LOSING MEMORY

I’m down to copyediting on my newest manuscript, “A Clean Sweep: VIII Fighter Command vs the Lufwaffe - 1942-45.” It’s the story of the greatest sustained air campaign in history. Between the first mission flown on August 17, 1942 and the last mission flown on April 25, 1945, the Eighth Air Force lost more men killed and wounded than the Marines did between August 7, 1942, the day they invaded Guadalcanal, and June 15, 1945, the day Okinawa was declared secure and the Pacific campaign ended.

I looked at the list of first-person accounts in the story, that I collected over the past 45 years, and I realized that every one of those people is now gone. The last ones in 2016. The last living American fighter ace of World War II died in 2019. There are only three aces still alive from the Korean War.

That’s a lot of memory gone. It’s why I’ve liked my job as much as I do. A very good novelist I know once said that he envied those of us who write non-fiction because “they have the power to bring the dead back to life.” I got to meet a lot of people - some of them famous, all of them interesting - and I get to be the one who makes sure someone else, someone younger than me, has the chance to meet them too.

That set me thinking.

I’ve actually lived through a lot of “history” in my life, much of it I participated in directly. And of my friends from back then, my fellow participants in those events, there’s ten of us left. I’m not talking about wars, though a lot of those events involved a war; I’m talking about the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement - including the feminist and gay rights movements - and the list of people who were there at the beginning who can still give their first person testimony, is vanishingly small. It’s a moment to realize that stranger I look at in the mirror every morning in astonishment, that old guy, that’s me. That old guy.

I remember the first time I learned about the Holocaust, when a rabbi who had been an officer in the unit that liberated Dachau showed us the black and white photos he had taken with his camera that day. I remember one of my fellow youth group members asking him how he could take those photos - these were very “graphic” - and he said “I took them because I knew if I didn’t, there would come a time people wouldn’t believe me when I told them about that day.”

We have proof that the Holocaust happened then today because General Eisenhower, who commanded the Allied armies that liberated the camps, ordered that everything be photographed and documented. He said “there will be a day when people will want to say this didn’t happen, and this proof will be necessary.”

Did you know that 60 percent of Americans under 40 are unsure that the Holocaust happened? How hard does that make it for them to see what is happening on the streets today, and understand the threat?

We are in a transitional era, losing everyone with living memory of the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Union movement, European Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, Segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, “first wave” Feminism, the “pre-AIDS” gay rights movement - all the history of the past 80-plus years.

Those were an important 80 years. In this country’s history, there was probably more progress made in those 80 years than any other period of our history.

This time, right now, is an important inflection point for authoritarian and fascist forces to wage a power grab, when there aren’t people around who will oppose them because they know what they’re looking at. When there aren’t people who can tell the rest of us what’s happening.

That’s what is going on today. Right now.

The goal of those who want to get books out of libraries and history classes out of school is because it’s their chance to erase the memory of all those events, all those times when people took history into their own hands and changed it for the better.

When I was growing up, I knew a man who was one of the Czarist cadets who defended the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in 1917. I’ve met and talked to people who were in the sit-down strike at GM in 1937 that created the modern labor movement. I was friends with a guy who was the only white minister in Alabama to work with Martin Luther King in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (he was also one of the young fighter pilots in “MiG Alley”). I met both presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. I knew people who lived through the Hollywood Red Scare. I knew a man who liberated Dachau. I know personally what it was like to confront the very real possibility of the End of the World in October 1962. Nobody can tell me that history didn’t happen, that those people didn’t exist.

There are people who would like to just that - say that history didn’t happen, that those people never lived. I’ve gotten criticism from readers at Amazon of my history books being “woke,” for showing that the Korean War didn’t happen the way the “official history” says it did.

“Woke history” is a synonym for “the truth.” A lot of people don’t want to know the truth.

They don’t want the truth (small “t”) out there because they know that “He who controls the past, controls the future.”

That’s what this fight in the school boards and the libraries and the state legislatures is all about.

Losing memory.

Because they think if they can erase the memory, they can win. And it’s likely they’re right.

That is what this fight is about.

Paid subscriptions support this project. That’s why comments are limited to the paid subscribers. You can support this site and add your commentary, for only $7/month, $70/year (saving $14).