What are we remembering on Memorial Day?

This opinion piece was published on June 4, 2019 in the <i>Brattleboro Reformer </i>

If you follow this blog, you know we transcribe oral histories. We have transcribed hundreds for the National WW2 Museum in New Orleans. Despite having grown up with John Wayne movies about the war, I didn’t know that many facts about the war. And there are a lot of minutiae that require research.

We were researching something a Navy vet said about Hogashi ammunition crews. I had no luck finding Hogashi or Higashi—or any other spelling—ammunition crews. That happens a lot. But in my search, I stumbled upon this opinion piece written by the son of this particular vet.

“This Thursday, June 6, will mark the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, known as D-Day; a landmark in history that will garner a great deal of attention, and deservedly so. I continue to struggle, however, with the near universal avoidance of any recognition for the largest invasion of World War II, Okinawa.

If you stopped 100 people on the street and asked when D-Day was, probably 25 or more would know June 6, 1944; nearly everyone would know what you were talking about, and probably 99 of them would think of it as the largest invasion of the war. Similarly, if you asked those same 100 when L-Day, (the invasion of Okinawa) was, you’d be lucky to get one correct answer: April 1, 1945 — no fooling, and in 1945 also Easter Sunday. Most would know very little about the invasion or its significance in the war, or that April 1, 1945 was also known as L-Day.”

We Americans argue a lot. We argue about everything, and I suppose that’s the foundation of democracy. I remember hearing, in days gone by, about efforts to spread democracy around the world. I wondered then if these people were sure that the rest of the world wanted to adopt a style of government that required constant arguing.

But World War II was something. As usual, we were a very divided country about entering the war. We argued that it wasn’t our business. It wasn’t going to happen here. But then it did.

Listening to story after story about “Do you remember where you were, what you were doing, when you heard about Pearl Harbor?” is a fantastic experience. These days we have many markers, “Where were you on 9/11?” “Where were you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded?” But in 1942, there was no TV, and the stories of where and how people heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor are many and varied. American English was different then. Think about how Cary Grant spoke, Katherine Hepburn, and FDR.

That’s what Memorial Day is for, remembering. Happy Memorial Day from all of us at Adept Word Management.