A Private's Memory of WWII

We passed through part of the Ruhr, the industrial heart of the most industrialized nation in Europe. The cities all showed signs of massive bombing raids, with flattened houses and buildings and half destroyed railroad stations.  While the railroad stations were only twisted ruins of metal and empty walls, the trains were still running, and in the cities the smokestacks of factories were still pouring out great streams of smoke.  This was Germany’s industrial heart, the object of so much of our bombing: I had gone to our war room day after day in Texas and diligently plotted each raid, with reported results. These were among the lines I had drawn, back then; great piles of rubble; and yet those factories were still operating.  Once we stopped at a large, major city and remained there for almost an hour.  We sat looking out over utter destruction, and yet the smoke still poured out of the high smokestacks. We had not destroyed the factories at all, somebody remarked; we had only destroyed the cities; at least that was true in this place.

We sat there for a long time, making remarks and passing the time; and looking at those great streams of smoke, I finally made my own witty and cynical remark, fitting the occasion of our triumph:

“Well, we’ve saved the world from the savages; now who’ll save it from us?”

This might have got a few silent chuckles, but it was really not much of a laugh line. It did receive a few mild challenges. I referred, very tentatively, to the pattern of Greek and Roman history, to the inevitable tendency of small-time, idealistic peoples or towns to turn ultimately, as they acquired power, into the very things they had once abhorred: nations of arrogance, conquest, and carnage. Then we batted that around for a few moments. We agreed that when focusing on ancient history this could be considered theoretically possible, but that it would never happen in America: we were too inured to independent thought and ideals of fairness for that.