I have written two local history books about the Central Coast’s role in World War II, in part to answer the question that Donald Trump asked at Arlington amid the tombstones: “I don’t get it,” he told Marine Gen. John Kelly, then his chief of staff. “What was in it for them?”
I wrote the books and made a video, Ambassadors, to answer that question.
“Nothing” is the correct answer.
I did these to honor my parents, part of the “Greatest Generation.” Before Pearl Harbor, they were condemned by sociologists as hedonistic, shallow and lazy.
That was obviously a mistake.
Once, during a student trip to Ireland in mid-summer, we ate at a little restaurant high above the Ring of Kerry. When we’d finished our fish chowder, which was incredible, we went to pay and there was a small, beautifully lettered sign atop the cash register:
“Happy Fourth to our American friends.”
If Ireland was neutral during my parents’ war, France wasn’t, and the advance toward Germany in 1944 destroyed city after city in northern France. But on another student trip, we discovered warmth and welcome there very much like that in Ireland.
I’m not naïve enough to suggest that World War II American servicemen were angelic. But they were among the best ambassadors in our nation’s history.
The Europeans remember them. French re-enactors play American G.I.s. An English monument memorializes the aircrew killed when a B-17 pilot guided his stricken bomber past a playground.
American and German tanker crew members who had fought each other at near point-blank range beneath Cologne Cathedral embraced as brother-veterans 68 years later. Bruyeres, a French town, has a “Rue du Regiment 442nd Americain” to honor the Japanse American veterans, including an Arroyo Grande soldier, who’d fought there so courageously and so aggressively in the fall of 1944.
American B-17s flew out of RAF Snetterton Heath in East Anglia, and at least two Arroyo Grande pilots did, too. One was killed in a flying accident. Another brought his ship, set afire over Berlin, safely home. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
At a nearby church, St. Andrew’s, the young Americans are remembered in a stained-glass window, with one of them looking up to the Risen Christ.
So for this Veterans Day, and for my parents, I made Ambassadors with excerpts from my writing.
Editor’s Note: To honor veterans, The Palm Theater is showing the film Memphis Belle, introduced by Jim Gregory, on Monday, November 9, at 4:15 p.m. Admission for veterans is free.