In Their Own Words

Rocketman at Powerline tips us off to a magnificent article by David GelernterToo Much, Too Late, a paeon to the cynicism of so much of the Baby Boomer generation's response to their parents.

You need to read the whole thing, of course.

But the most interesting part came near the end.

Gelernter notes the great wave of history and art written by veterans in the fifties and sixties - and how it's disappeared almost completely under the stewardship of the baby boomers:The veterans' neglected voice. World War II produced an extraordinary literature of first-person soldier narratives--most of them out of print or unknown. Books like George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here," Philip Ardery's "Bomber Pilot," James Fahey's "Pacific War Diary." If we were serious about commemorating the war, we would do something serious. The Library of America includes two volumes on "Reporting World War II," but where are the soldiers' memoirs versus the reporters'? If we were serious, we would have every grade school in the nation introduce itself to local veterans and invite them over. We'd use software to record these informal talks and weave them into a National Second World War Narrative in cyberspace. That would be a monument worth having.In the early nineties I ghostwrote and edited a such a book, "Shavetail" by Bill Devitt. It was in the tradition of many great first-person accounts of the war - from "The GI War", a compendium of stories told in unstinting, and sometimes horrifying, detail by the men who were there, to a book written by Charles Lindbergh - not the pilot, but a North Dakota farm boy who was the last surviving member of the patrol that raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached, Devitt couldn't find a publisher. Indeed, it was only a few years ago that he self-published the book (which I highly recommend, by the way, even though or perhaps because it's been rewritten since my last pass at it). It was certainly more deserving of print than much of what clogs the shelves today.

Read the whole thing - and I mean Gelernter and Devitt and Lindberg (his book may still be in libraries) and many more.