Posted on 05/25/2015 10:05:33 AM PDT by re_tail20
THE SILENCE MUST HAVE FRIGHTENED EMILY WILSEY. In the seven months since her husband had gone to war, Captain David Wilsey, a 30-year-old anesthesiologist with the 116th Evacuation Hospital, had never gone more than a day or two without sending her a letter. Every step of the frigid, mud-soaked, and bloody Allied advance across France and Germany, he had written to her of his experiences. But now, with victory assured and the newspapers declaring the war in Europe all but over, the letters had stopped.
His last letter, dated May 1, 1945, was sent from “Somewhere Else Yet Again, Germany.” He had written about how excited he was that his unit would get the chance that night to see The Keys of the Kingdom, a movie starring Gregory Peck. He marveled over how fast the latest issue of the Elko Daily Courier, the daily paper in their town in Nevada, had reached him. “The advance party is out to reconnoiter the new site we will move to in a day or two,” he added, making his first reference to the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau opened in 1933 and was initially used to house political prisoners. It later became a training facility for the SS, the elite Nazi military force responsible for planning and executing the “Final Solution,” or the annihilation of the Jews. An estimated 41,500 prisoners were murdered there. Some went to the gas chambers, or were shot or beaten to death; others expired from exposure or starvation, or died subsequent to medical experiments conducted by SS doctors. Dachau was the inaugural Nazi concentration camp and served as a model for their massive killing system. “The war could end any hour yet we keep moving, racing, working just as if it weren’t over,” he told her,...
(Excerpt) Read more at newrepublic.com ...
I visited Dachau in 1960 while I was in the Army.
Very sobering.
Reminds me a bit of my dad. Dad was in the Phillipines - Luzon. He was a alcoholic and very distant from my mom and us five kids. It wasn’t until he died that my aunt told me he was on a detail whose job it was to retrieve the bodies of fellow soldiers who had died in battle. Yes, I know this is part of war and the commitment to leave no fellow soldier behind. However, what the Japanese did to those bodies was despicable. He had a hard time with the memories of what he saw.
It made it a bit easier for me to forgive him. A year or two before he died, he wanted me to contact an old army buddy that he was hoping was still alive. I regret that I was too selfish and couldn’t be bothered. I know now that he needed to talk to someone else who had been through it. He was alone in his memories. I so very much wish I had looked up that buddy.
Poignant story. And a reminder that ALL of those who serve deserve our gratitude. Yes, the frontline soldier/sailor/marine may bear the terror of bullet and bomb, but many others sacrifice to make that horror a little more bearable, and to carry a share of the burden as well.
Sad but interesting, and well written. Thanks for posting this.Glad to see one good piece from the “new” New Republic.
This is actually a moral equivalence hit piece. The GI is just as rotten underneath the do gooder facade as the enemy was. The slant of this article makes me sick, especially on Memorial Day.
So, GIs weren't the Greatest Generation after all? Has the author even read the book? Where does it claim the American soldier was anything other than the "complex" individual the author asserts? Read With the Old Breed, the classic about the American soldier in the Pacific War.
Saving Private Ryan sends two messages: First, "Earn this. Earn it." Vindicate the legalized mass murder your side had to commit to defend the right. Second, being nice gets you killed. Neither of these makes the GI a noble knight. What he does afterwards does. For the GIs of the author's arbitrary "afterwards," they were still at war. By the way, combat soldiers were only a fraction of the adult American male population, so they're probably not a good sample to account for a generation.
"Just as capable of depravity," as one commenter wrote, is just describing the human condition, and it leads to the fatuous moral equivalency argument. Everyone is "just as capable," but what counts is how well-reined that capability is. The claim of the author that the GIs murdered "in cold blood" is ridiculous. In fact, the longer they had to be in Dachau, the more inflamed they would be. And Dachau wasn't even the worst. GIs' cruelty in response to what they witnessed was not at all depraved. If you say it was, then you lose the distinction between them and Germans of the Holocaust or Japanese of the occupation and of the POW camps, who truly murdered in cold blood.
Obviously the letters were a catharsis for Wilsey. And, being an MD, he was doubtless confronted with what all combat MDs are confronted with -- being part of an endeavor that is the antithesis of their vocation. Moreover, physicians must live for precision and exacting standards. Is it no wonder many take that home with them?
Suggested reading on how people cope with war trauma: Malcolm Gladwell's, "Getting Over It" http://gladwell.com/getting-over-it/
Thank you for your memory. Yes, we sometimes make mistakes.
I read the comments to this on the TNR site. Liberals can’t help being military-hating liberals.
Most commented on the “racism” of Dr. Wilsey. The rest were “See, I told you so, American G.I.s weren’t the angels you think they were!”
My Dad was infantry and helped to liberate Dachau. He seldom talked about it. When I brought up G.I.’s summarily executing SS-men, Dad replied that American soldiers didn’t do such things. By then there were stories everywhere about Nazi war criminals escaping justice & living out their lives comfortably, and I was glad to hear that rough justice was meted out in Dachau.
I don't think that's accurate. Dachau did have a gas chamber, but my recollection is that it was not used. Dachau was not a death camp.
However 32,000 people did die there. Just from the bad treatment etc.
Truth and totalitarianism just cannot coexist.....Keep this in mind, Grasshopper.
“...I was glad to hear that rough justice was meted out in Dachau.”
Yes, there are better things to shed a tear over. I also hate how people of today seek to hold those from the past to today’s standards.
The family could easily have gotten rid of all the ‘racist’ letters, but they did not.
I remember reading a Nero Wolfe story, a big part of which was the large kitchen and wait staff at some country club (or something like that). They were all black guys. There was such archaic slurs used about them that I barely knew what was being discussed. (Or course our hero Nero is not like that, but his sidekick and narrator Archie was, iirc.)
Calling them “smokes” and stuff like that. I actually had to ask my mom about some of the language. I will always remember what she said to me “There’s been a great change”.
I think everyone from her generation (same as the Doctor in the NR piece, although since he was aleady an MD I guess he was older than my parents) KNOWS this, but some seem determined to convince young blacks that nothing has changed, in fact maybe things are worse than ever.
I hate the Left, they are idiots. When all you’ve got left to worry about are “microagressions” you better get down on your knees and thank God.
My dad served in the Pacific. I know nothing about his time there. It was actually my grandma, his mother-in-law who told me that he had never discussed any of it.
We never asked either, but I don’t know why that was. My father was a very sweet man, not intimidating like the man in the story, but still we never asked, not that I remember.
Looks like I’m right and the author is giving short shrift to facts. (And, by the way, he left out the hangings).
“There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings.”
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005214
Facts matter.
They were beaten, starved, hanged, shot, used for medical tests, and shipped out to other camps for liquidation. Some were even released. They were not, however, gassed at Dachau. Sloppy research, any way you cut it.
Yup, a couple of the quotes in the letter sounded “off”, for lack of a better word. Like “the Germans were SO not doing (something). That sounds more like a modern day teenager, than someone from the 40s. Makes me wonder how much is a figment of the author’s imagination.
I’ve no doubt that some of our soldiers weren’t Angels. But, I have a hard time reconciling atrocities with good, honest men like my grandfather, and the other vets he served with.
I agree.
very much so......especially today.
Well I knew a some guys who were at Dachau on April 29, we left 2 companies there, one to guard Dachau and the other to guard the Autobahn. The rest of us went to Munich. Other units moved into Dachau as we moved out. The incidents mentioned could have happened later but I never heard of them. Maybe I was too busy moving toward Austria to get the war over.
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