Dumping on the "Greatest Generation"

Provided you haven't been living down the canyon from Ted Kaczynski's old place for the last ten or so years, you probably have heard the name given to the World War II generation by Tom Brokaw: "The Greatest Generation." The book told the stories of people involved in the war and spawned a horde of copycat books.

It is my premise that the term the "greatest generation" is tantamount to a theft of glory, for it takes the true glory from those who earned it, their parents and grandparents.

The idea put forth is that it was the massive participation of the World War II generation that brought about the defeat of the Axis. And yes, there is something to that. But let us not forget that the American World War II generation had their counterparts in every other major country involved in that war. Millions of young Germans went off to fight and die for the Fuhrer. Millions of Japanese went off to die for Emperor Hirohito. Millions of Soviet citizens fought for their country, including thousands of women soldiers, sailors and airmen. While our women were doing "Rosie the Riveter" in our defense plants, Russian women were building T-34 tanks in the middle of winter in open-air factories in the Ural Mountains. The Japanese civilians were making and machining parts in their homes, essentially turning entire residential neighborhoods into factories (and justifying the firebombing of Japanese cities). The "greatest generation" were the foot soldiers, the factory workers, the cannon fodder for the war.

The true "greatest generation" were those who planned and executed the war strategy to win the war. They were the parents of the so-called "greatest generation." They were the military officers who conceived of the strategies to win, men like George Marshall, Chester Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Georgy Zhukov. They were the men who designed the equipment needed to win the war, such as Karl Probst and John Garand. They were the men who ran the companies that produced war equipment, such as Henry Kaiser, Donald Douglas, William Boeing, and all of the other companies and organizations. They were the ones who got the job done. They were the ones who sparked the post-war economic boom.

The "Greatest Generation" stole the glory and the credit for winning World War II from their parents, who were, by 1998, conveniently dead.

So what was the first thing that the "Greatest Generation" did when they took over from their parents' generation? Against the advice of their parents, they got this nation into a land war in Asia, a war that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and accomplished nothing. It was not the "Greatest Generation" that struggled against segregation in the 1960s, it was the in-between generation that was too young for World War II and the leading cohort of the Baby Boom that opposed segregation. And yes, it was the Baby Boomers who took to the streets to stop the Vietnam War, a war that the "Greatest Generation" largely supported to the bitter end.

The "Greatest Generation" had their war to command and they fucked it up. (And yes, the Baby Boomers elected an ignorant sociopath who promptly repeated that mistake, but that's a topic for another time.)