After the Great War, master glass artist Frederick Carder created the beautiful memorial to Corning’s war dead, now exhibited at city hall. Among 30 names was that of Carder’s own son.
*If in 1920 you had killed every man, woman, and child in the state of Nevada… then killed another 40,000 in Delaware… then maimed every person in Wyoming… then wounded 10,000 more in Delaware… you’d just about equal America’s losses in the First World War.
*World War II, of course, was even bigger. Simon Winchester wrote, “The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the six years of the Second World War than in all the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.”
*By the 1940 census you’d need to add up the populations of Wyoming, Nevada, and Alaska to make up America’s dead in that war, while the wounded could be paired one-to-one with the people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
*Others suffered worse. You’d have to kill the entire populations of 22 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia to reach the LOW estimate of Soviet deaths. They had more civilians killed in a single city than we had TOTAL deaths worldwide, and Winston Churchill claimed that residents of London were killed at a higher rate than American military personnel were. Fifty percent of the World War II dead were civilians, compared with 10% in World War I.
*But even here in mostly-shielded America, the cost was still heartbreaking. The small Hammondsport school endured the deaths of 14 alumni. All four of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons fought in the First World War, where one died. The three survivors fought again in the Second War, where two of them died. Joseph P. Kennedy had three sons and a son-in-law in World War II. Two died, and one was gravely injured. The five Sullivan brothers all served, and all died, on the same ship.
*While the Second World War was a time of great unity and great opportunity, it also stressed Americans to the breaking point. Divorce went up, and so did illegitimacy. So did premarital sex, extramarital sex, prostitution, venereal disease, and juvenile delinquency. Some families gingerly stitched themselves back together afterward, but others broke into shards, or spewed forth rancor for decades. Race riots broke out as bigots murderously tried to hammer African Americans back into “their place,” even if it hurt the war effort.
*For the almost 900,000 Americans who were wounded in the two world wars, at least their pain was obvious and to some extent comprehensible. Emotional and psychological suffering did not even have a vocabulary yet. Those who suffered were considered moral failures, and looked on with pity or contempt. These were the men sitting by themselves at opposite ends of the bar, speaking to no one and self-medicating with alcohol. The highest veteran suicide rates were not from Vietnam vets, or Gulf War vets, but from World War II vets.
*Some estimate the financial cost of the War at almost 15 trillion in today’s dollars. But THOSE bills are long since paid off. And they count for nothing beside the human cost. The bills for THAT are still falling due.