The Brief Ennoblement of War

“I was not old enough to fight in World War II. But I was old enough to feel the great upsurge in selfless community that animated most on the ‘Home Front.’ A job to be done that was difficult but worth doing, a desire to cooperate and an inner feeling of puissance in being a tiny part of an immense collective puissance that could not fail to sweep aside any obstacles to the most important victory in military history.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—6/10/2013—Anyone still perplexed at the world’s insatiable curiosity about war, and especially World War II, will spend a satisfying few days digesting Rick Atkinson’s best seller, “The Guns at Last Light.”

Atkinson concludes this history of the war in the West from D-Day to Germany’s May 1945 surrender with some of the most stirring and enlightening war prose—his and quoted lines—I’ve ever read.

Thus, the soldiers’ tour of duty is likened to “the one great lyric passage in their lives.”

Continues Atkinson, “The war’s intensity, camaraderie and sense of high purpose left many with ‘a deplorable nostalgia,’ in the phrase of A.J. Liebling.”

Nostalgia for what? Liebling explains: “The times were full of certainty. I have seldom been sure I was right since.”

An Air Force crewman adds, ”Never did I feel so much alive. Never did the Earth and all the surroundings look so bright and sharp.”

And from Alan Moorehead, a prominent WWII historian: “The anti-aircraft gunner in a raid and the boy in the landing barge did feel at moments that the thing they were doing was a clear and definite good, the best they could do. At those moments there was a surpassing satisfaction, a sense of exactly and entirely fulfilling one’s life. This thing, this brief ennoblement, kept recurring again and again . . . .”

I was not old enough to fight in World War II. But I was old enough to feel the great upsurge in selfless community that animated most on the “Home Front.”

A job to be done that was difficult but worth doing, a desire to cooperate and an inner feeling of puissance in being a tiny part of an immense collective puissance that could not fail to sweep aside any obstacles to the most important victory in military history.

Those were the emotions of the early-to-mid-1940s. They didn’t constitute an ennoblement, as did those of the soldier, but they certainly were uplifting. We have not seen their like since.