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The
image I took here, a year and a half ago when I was visiting Washington, DC, is
just a portion of the much larger World War II Memorial, in the same way that this particular pavilion, the
Atlantic, formed only half of a sprawling conflict.
This
past Friday marked V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, when citizens of the United
States and its transatlantic ally, Great Britain, celebrated the long-awaited
defeat of the Nazi regime. Few if any people in the West could have imagined
that resistance in Japan would crumble only three months hence, but even the
defeat of Hitler and Mussolini was a colossal achievement.
Altogether,
16 million served in the U.S. military during WWII. Approximately 400,000
never came home. This was the so-called “Good War,” the one with a clear
military objective and an unambiguous ending.
Even
the young service personnel who managed to make it home, however, left their
innocence in places such as Normandy Beach, Anzio, Tunisia, Remagen Bridge and other sites recalled in the Atlantic Pavilion.
No memorial, no matter how gloriously achieved, can ever convey the magnitude
of that loss.
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