Eighty years ago, as news of Germany’s surrender spread, good people throughout Europe and the wider world flowed into the streets and open places to celebrate the end of Nazism and Hitler’s fever dream of blood and soil nationalism. To be sure, there was still much fighting to be done in the Asia-Pacific—though, happily, it would prove to be much less fighting than expected. True, also, a full accounting of the horrors of the death camps was yet to be grasped. Broken earth and broken homes needed to be rebuilt. And there were still the dead—the nearly uncountable dead—stretched from the raped and desiccated eastern front to the broken cities of western France and from the cold tundra of the Scandinavian north to the sand seas of Africa’s north. Nevertheless, six long years of fighting in Europe was over.
The overwhelming feeling at the time, at least in those first moments of victory, was gratitude. Gratitude that the thing had ended as it did. Gratitude that we had won. Gratitude that the many horrors were ended, that the crematoria fires had been doused and would not now spread across all the lands. General George Marshall, one of the finest men and finest warriors this or any other nation has ever produced, knew precisely where to place the lion’s share of his own gratitude. “My admiration and gratitude,” he said in a VE Day radio address, “go first to those who have fallen, and to the men of the American armies of the air and ground whose complete devotion to duty and indomitable courage have overcome the enemy and every conceivable obstacle in achieving this historic victory.”
Marshall hints at an important distinction. Our gratitude at the time was not found in the fact that we, as a nation and as individual fighting men, got to go to war. Our gratitude, rather, was centered on being the kinds of people—the kind of nation—willing to fight when the fighting had to be done. To be sure, those at the pointy-end of the spear deserve to be singled out for taking the risks—both of being harmed but also of doing harm. But Americans of every kind came together to support the fighting man in every conceivable way—material and immaterial.
Of course, it was all rather a near thing. America, infamously, did not in fact rush to the front to support the free nations of Europe when Hitler’s hordes first blitzkrieged across the frontiers. We were not willing to fight when fighting had to be done. We shirked our duty. Reinhold Niebuhr, the American protestant theologian, lamented this. He championed the case for American interventionism against Nazism, even starting up a magazine, Christianity & Crisis, to help him do so. Shortly after Japanese Zeros dropped from the skies over Pearl Harbor, Niebuhr insisted to the still doubtful mainline Christian community that Christian faith offers “no easy escape from the hard and sometimes cruel choices of such a world as ours.” But he also encouraged readers that faith “did offer resources and insights by which our decisions could be made wisely and our responsibilities borne courageously.” He concluded with the suggestion that it was to America’s own good that the Japanese attack had finally “strengthened our reluctant will” by goading America to now do what she ought already to have done. “We have been thrown into a community of common responsibility,” he lamented with relief, “by being engulfed in a community of common sorrow.”
It was to our good because America had too long indulged in our native predisposition toward minding our own business. Our preference for an almost self-isolating, inward-turning desire to be left alone to tend our own garden had to be overcome for our own good. We had no moral right to indulge in disregard for the world around us.
By the time those Zeros had dropped from the sky, we had already become the indispensable nation, but we did not yet embrace that fact—probably because we did not yet know it. In time, certainly by the time the smoke cleared over Europe, we had, if reluctantly, accepted the full burden and responsibility that comes with great power.
It’s concerning to notice that contemporary America too, much like the recalcitrant nation in Niebuhr’s day, is an oddity. We are a weirdly passionate bunch. On the one hand, we are far too easily angered. Our dander gets up at imagined slights and petty conflicts of little importance, or none. On the other hand, we are barely rattled by real evils and rank injustice. We seem to have swapped a love for goodness, beauty, and truth for a desire for the base, the ugly, and the false. Our passions do not sustain our rational powers, they vanquish it. Our loves are disordered, our rage is disheveled, and we have no idea how good we have it and how quickly it all can be lost. Yesterday morning, I spoke about the end of WW2 to a group of high school freshmen at a Christian classical school. It occurred to me while speaking with them that it is due to the order, justice, and peace established by the Allied victory that such quotidian goods as safe schools, open learning, and the free and secure assembly of religious groups can be enjoyed with any certainty. Such goods are not automatic. They have to be fought for.
It seems an open question whether much of American society has the moral sobriety to properly regard such virtues as duty, honor, courage, commitment, service before self, and stick-to-it-ness that is required for the continued maintenance of free societies. Lord Moran, the moralist and personal physician to Winston Churchill, insisted that a ready supply of virtue was essential for the successful conclusion of those six long years of war against Nazism:
I contend that fortitude in war has its roots in morality; that selection is a search for character. Courage can be judged apart from danger only if the social significance and meaning of courage is known to us; namely that a man of character in peace becomes a man of courage in war. He cannot be selfish in peace and yet be unselfish in war. Character, as Aristotle taught, is a habit, the daily choice of right and wrong; it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace and is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war. For war, in spirit of what we have heard to the contrary, has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us, till it is plan for all to read; it cannot change; it exposes.
The cultivation of such necessary virtues is not automatic. They do not happen on their own. Turning again to Marshall, we should recall his commencement address at Trinity College, Connecticut, in the spring of 1941—before the entrance of America into the fight. In his comments, the great man drew a parallel between the role of Trinity College and that of the United States Army, both of which provide, in their own manner, patriotic service to the nation. Trinity accomplished this, in part, by attending not simply to the technical academic preparation of its students but to the spiritual needs required of them to be participatory citizens of good character in distressing and unpredictable times. Of the Trinity students, Marshall noted, “Their period of development here not only vitalized the faculties of their minds but also aroused and intensified those latent forces of the soul that the ordinary educational process sometimes fails to reach.” In his own martial universe, the general noted, the word “soul” would be replaced with “morale.”
Akin to the vocation of the university, Marshall continued, the War Department of the United States had an obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious dual concern. Instead of a University’s production of scholars, the War Department might easily be thought to be concerned only with the “development and perfection of … a war machine.” One thinks mainly of “the production of bombers, of pursuit ships, of tanks, howitzers, rifles and shells.” But, the General insisted, underlying “the essentially material and industrial effort is the realization that the primary instrument of warfare is the fighting man.” He continued:
So we progress from the machine to the man, and much of our time and thought and effort is concentrated on the disposition and the temper and the spirit of the men we have mobilized; and we get back to the word “morale.”…Today war, total war…is a long drawn out and intricately planned business, and the longer it continues the heavier are the demands on the character of the men engaged in it…The Soldier’s heart, the soldier’s spirit, the soldier’s soul, are everything. Unless the soldier’s soul sustains him, he cannot be relied on and will fail himself and his commander and his country in the end.
The effort to prevent this failure is not a martial task alone. Those public institutions charged with the moral formation of those young people from whom future warfighters are drawn—schools, faith communities, families, and the like—must take up their role as well. The central crisis of American life, I contend, is that our institutions may no longer be up to the task.
They had better be. In his VE Day radio address, even as he praised the successful prosecution of the European war, Marshall cautioned sobriety and drew attention to the task ahead. “Unfortunately,” he reminded his listeners, “the conclusion of the European battle does not establish the peace for which we have been fighting.” Marshall understood the importance of taking time to recognize the Allied victory in Europe, but he knew that our resolve must not slacken but turn quickly toward the Asia-Pacific.
Tensions, of course, are brewing in the Asia-Pacific once again. And while fighting is not a foregone conclusion, it will be if we do not prepare capably and credibly for it. The extraordinary capability of the American warrior over the two-decade conflict against terror proved that there remains steel in the spine of America’s young. Their hearts are strong. There’s fortitude there to go the distance.
That’s the good news.
