Our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, is about half way through her pregnancy, and I am allowing my mind to savor the impending prospect of my own great-grandparental apotheosis. Not surprisingly, perhaps, as one thought leads to another, I have been thinking about my own parents, now long departed with their entire entourage of my uncles and aunts. In particular I have been thinking about my Dad, a man whose life was both commonplace and extraordinary, as were so many of the lives of the parents of my contemporaries, for whom the great upheaval of the Second World War was the defining episode.
For our family, it was almost as if there were two different wars. My Dad’s two brothers, one older and one younger, were in Europe fighting Germans. Dad was half a world away in the South Pacific. The only historical source available to me is family lore, but I think it is at least as reliable as the Chanson de Roland. All three of the Fleming brothers signed up almost immediately after Pearl Harbor. Dad had conned my mother into believing that he had a safe non-combatant place in the hastily created Seabees (CB=naval Construction Battalion), as indeed in theory he had. But he was somehow actually already attached to a Marine unit at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942. That was only six months after Pearl Harbor. If you have ever seen a map of Midway Atol—it’s about five square miles in size—you will appreciate that it is a place-name rather than a place. The slaughter played out in ships and planes. As it turned out, Midway was a turning point that suggested to the savvy—of whom there were not all that many at the time—the inevitable doom of the Japanese Empire. As I was six years old when that battle took place, I am dependent upon oral tradition and military historians for my understanding of its significance. American geography played a large role in how American civilians experienced the War. We were living in Denver, refugees taken in by my maternal grandparents, and our principal local spiritual fears were “western”, the prospect that the West Coast might be a bloody battlefield. In retrospect this seems absurd, and probably should have at the time, but life is not lived retrospectively. The so-called “greatest generation” of Americans is now almost entirely extinct. Their progeny, among whom I number, will join them in the dusty halls soon enough. But in the meantime, I marvel at the current widespread oblivion of, or indifference to, the extraordinary feats they achieved. My father, though nearly a stereotype of rugged old American masculinity, was a kind and even gentle person. But he became a committed warrior. In his eyes the atomic bombing of a huge civilian population was not merely justified but in some sense required by the barbarism it paused, if it could never fully redress.
Midway Island gets its name from its location, roughly halfway across the Pacific Ocean from the coastal United States. It is usually classified as being a part of the Hawaiian archipelago, though it is not a part of the state of Hawaii. It has no permanent inhabitants. From one point of view it’s a pretty good place to fight a war. There is no civilian population to be its innocent victims. But from another and saner perspective its insignificance is nearly absurd. The idea of two violent armadas contesting its possession is rather tragic in itself, an emblem of the vanity of human wishes.
This essay was born of my larger pondering of the rapidity of social change, especially in America, and more especially as I find it in my own family history. I cannot say that my father didn’t give a second thought to the obvious truth that it was the use of the atomic bomb that ended the war in the Pacific. He was too intelligent and too humane for such thoughtlessness. But he fully believed in the justness of the Allied cause and had seen much evidence that persuaded him of the barbarity and fanaticism of the Japanese military machine. His American patriotism was almost instinctive, but it was far from mindless. He didn’t revel in it. Much of his early life had been difficult, and he felt that he was fighting not merely against an urgent existential threat but to make a better world, better first of all for his own family, but also superior in an ethical sense, a better world for all. Those attitudes, or others very like them, dominated the thinking of the “greatest generation,” and must have been practically universal among those who had actually fought in the war. He lived long enough to hear such attitudes mocked and deplored by what he called “pipsqueaks” who had never heard of Kwajalein, let alone sought it out on a map. His attitude to “pipsqueaks” was that of a democratic American: “People are free to speak as they pease. It’s a free country”. It was a satisfaction to him, in his own eyes, that he had done his tiny bit to keep it free.
The Battle of Midway was the beginning of the war for my Dad, but in his allegorizing mind the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Rising Sun. He was in good military company on that score. Admiral Yamamoto actually thought the same thing, and even seems to have said so at the time. My Dad never read Dante, but like Dante he faced the great adventure of his life in “the middle of life’s road”, that is, around his thirty-fifth year. As for so many millions of others, that stupendous war was and remained for my father the central event of his life, though lurking silently in the background. The Book of Job can always be counted on if you need an accurate pessimistic spin: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling.” (Job 7:1). But in life’s adversarial aspects one feels also the warmth-giving fires of life. We sit astride the shoulders of giants, and however midget-like is our actual perspective, we perforce can see a more distant horizon than could they. I now have every hope, and every reasonable expectation, soon to greet the arrival of a great grandchild. And that’s just great. My own great father never had that privilege.
In memoriam: Marvin Dale Fleming (1906-1980)
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