I was born seven years after the end of World War II. So most f the adults around me would have had direct experience of it --= indeed, grown up with it or served in it in some capacity.
My own father was in the 8th Air Force and bombed the Germans regularly during 1944-45. He was just 22 when he started.
So World War II had a profound effect on my life . . . even now, I’m slightly obsessed with it and try to know as much as I can about it. I’m having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that all that really happened – I tend to view it as historical fiction, because all that suffering is truly hard to grasp.
Too many people seem today as jsut ignorant of the whole thing . . . that adds to my disorientation.
In about one month, it will be seventy years since the damn thing ended. In fact, we’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of a lot of things: Hitler killed himself in April.
Oh . . . I forgot to mention: I have connections to both American theaters of war; I married a Japanese and my son is half Japanese. I lived in Japan for five years and experienced firsthand the denial that is rampant there. Indeed, I met two kamikaze pilots who weren’t able to die for the emperor. They were charming.
Well, I was very much alive during the cold war and Vietnam. But even Vietnam was surreal; I remember the black and white images on the nightly news and the “body count.” My own brother was old enough to be drafted – in this case I can say thank Dog he had muscular dystrophy and was declared 4F.
The cold war was just a boring fact of life, like the Middle East conflict. After terrorist hijack #129, you lose interest.
In today’s world it all seems impossible. And yet I wonder if anything like it could ever happen again . . .
I was born in 1956 and the shadow of WWII still lay over the world. It greatly affected culture, with an entire genre of literature, movies, and television, even though television barely existed during the war. It was assumed most men of a certain age had served in the war. Service in WWII was a requirement for politicians.
As **boffking **mentions, the technology that developed as a result of the war effort affected almost everything, computers and electronics, jet aircraft, plastic materials, the space race, and let’s not forget nuclear energy.
Not too much. My mom was in high school at the time and had a desk job of some sort; she and the other girls had to attend lectures on the order of “The Yellow Menace” and “Loose Lips Sink Ships”. They all thought it was silly, because they were typing equipment requisition forms. My dad had had TB as a child and was 4F; my grandfathers were either too old or were probably in protected occupations (diesel engineer working for the railroad, telephone lineman).
My grandfather fought at Guadalcanal, though he never talked about it much. He met my grandmother when he came back. So if that exact sequence of events didn’t happen I wouldn’t exist.
I’ll never know various aunts, uncles, and cousins (German Jews – my grandmother and her immediate family successfully escaped to Canada) who were killed in the Holocaust. My grandmother would have never left Germany, met my grandfather in Canada, and given birth to my mother.
As I watch some TV shows on MeTV, I enjoy the antics of Colonel Hogan (in Hogan’s Heroes) during World War II, the adventures of Wonder Woman during World War II, and the occasional episode of The Twilight Zone or Star Trek which might feature an episode with a callback to World War II (such as the episode Deaths-Head Revisited for TW and Patterns of Force for ST:TOS). And while Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman never met Colonel Klink, strangely Adam West’s Batman did.
And even modern episodes of TV shows have callbacks to WWII, such as Doctor Who’s “Let’s Kill Hitler”.
As far as comic books go, my favorite heroes have indelible roots going back to World War II (even if some characters that used to have a WWII connection no longer do).
My dad was born and raised in Kansas, as far from the ocean as possible. So when war was declared he did the obvious thing and joined the Navy. He ended up in Underwater Demolition Team 11, clearing Pacific island beaches for the Army and Marine landing craft. After Japan surrendered they did some work surveying Japanese harbors in preparation for the occupation and saw the devastation at Nagasaki. He met my mother in Chicago after mustering out.
Both my parents and many other relatives of that age are Holocaust survivors. My grandmother, who lived to be 100 years old, lost all but one of her many siblings in the war. I’ve heard lots of stories.
It hasn’t affected me much because I didn’t know them, but most of my family was lost in the Holocaust. My grandfather and my grandmother and her siblings made it here to the US, almost everyone else was gone by the end of the war.
They were the ones being silly. In Wine & War it’s told that one of the ways the Allies used to learn about German offensives was from French vintners as the Germans used to stock up on wine beforehand.
My father went to Europe in late 1944 and stayed on occupation duty until 1946. WW II definitely affected when my parents had their first child, me.
In less significant ways, I got to wear his Eisenhower jacket when I was in high school. We also went to lots of reunions of his battalion.
I was born in the 50s, so it certainly was still “in the air”. As a boy scout, most of our gear was “Army Surplus”, and had a very military feel to it. Both my parents were in the military during the war, and would not have met otherwise. But, on a day-to-day basis, not so much-- other than growing up in the 60s when the US was still living off the fact that it was pretty much the only industrialized country in the world not devastated by the war.