The Greatest?

We’d have cracked up laughing had we known of the “greatest generation” con that would define us 50 years later. The greatest generation was our parents who saw us through the Depression. Our children, we were sure, would be an even greater generation. We were clearing evil from the earth so that could be.

There was certainly much to praise in our conduct. We were kind and generous to the defeated population, especially to children. Several married men from my battalion took displaced children back to the States and adopted them. We were persevering, brave, loyal, brilliant improvisers with machinery. When the Allied command overlooked the big defensive advantage Normandy’s hedgerows gave the German defenders, it was the G.I.s who concocted solutions to cut through them and enable our 3rd Army’s breakout at St. Lo.

We also displayed greatness as a country. We invested much labor, money, and expertise in restoring the infrastructures of our allies and enemies alike. Yes, it was partly to create markets for our products and counter the appeal of communism, which was taking over Eastern Europe and threatening France, Greece, and Italy, but it was also an action that came from our hearts.

But then, we had a dark side. Many of us profited from Germany’s war-devastated economy and consumer shortages by selling our cigarettes and manipulating our dollars’ pay on the black market. We were intensely racist with Afro-American G.I.s, who were largely relegated to service functions and performed stunning feats of efficiency and endurance trucking supplies to our advancing armies.

And we looted and raped, not to the extent of our enemies, but we did this, and U.S. soldiers shot German prisoners. During the Battle of the Bulge, Wehrmacht soldiers wearing U.S. Army uniforms and fluent in American English infiltrated our lines and were misdirecting our reinforcement and supply convoys. If we believed captured German soldiers knew of the saboteurs’ whereabouts, we would give their top-ranking officer a few seconds to start disclosing it. If he didn’t, we would shoot him, then demand an answer from the next in rank. Either he or another captured soldier would then reveal it.

I have absolutely no criticism to offer on this. I would have done it myself if called upon, held my carbine to their heads and fired until we got the information we had to have and done so without a qualm. And though I have been registered as a conscientious objector since my discharge in 1946, I would probably in a similar situation shoot them today.

But, in addition, I might also shoot a surrendering soldier because I feared him, or coveted his Wehrmacht overcoat, which didn’t get waterlogged like ours did, or in revenge for their shooting G.I. prisoners en masse at Malmedy, or because my squad’s orders that day were not to take prisoners.

Which is to face the essential point. There is really very little room for greatness in war.

Indeed, a reason for us to avoid war is that we are lousy at it. During World War II, our leaders repeatedly made huge, inexcusable mistakes.

Gen. James Doolittle, commander of the U.S. 8th Air Force in England, flew combat missions over German-held territory despite his intimate knowledge of the Allies’ plans for the invasion of France. Had he been shot down and captured, German enhanced interrogation would probably have extracted these secrets from him, and they’d have been ready for us in Normandy.

Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. 5th Army in Italy, ignored a direct order from his superior, British Gen. Harold Alexander, to bypass Rome in order to surround the German 10th Army. Clark got the glory of entering Rome as a conqueror; the Germans got leave to fight in Italy for another year.

In the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a hero of World War II, defied President Truman’s order not to use American forces in his advance through North Korea to the Chinese border. As Truman feared, the Chinese entered the war, sent us reeling, and retook most of North Korea.

The Allies were lax in other crucial ways. We woefully underestimated the Japanese, in part because of our presumptions of racial superiority, and were late to recognize Germany’s ability to produce game-changing weapons, such as jet airplanes, which were 100 miles per hour faster than any warplane the Allies could put in the sky. If Hitler had not insisted most of his jets be bombers rather than fighters, for offense rather than defense, we would not have prevailed on D-Day or in our air campaign to disrupt Germany’s transportation system and war production.

My nomination for the most ruinous and ignorant act of all would go to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In August 1941, Hoover blew off evidence from a British MI5 double agent, Dusan Popov, that Japan was preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoover, a prude, detested Popov, a high-stakes gambler and womanizer. Popov’s most famous conquest was Simone Simon, a kittenish French movie star now renowned by cinema buffs for her performance in “Cat People” of a young woman cursed by her inner panther and also for providing her lovers with gold keys to her boudoir.

Rather than pass Popov’s information to the president and military chiefs, Hoover threatened to arrest him under a federal law, the Mann Act, for transporting a woman across state lines (New York to Florida) for “purposes of debauchery.” That Popov’s paramour was a consenting adult mattered not to Hoover. Four months later, Japan killed 2,400 Americans and crippled our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and proceeded to overrun most of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.

All of these gentlemen were extolled during the war and long afterward. President Truman awarded Doolittle a Silver Star for, among other things, his “personal example” during the very time his hubris was endangering our invasion of Europe. Clark was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, our second highest medal, by General Eisenhower. After Truman fired him for insubordination, MacArthur came home to a hero’s ticker tape parade in New York, an invitation to address a joint session of Congress, and beseeching from Republican leaders to run for president. Hoover led the F.B.I. until his death in 1972.

In tragic contrast, Alan Turing, the young English mathematician whose solving of Germany’s “ultra” code probably saved the war for us, was harassed by the British police because he was gay and in 1954 killed himself. The appropriate outcome was Popov’s, who became Ian Fleming’s model for James Bond.

If Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq mean anything, we are no better at war now than in World War II. The greatest generation will be the one that finds peace.

Seventy years ago today, May 7, 1945, Germany’s armed forces surrendered to the Allies.

Richard Rosenthal served in the 1251st Combat Engineer Battalion during the Battles of the Rhineland and Central Europe. He lives in East Hampton.