The End Of The Greatest Generation
The suffering and deprivation those awesome old guys endured so we could live as free men and women simply defies reason. Photo: U.S. Navy
Most of them are all gone now. Our world used to be dirty with WWII veterans. In my own little Southern town, the local car salesman served on PT boats in the South Pacific, the banker flew B-24 Liberators, my geometry teacher humped a Browning Automatic Rifle all the way across Europe and the owner of the local shoe store jumped into Normandy with the 82nd.
They all dressed like the Blues Brothers and gathered out in front of the church at the last amen to smoke cigarettes. They all smoked. Did you ever wonder why that was?
In war, young people see and experience things no one ever should.
These are Japanese dead on Guadalcanal. Photo: U.S. Marine Corps
A Day In The Life
A reader recently sent me a copy of an article taken from The Harlan Daily Enterprise dated 1 November 1944. It concerned his dad, PFC Robert Winebarger. Here is the prose:
“SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC — Using a Tommy gun, a right to the jaw, a Jap sword and plenty of nerve, PFC Robert L. Winebarger of Harlan, Ky., killed five Jap soldiers in about as many seconds and softened up a sixth for a buddy to polish off during the battle for Guam. Winebarger was leading a patrol in the hills of Barrigada when he came across the six Jap stragglers bivouacked in a clearing. He immediately moved in, opened up with his Tommy gun and killed three of them. As the third one went down, his gun spat out its last shell — the other three Japs were just five yards away. One of them, an officer, ran for his Samurai sword, which was hanging on a nearby banana tree. A race for the sword. It was a tie.
But Winebarger smashed his enemy in the face with his elbow, knocked him down and wrested the sword from his hands. “I ripped the scabbard off and was going to cleave him when one of the other Japs came out of his daze and went for a grenade,” Winebarger said. “I dug the sword in his back, and the end of the blade broke off. The third Jap was crawling toward a whole bag of grenades when I swiped him a pretty one, smack on top of the head. He let out a squawk, so I chopped him again to make sure he was done for.”
Winebarger then turned to finish off the Jap officer he had stunned with the scabbard, but another member of the Marine patrol had got there first.
The 21-year-old Marine has been overseas 18 months and is a veteran of the Guam and Bougainville campaigns.
This fighting Marine is the son of W.S. Winebarger and a brother of Raymond Winebarger, manager of Lloyd’s Café, where Robert formerly was employed.”
Let’s ponder the particulars of this exchange for a moment. This 21-year-old kid killed five enemy soldiers at bad-breath range and brained a third. He blew three of them away with a Thompson submachine gun and took the next two at contact range with a sword. The sordid details were splashed all over his local newspaper. What must the experience do to a person?
My buddy tells me his dad seldom spoke of the war after he came home. Most of them didn’t. Soak in the details of the above narrative and then juxtapose that against a normal life with a job, a mortgage and a family. It’s like oil and water. Those two worlds just don’t mix.
Here’s a quote from my friend regarding what it was like growing up with a man like that, “I still remember as a youngster being awakened by his screaming from nightmares in the middle of the night and our Mother coming in our room telling us, ‘Daddy is just having a bad dream.’ He had a lot of bad dreams!” Is it any wonder?
Nothing about freedom is free: Graves on Guadalcanal. Photo: U.S. Army
Broken People
Of course they all smoked. Nicotine is a superb anxiety drug and their world was unimaginably anxiety-provoking. Uncle Sam put cigarettes in their K-rations. I hate cigarettes more than Nancy Pelosi hates guys like me, and I would have very likely picked up the habit myself had I been there.
Some might take umbrage with the wanton use of a certain antiquated racial epithet in the previous narrative. You’ll just have to get over that. Be offended by the fact a 21-year-old kid had to chop a man’s head in half in order to live to see another dawn, not that he used some particularly harsh language.
We so seldom see what the world was really like. It was horrible, unimaginably thus, but this is what it took to buy us our liberty. Those incredible kids willingly gave up their innocence and their lives so we could be free. We owe it to them as modern-day Americans to live like we know it.