy time on an American college campus.
Now, eight decades after Hitler killed himself in the wreckage of the Reich Chancellery, the U.S. presidency is in the hands of a man who vows to make America great again. He’ll do it, he says, by resuming the tariff wars that drove the world economy to ruin in the 1920s and 30s.
He won the presidency by telling a debate audience that Americans should fear immigrants who were eating their cats and dogs, a remark that likely would have drawn universal mockery from the World War II generation but in 2024 didn’t stop him from gaining 77 million votes.
The scapegoats of 2025, undocumented immigrants, are the subject of right-wing cable TV entertainment, manacled and shipped out of the country with not a single legal word said on their behalf. Universities find their government subsidies cut for the crime of admitting foreign students suddenly out of favor.
The European Union and NATO were created after 1945 as alternatives to the deadly anarchy of nationalism that rent Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. But according to the revisionist MAGA narrative, those alliances were founded to “rip off” the U.S. and are thus ripe for abandonment in favor of closer ties with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Businesses are now subject to harassment and even legal action for the simple act of reminding their employees the long-accepted truth that the U.S. is a nation made up of a variety of cultures. Preachers who fill respected pulpits proclaim that the president of the United States is also a messiah on a mission from God. Their parishioners, ignorant of how America’s constitution guarantees of freedom of religion, now assert that separation of church and state is what House Speaker Mike Johnson calls a “misnomer.”
The America of 1933 was far from a perfect place. Racial segregation was still codified in the south and widely practiced unofficially in the north. The vote women had won thirteen years earlier had, in 1933, yet to produce much change in women’s status. The ultimate gains for both racial minorities and women would await the spark of the war a decade later that knit America together in a common effort.
But the Great Depression, for all its sorrows, had the effect of focusing America so that in 1933 Roosevelt had no need to resort to vicious demagoguery against immigrants and minorities.
On that March day of FDR’s first inaugural, with the nation’s banking system seized up into paralysis, Americans had greater issues on their minds than who should use which bathroom. They understood that if America had a crime problem in 1933, it was due in large measure to corrupted enforcement and evasion of the country’s great attempt to regulate private behavior; prohibition. Before the year was finished the U.S., having learned the hard way that private behavior resists government control, struck the Volstead Amendment from the constitution.
The America of 1933 knew that religion was a private, individual matter and not a platform for a political party. Religious fundamentalism that sought to invade public schools had been literally laughed out of the legal and political space at the John T. Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee eight years before FDR’s inaugural.
In short, America was a great nation in 1933 and again in 1944-45 because its people understood what a democratic republic and its constitution really meant. That understanding protected them from fear. The soldiers who crossed the English Channel on D-Day carried that wisdom along with their bravery. We can only hope that insight is still present among their descendants.