The big lesson to be learnt from World War II

Growing up, I could not avoid becoming swept up in the stories of World War II.

My uncle from Cape Town was captured at Tobruk in Libya and spent four years in a German-prisoner-of-war (POW) camp; my father experienced the Blitz in London and signed up for four years with the Royal Air Force (RAF), mainly fighting against the Japanese.

My mother, my aunts and uncles all had stories to tell about those years. Long before the advent of the Internet, I devoured all the books I could find about the war.

I marvelled at British Battle of Britain hero Douglas Bader, who lost his legs in a flying accident in the 1930s, but went on to bully his way back into a cockpit, commanding RAF squadrons and later getting shot down and interned in a POW camp.

I learned, too, about South African fighter pilot “Sailor” Adolph Gysbert Malan, absorbing his experiences in the Battle of Britain and later over Europe, before finding out years later, that my mother had met him after the war when she was a volunteer for the “Torch Commando” – a group of liberal whites who started one of the first fightbacks against apartheid.

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Even now, I can put together an accurate timeline of events both in Europe and in the Pacific theatre, but I have realised that the predominance of Western sources – newspapers, radio and movies – mean I had a slanted view of who did what in that conflict.

Ignorant Americans like to tell the Brits and the French that “if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French”, implying they liberated Europe from Nazi control.

And while the D-Day landings did mark a significant gain for the Allies, the fact that the Germans were now fighting on two fronts meant their days were numbered.

In reality, it was the people of the Soviet Union – not only Russians, but Ukrainians and assorted other “socialist republics” – who shed the most blood in the war and who played perhaps the decisive role in defeating Adolf Hitler.

Without their resistance and ultimate victory at Stalingrad, the punishing massive tank battle at Kursk and their relentless drive from the east in 1944/45, it would have been far more difficult to bring Germany to its knees.

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That, of course, is not to discount the suffering and grit of the people of the rest of Europe – and the UK, particularly, which was heavily battered during the Luftwaffe air war campaign of 1940/41 – who have every right to mark the 80th anniversary of end of hostilities this week.

The old alliances of the war years, though, are gone for good. It doesn’t seem as though “hands across the water”, which encapsulated US-UK relations during the war, means as much now, given the bullying from the Trump White House.

My father seldom talked about his experiences other than a comment once that “war is a waste”.

He always respected the suffering of my uncle whose time in a POW camp saw him lose all his toes and later, back in civvie street, when booze softened those memories, he lost his marriage and his health.

My father said little when he saw me conscripted as a soldier, although he must have worried. When my son was born, I vowed I would never, as the Ballad of the Green Beret admonished, “put silver wings on my son’s chest”.

If we learn only one thing from World War II, it should be that war benefits nobody but arms merchants.

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