I suspect many during and after WW2 felt this way.
Only as an adult have I come to realize the gift he gave me.
When I was a child, I spent a ton of time with him, he had a big hand in raising me. The picture he painted for the young me formed the foundation of my world view. He chose to share with us the Japanese cooking he learned while living there, he taught us how to use chop sticks, one of my most prized possessions is a silk he brought back and gave me in his will. He never once spoke negatively about any group of people, especially those who were "enemies", he stood up for anyone who was being treated negatively and wouldn't stand for it. He harbored no ill will, and therefore didn't put it in me.
It's only as an adult through research into his service that i have realized the full gravity of what he did during this service and the fact that he was a truly happy, blissful, and forgiving man after all that.
I can say to you, having been one of the recipients of the kindness and forgiveness you are showing in your own life now, and sharing in this comment - thank you. This is how the world moves on.
Had another relative who was a Marine. Was present at many of the worst battles. Including Iwo Jima. I never heard his stories. He never talked about them. My mom pressured him into talking one day. She regretted that for the rest of her life because the stories were so traumatic and it left him in tears. He was a gentle man. Became a Methodist minister after the war. I never once heard him raise his voice in anger. One of the kindest men I've ever known.
This is a sample size of only two. So I'm not assuming combat, or the lack of, shaped these men into what they would later become. But it's a little interesting to me.
Since I myself am older, I have some relatives who go way back. My grandmother was once visited by her great-uncle when she was 6. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War (on the Confederate side). He also wouldn't talk about combat. But he did tell this one story where he and some buddies snuck out of camp. Somewhere in northern Mexico. Found a bar and flirted a little with girls. Then the girls suddenly rushed the men out of the bar and hid them in a barn. Mexican soldiers heard there were Americans in town. The Americans hid under a bale of hay and were narrowly missed by a Mexican soldier who shoved a pitchfork into it. That great-uncle loved that story and would tell it often. Laughing every time.
Interesting. Until very recently, as far as I could know, my mother's life began at 16. She refused to talk about anything from her childhood.
I don't know if, like you, she didn't want to traumatize us or simply didn't want to think about it at all. But now, in her late 80s, she'll sometimes absent-mindedly relate some story from her childhood. They are all kid stories, but the perspective in them can be hair raising. (She was a child in an occupied country during WWII in the pacific; then immediately as the war ended the country became a different war zone, so she only knew living in that kind of environment until she left the country to go to university).
Recently I've been thinking of this because of the Ukraine war. I have seen at close range the impact of a generation of kids (like my mother in law, and others in her village) who grew up in postwar Germany with essentially no adult men around. That whole generation is pretty screwed up, and their kids (my generation) also reflect that impact. While my personal opinion is that Germany is not doing anywhere near enough to help Ukraine, I think they should be preparing a for a huge postwar assistance, not just money for rebuilding, but psychological / therapy based on their experience to try to reduce the effects of wartime trauma on Ukraine.
We take lots of refugees. I would argue this is already a very effective way of preventing further traumatizing.
But as far as I am aware, those who come do not easily get offered psychatric help, even if they already are traumatized.
But the psychatric sector is pretty much operating on its limits anyway.
There is sadly no shortage of countries with large populations who suffered in war. But Germany is a large, wealthy country which is a good example of what Ukraine will face in postwar reconstruction. And yes, Germany still owes an old debt to Ukraine (instigation of war) as well as a contemporary one (holding off Russia with limited German assistance).
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/29/5672649...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/07/7304045...
In the long term we all benefit.
That is, if they can get over that calvinist/puritan mental health == weakness/stigma thing, which seems to be slowly happening.
Germany already hosts around one million refugees from Ukraine. The exact numer is difficult to say, since the EU has provided all Ukrainian refugees visa-free entry. Which is unprecedented. Most of them are women and children. The winter is coming.
Providing them psychological help is important, but the sheer number of people from Ukraine (not speaking German) makes this very challenging. The Germans themselves also have the problem of finding psychological help, since the number of people needing it has been rising because of the pandemic, the war, the economic instability, etc.
Well, perhaps they should, but I'm not sure they can. My parents never mentioned any help regarding postwar trauma being available in Germany. Perhaps mental health issues weren't recognized as such then, perhaps they had other priorities. The first few years after the war "were difficult".
Yes, but it is now the 21st century.
One of the things that most non-veterans don't grasp is just how mundane day-to-day military life can be, even in a combat zone, like how people without a security clearance can't imagine how mundane most SECRET material really is. I find it hard to explain, but life is both different in quirky ways (various restrictions on freedoms, being judged professionally by your height/weight and 2-mile running time, random attacks by mortar fire, etc.) and dominated by many of the same experiences and concerns of civilian life (time spent just acquiring and eating food, dealing with traffic and bureaucracy, being frustrated by your assigned Windows machine on the enterprise network, etc.).
One of my personal takeaways from my time in Afghanistan is just how widely variable everyone's "combat" experience can be. I flew helicopters, so I saw the whole range of living conditions on a daily basis: everything from the smallest observation posts where squads lived in filth and got attacked routinely by well-aimed direct fire, to the large airbases like Bagram where people worked 9-5 in a cubicle and had many amenities that were even nicer than what was back home at Fort Bragg. And where you ended up on that spectrum seemed quite arbitrary and luck-of-the-draw. Some otherwise interchangeable helicopter units just flew VIPs back and forth between Bagram and Kabul while others flew SEAL teams on very-high-risk raids every night. So when someone says they did a tour in Afghanistan (even if they earned a Bronze Star or a Combat Action Badge), that doesn't mean much to me, in itself. Edited to add: I think the variance among people who "served in WWII" is orders-of-magnitude greater. There were just so many millions of people in uniform in so many diverse places.
So if you were drafted, even as a German you had a nearly 50% chance to be assigned a position where you weren't expected to see combat. And on top of that there's the combat troops defending targets that weren't attacked by the enemy.
But with some bad luck you might have ended up fighting at Stalingrad. War isn't fair, on so many levels.
US worries were legitimate (atrocities perpetrated against civilians, future control of Europe/Asia, the international economic order and security of global trade networks, etc.) but “urgent” invasion wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t a very successful invasion. They held a couple of islands for two months at the cost of 4000 of their 8000 men.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in contemporary American understanding of WWII.
Edit because I’m exhausted and not being mindful about finishing thoughts, I didn’t mean this to be fighting words so much as clarifying words: they cared about mass attacks on civilians in some cases but not others. Bombings of allied cities was absolutely a concern. Mass murder or German and mostly eastern European Jews wasn’t such a concern. There wasn’t any such reaction to sending Jewish refugees back to be murdered.
The whole concept of actually caring about nazi atrocities on the scale they they committed them, to the victims they were committed against, was a retroactive set of moral concerns. And that’s unsurprising given that the US was the primary inspiration for those atrocities.
The Philippines was US.
We were literally invaded.
They also bombed the West Coast.
You are right that the Philippines was invaded, and was at the time a US territory. But it was at that point under a government intended to transition it to independence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare–Hawes–Cutting_Act
From what I can tell (this was decades before my birth and I have not extensively studied it, so I probably have an oversimplified impression) for mainland Americans, the Philippines was not really considered to be part of the country in the same way as, say, Illinois or Texas, and Filipinos were not considered to be Americans in the same way. (e.g. after WWII the Congress voted to strip benefits from Filipino veterans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_Act_of_1946) I’m sure the US wanted to maintain some navy and trade presence there though.
The Japanese also occupied the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu (part of Alaska territory). But it’s hard to imagine that people 3000 miles away in, say, Oregon were worried that the Japanese would be imminently launching an amphibious assault from there.
(a) This balloon bombing was covered up and essentially nobody about it at the time, so clearly not something people were urgently worried about.
(b) This militarily irrelevant bombing of a handful of random civilians is hardly an “invasion”.
Two bombs, and it was basically a non-event. The intent was to start massive forest fires, but they failed.
They also shelled the West coast, and all they did was damage a baseball backstop at Fort Stevens and tear up the beach a bit.
The mainland US was not in any danger.
What I mean by this is that the average US citizen was completely safe (well, until drafts)
I presume the famous American educashun kicked in and geographically spoiled the slogan of bad bad America.
How do you explain that war is long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of heart pounding panic? Not well if you weren’t there.
your choice to shoulder this burden for all, is well your choice. but be advised that this choice may have unintended consequences in a longer term. consequences of your choice to witholding bad things "for them".
I don't belive you're doing this (bearing the horrible things) only to shield your relatives from your past. it is important you recognize that it's something you do for yourself, you are the main person who doesn't want to remember whatever horrible events you had to experience; don't pin this choice on them.
"I did it for them!".. sure, why not? but my point is that first and foremost he's making those choices for himself; which is pefrectly fine. what's not fine (IMO) is to pretend such choices aren't selfish.
I speak from my own experience, if it helps it helps, if it doesn't just leave it. maybe it wasn't meant for you
Your claim of selfishness seems to be unwarranted (and perhaps a little mean spirited), how can you possibly tell?