EAST MONTPELIER – For millions of Americans these days, the mantra du jour is, and has been for a while, “MAGA, Make America Great Again.” Putting aside for at least the moment many of the problems of the “good old days” that this slogan refers to, like racial segregation, disempowerment of women, anti-Semitism, old-age poverty and a thousand other features of the past, it occurs to me that very, very few of the millions for whom this slogan is tantamount to Scripture are old enough to remember (to have experienced) the days during which America was great.
Consider what our country went through in the first half of the last century. The most salient features of that history were the Reform movement calculated to break the power of the unregulated rich; the War to End All Wars that ended in 1918 with an armistice followed by a peace treaty that almost guaranteed a repeat of the first war; strikes and labor disputes leading to government-sanctioned murder; Prohibition and the rise of organized crime; the catastrophic Dust Bowl, mass bankruptcy and displacement; the Great Depression; the birth of the New Deal; the rise of the American Nazi party. It’s no wonder the nation wanted nothing to do with the rise of fascism in Europe or the spread of Japanese imperial influence in the Far East.
But Japan committed the unthinkable in December of 1941. Just four days later Hitler, no doubt emboldened by his successes in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Poland, as well as by his non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and his belief that Japan would make short work of our soft, decadent nation, declared war on us. The fat, as we used to say, was in the fire, along with, among others, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Newsreels showed a jubilant Hitler skipping with joy near the Eiffel Tower. The photo soon became a prime recruiting poster.
This is about where my chums and I came in. The attack on Pearl Harbor was announced while the Langes were at Sunday dinner at Grandma’s. According to family legend, my Uncle Alvin was first in line at the Albany induction center next morning. Alvin’s enthusiasm wasn’t atypical; almost everybody wanted in, or didn’t dare hang back in the middle of an impossible two-front war across two oceans.
What’s triggered all this is a link to a video my kid sent me a couple of days ago, a documentary about Germen prisoner-of-war reactions to the reality of the United States, once they arrived here. They recorded their impressions in journals (which they were forbidden to keep under the Nazis) and in letters home. Watching it, I found myself scribbling notes, as if I were in class long ago. It was fascinating.
At its peak, the Axis prisoner of war population in the States reached 425,000. Their reactions that were recorded express mostly incredulity. They had been conditioned to believe that we were a failing nation of indolent dumbbells leading hardscrabble existences and pushovers in a fight. But the prisoners, on a train, for example, from the east coast to Texas, were carried in Pullman cars instead of the cattle cars they’d been accustomed to, and given food far superior to what their German officers ate. They passed a former auto manufacturing plant that was producing a new B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; shipyards with new Liberty ships side by side and days from launch; parking lots full of workers’ cars, unheard of at home; and combines working vast fields of wheat “like ships plowing the sea.” They passed steel mills whose blast furnaces ran in three shifts around the clock with women working them.
They’d been told we were “a mongrel nation” (the Nazis exterminated “mongrel” populations), but came to believe that diversity was our greatest human asset. Raised in and accustomed to near-penury, they were appalled by the amount of food that was thrown away by Americans with apparent “consciousness of infinite resources.” Torn by cognitive dissonance between what they’d been conditioned to expect and what they experienced, they suffered from “Ideological Collapse Syndrome.”
Most of all, they found it hard to believe how well they were treated. “Our war is with Hitler, not the German people,” many of their guards assured them. Local churches sent thousands of boxed Christmas gifts and cookies. There seemed to be nothing unspoken because of fear. The friendliness, one prisoner wrote, came from the “unshakable confidence of true power. They were strong enough to show mercy.”
If you’re devoted to making America great again, take another look at World War II.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
