Page 28 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • June 4, 2014 Honor those who served, but know the big picture The good news is that we still have a considerable number of World War II veterans among us, men and women who served with great valor and loyalty and deserve every acco- lade a grateful nation can bestow. World War II was, among other things, the last Ameri- can war in which the nation’s enemies actually had navies, and U.S. troops not slated for the cutting edge of combat on the ground or in the air still had a chance of being killed in transit. The enemies also had plausible air forces and non-combatants nowhere near the front lines had a chance of being killed in air raids. World War II was also unique in the sense that we were fighting countries considered major powers. Harrowing moments took place during the Korean War and during the early days in Vietnam, but World War II was in a class by itself when it came to facing established military forces with high-tech weapons systems. German fighter aircraft had us out-classed at the beginning and at the end of the air war, and Japanese torpedoes during the first two years of the war generally traveled straight and exploded on contact, while ours often circled, sank, or failed to go off. World War II, for at least the first year, was an uphill battle. We need to remember that Americans were able to deal with that and did so with strength, cour- age, and skill. The veterans I spoke with while we waited for this year’s Memorial Day events to start were, without excep- tion, modest men with a sense of humor. They are men of real character and real courage. As a national tribute to veterans, PBS aired the story of John Glenn, who flew strafing missions in the Pacific and later shot down three MIGs in the Korean War. Glenn was also the first American to orbit the Earth. He later served four consecutive terms in the United States Senate. Glenn defines being a genuine hero and a man of integrity. Yet savor the irony: After fighting the Japanese, the only effec- tive anti-communist power in Asia and a U.S. ally during World War I, Glenn then fought against the communist Chinese -- or possibly against Russian pilots, who were known to have flown against the U.S. over Korea. At that time, most people were unconscious of the irony and Glenn served this country heroically. Today, we have access to a more detailed knowledge of how we shifted gears from fighting anti-communists in Asia to fighting communists in Asia, but it still does not make much sense to most people. Right after Glenn, Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna, two fine actors, launched the 25th Anniversary of the National Memorial Day concert with a group of celebrity entertain- ers and military bands. Some of the tributes were beyond criticism: “He died for his buddies, whom he loved,” Diane Wiest read from the letter of a Gold Star mother. The same man was quoted as saying, “I wasn’t a hero,” but he was. One of the quirks of human existence is that people who are heroes seldom admit they are heroes, and people who are not heroes claim to be heroes for their own advantage. A few years ago, a country-western singer claimed to be a combat veteran of Iraq who had been hit in the helmet by a rocket-propelled grenade. Rocket-propelled grenades are made to blow holes in enemy armored vehicles and even a cowboy hat under the helmet might not have saved him. What sank him was making these claims on national TV. Word came back from his unit that after a dozen years in the Army National Guard he spent a month in Afghani- stan in a supply unit, and never saw combat. He was never wounded or decorated for valor. His ex-wife said his stut- tering was fake. Stories that do well in bars flop on national TV. The talent show also took away his award. Sift out the guys like this and the guys who say they won the Medal of Honor but did not, and it becomes clear that modesty is a quality associated with heroism. Real heroes do not need to boast. Sometimes moderators get caught, however good their intentions. Mantegna introduced clips of D-Day saying we were landing in Europe to destroy “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known.” I had six uncles or senior cousins in World War II. One of them was killed a B-17 over Germany, another served two years on destroyers in the Pacific, and they were fighting an awful tyranny -- but look at the numbers. R.J. Rummel of Rutgers wrote in “Murder by Government” in 1994 that the Soviets murdered 61,911,000 people; the Chinese communists, tacit allies who benefited from our victory over Japan, murdered 35,236,000; the Nazi regime, our war-time enemy, had murdered 20,946,000; Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese -- an expensive U.S. ally -- murdered 10,214,000; and Hirohito’s Japanese had mur- dered 5,964,000. In round numbers, our allies murdered 107 million people and our enemies murdered 27 million. The French author Stephane Courtois and his panel of European scholars for “The Black Book of Communism” reported in 1997, in a slightly different context, that that communist Chinese had murdered 65 million and the Sovi- ets had murdered about 20 million, with another million murders in Eastern Europe, two million in North Korea, and two million in Cambodia. The Nazi regime murdered 25 million as against almost 100,000 million for the com- munist states backed by Stalin, our war-time ally. Some of Courtois’ own contributors point out that, in purely moral terms, the Hitler murders were worse because many of them were racial rather than political. But the Soviets also punished religious leaders and whole ethnic groups with widespread deportations that had death rates of 20 to 50 percent -- purely on suspicion. Some slave laborers who starved to death during chronic overwork in the Siberian gold fields were rabbis or other religious Jews who refused to give up their beliefs. Many others were Orthodox or Catholic priests, or Polish prisoners of war who would have gladly fought Hitler, as they did for the British in Italy. An awkward, but accu- rate, statement would have been that we helped destroy the third worst tyranny in history, and later the fifth worst, to ensure the temporary survival of the worst, second worst, and fourth worst regimes in history. An awkward photo- graph would have been what happened to Russian, Ukrai- nian, and Georgian POWs who joined the Wehrmacht to avoid starvation behind barbed wire. Some of these men prided themselves on fighting very well against Stalin and very badly when they were sent to man the D-Day bunkers in Normandy against the Americans, British, Canadians, and the Free French. Some overwhelmed, and sometimes killed, their own German officers and surrendered in droves shouting, “Me Polski! Me shoot high!” They were taken away to POW camps and, at the end of the war, under extreme protest, they were handed back to Stalin, who had his henchmen hang some of the Russian defectors-by-star- vation within sight of their former American captors. Controversial but extensive research by James Bacque in “Other Losses” and by John Dietrich in “The Morgen- thau Plan” suggests that a million late-war German draft- ees starved to death in open-air barbed-wire enclosures near the Rhine before the U.S. decided to reconstruct Ger- many as a bastion against the Soviets. The 650,000 German civilians and 800,000 Japanese civilians who were killed in incendiary air raids or in the two atomic bomb attacks were mostly women and children who were victims of their own bad governments -- and, in a way, of the American belief that you can fight a war “on the cheap” if you have better technology. This does not work in wars against people whose lives are a controlled by a religion rather than a gov- ernment, as in the Middle East. I have spoken to people who encouraged Japanese pris- oners to run for it so they could shoot them in the back. Fear does strange things to people. Racism helps it do those things. I just bumped into a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the autumn of 1940. Japan had just inked “the Axis alliance” -- otherwise known as the Anti-Comin- tern Pact, to oppose the expansion of communism outside Russia -- and Roosevelt said, “This country is ready to pull the trigger if the (Japanese) do anything. I mean we won’t stand any nonsense, public opinion won’t...if they do some fool thing.” The Japanese replied that they would never attack the United States on one condition. The United States could ensure peace by removing its military bases from Midway, Wake, and Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese saw them as a threat. Roosevelt said it was the first time any Japanese had told the Americans to get out of Hawaii. He understood that the 80 percent of Americans who did not want another war with Germany were somewhat less concerned about a war with Japan. Guess who left the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor despite the request of the commanding admiral to bring it back to San Diego? Guess who forgot to make a call when he had a clear war warning through a decrypted code mes- sage five hours before the Japanese attack? He sent a West- ern Union telegram that only arrived after the aircraft had headed back to the carriers. My father volunteered through the draft the weekend after Pearl Harbor and my cousin Hank, now 93, signed up for the Navy as soon has he was 17 and saw two years of Pacific combat. They both said Pearl Harbor was a set- up, but they served anyway. They wanted to stand by their country and their buddies. So did a lot of others. I’ve spoken to them at Pearl Harbor reunions. They never seem to get quoted on TV or in the newspapers. That is another reason World War II veterans are a precious natural resource. They were brave enough to serve and still brave enough to cut through the ballyhoo and tell the truth. Mitzvah Mall assists charities The Barnert Temple community raised more than $31,000 during its 14 th annual Mitzvah Mall thanks to the work of the newly formed Team Tzedek, represented here by Rich Edelman; Steve Kiel; Paul Avenius; Barbara Kiel; Jacques Ohayon; Co-Chairs Eileen Roman, Ron Lynn, and Sue Klein; Debby Birrer; Bari Hopkins; Donna Meyer, and Lisa Dugal. Their year-long effort raised money and awareness for 11 carefully-selected charities, each representing a mitzvah: a commandment to do moral deeds and pursue tzedek (social justice) through acts of human kindness. Inspired by their interactions with charity repre- sentatives at the event, temple members continue to partner with these grassroots organizations to help them fulfill their missions to make a difference. For more information, visit www.barnerttemple.org/MitzvahMall/.Barnert Temple is located at 747 Route 208 South, Franklin Lakes.