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More of reminiscing than debating, so off to IMHO.
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Without the Holocaust, my grandfather would never have come to the US as a Jewish refugee and met my grandmother. There’re also a bunch of family friends we had who were refugees.
My parents and aunts and uncles are bona-fide Baby Boomers (born 1948-1964) so I am of the generation that will feel the effects of being the generation after a baby boom.
What those are I’m not quite sure but they did just build a massive 55-and-older community next to my neighborhood, and a senior living center down the street.
My dad’s parents came to America as a young married couple, shortly after the end of WWI. The family farm in Germany had been severely damaged in the war and the family felt it could no longer support two young families. So my grandfather left and his older brother, Heinrich, remained. The brothers stayed close, exchanging letters and phone calls. Heinrich and his family followed the Nazis. Whether because of idealism or pragmatism, I’ll never know. It split the brothers apart as both sent their eldest sons (my dad and his cousin) off to fight.
Both my dad and his cousin suvived the war. The cousin was seriously injured, however, and lost the family farm when his father passed away. We were told that the cousin, his wife, and a younger brother, all moved to Oregon after the war. We never spoke to them or them to us.
The war created (or at least exposed) an enormous rift between a family that had once been so close. Had there been no war, I might have had family to interact with either in Germany or here in America.
My father was British and served in the Fleet Air Arm; he met my mother while receiving training at a US naval air station. So if it weren’t for WWII, they would probably never have come within a thousand miles of each other.
Other than that, it’s hard to say what effect the war had on me personally as distinct from its effect on society in general. I see it as having, to a large extent, created the world I was born into and grew up in – postwar prosperity in the US, and the struggle for global supremacy between the US and USSR, which influenced so many aspects of life in the US.
Since I was the youngest child of someone who married relatively late my parents were of a different era than the parents of many of my friends. My father almost made it into WWII whereas my peer’s parents were all Viet Nam era. All of my uncles were WWII vets.
My father was due to be in the invasion of mainland Japan as a Marine so there was an excellent chance the bomb allowed me to be born.
I was stationed in Germany in the late 80s early 90s. I spoke to a number of German WWII vets. All seemed to be happy that the U.S. Army stuck around. They certainly didn’t like the Russians.
How has it affected my life? My father was a POW in Germany for four years, and I’m only now realising, twenty years after his death, how much it marked him and may have influenced the atmosphere within the family. Plus, he and my mother retained so many of the habits of frugality/thrift and “make do and mend”, like not wasting food, re-using/repairing/recycling as much as possible, never throwing away usable wrapping paper and string, and so on. I won’t say I stick as strictly to them as they did, but they still have some effect (I have turned a shirt-collar, for example).
I was born mere months after the end of WW2, and my older brother was conceived specifically to keep my father from being drafted. All of my uncles, on both sides, served in the army. My maternal grandfather, a Polish Jew, had his entire extended family wiped out during the Holocaust. I have vivid memories of being shown films of the Holocaust at a very early age. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the atrocities.
I work in Aerial Photography, for mapping. Redefined by WW2.
I lost a great-Uncle in the war. I never learned his name, as Grandma didn’t like to talk about losing him. He was flying a transport plane in Asia, and just vanished. no body, no plane.
A lot of American Jews have a story like that. My father’s brother married a woman who came here as a small child and part of a refugee family. I owe my cousins to that. Also, this woman pretty much raised me, and I actually lived with my aunt and uncle when I was in high school-- I mean, I was at their house all the time before, but then they moved from down the street to halfway across the country, and a few years later, I went to live with them.
My aunt taught me a lot of things: one thing was how not to make myself crazy with “what ifs.” She has to live with knowing that the life, and the husband and children she cherishes, she has as a small part of a large story that includes a great world tragedy; but she has also lived with poor health from the malnutrition she suffered for her first four years of life. She doesn’t dwell on regrets, or possibilities, or “suppose I’d done this instead.” She can’t. I can’t either.
My mom’s first husband was a ball turret gunner. His plane was lost at sea.
So, without WWII my mother wouldn’t have married my father. Hence, no me.
All the uncles on my mother’s side fought in WWII, and thank Og they all came home intact (although one had nearly starved to death and took a couple years to recover). None of them finished high school, but thanks to the GED and GI bill they were all able to attend college and live in the middle class.
On my dad’s side most of the family was wiped out - Russian Jews did not fare well. In a sense there was no effect on me because I never met those people, but there was a marked lack of people on that side of the family: grandma, grandpa, one great aunt, one uncle who died young, one counsin… and that is IT. In the entire world. The rest of the family was obliterated. Couldn’t help but notice the difference between that mom’s stereotypical large Catholic family.
WWII affected all of our lives a great deal. We’ve seen the movies where a guy goes back in time and changes one thing which in turn changes history. Something on the scale of WWII not happening, or happening differently, would mean most of us wouldn’t exist, and anyone who did exist would have a much different life.
I wonder how much larger the world population would be now without WWII?
According to Wikipedia approximately 60,000,000 to 85,000,000 people were killed in the war. That’s a staggering number.
Most of these casualties were male, of course, but I wonder what the world population would look like now without the war.
Half of my childhood was spent on US military bases in Europe, mostly in Germany. This was in the '80s and '90s but the shadow of WWII still seemed heavy even then, given the circumstances. Many of the bases were named after American WWII generals; many of the buildings on base were originally used by the Wehrmacht; there were WWII-era bunkers that we played in; there was still a bit of a “conqueror” mentality. There were enough WWII vets around back then that we could eye kindly old Germans on the street suspiciously, wondering what they had done in the war years, and trying to fathom how such a wonderful, peaceful country (FAR more peaceful in those years than the US, which was at the height of its crime epidemic) could have committed such awful deeds.
I actually developed more of an interest in the Cold War from the experience, since that was the more immediate reason all those hundreds of thousands of Americans were stationed over there - kind of like the OP, it was something that almost all the adults around me had been directly or indirectly involved in, and reading about it now seems like historical fiction. But of course the Cold War wouldn’t have happened without WWII coming first. Living overseas as a kid hugely effected the subsequent course of my life, up to the present day.
Parents, friends and others who kept everything. Between the Depression and Scrap Drives ------
I was born in San Diego because my step-grandfather was based there on the way to the Pacific Theater, and once he encountered my grandmother gradually relocated most of the family. Had I grown up in central Ohio, where my parents met and where my father’s family is based, I would be an entirely different person, as would my parents.
My mother’s family refused to fight in the war because of religion (JWs), the stigma of which probably drove them further into the religion at a time when it was changing for the worse.
The main effect was my middle name, which was the name of my uncle, who died in the Normandy invasion. My grandmother was very touched when I started writing, since he had aspired to be a poet.
My mother’s brother was killed in battle in Europe in 1944, so he’s an uncle that I never knew. His insurance benefits paid off their family farm debts, so when their parents died, my mother had nice rental income from the paid-for farm.