The liberators of World War II

By Warren Kozak

Many years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Dutch businessman in a hotel in China. In the course of our discussion, I learned that he had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today known as Indonesia. I quickly calculated that he was old enough to have been alive during World War II, so I asked what happened to him.

He told me that he and his parents spent the entire war in a Japanese prison camp.

"What was that like?" I asked.

He explained that because his family entered the camp when he was 3 years old and was liberated when he was 8, he really had no basis of comparison to anything else.

"That's all I knew," he said. "That was really my whole life up until then."

They got by. They survived. As a child, he even found ways to play with some simple toys his mother made for him. He didn't appear scarred in any way, and I thought our conversation had ended. But after a long pause, for some reason he opened up and began to tell me a story that I have never forgotten. It is a story that actually said more about my own country, its singularity, and its values.

"When we were liberated," he said, "these soldiers came into the camp. They were different. They looked like giants, and they were all smiling."

One of these giants quietly sat down next to him and gently lifted him onto his knee. The soldier reached into his pack and took out a tin can, which contained a piece of bread, something the boy had never seen. Then he reached back and opened another can with a strange, colorful paste.

"I watched the soldier as he slowly spread jam over the bread, and then he gave it to me."

The man stopped there for a moment as his voice choked up, and then he turned and looked straight at me. "I travel all over the world," he said. "I eat in very expensive restaurants ... and I will never, ever eat anything again that tasted so good."

I didn't realize that I was nodding in agreement, and I said, "I know," to which he quickly corrected me: "No, you will never know ... and that's a very lucky thing."

Seventy years ago this summer, as World War II came to its climactic end, the world became a vast arena of liberated humanity. People came out of prison camps and attics, forests and cellars. Whole countries and populations were freed as the Nazi army crumbled and Japan surrendered. Millions of human beings, many of whom had been slaves for years, most of them starving, were suddenly released.

Their liberators included, along with our allies, a vast army of millions of young Americans - for some reason, everyone referred to them as boys or "our boys." Paul Fussell, the late writer who was a young lieutenant in the 103d Infantry, accurately titled his war memoir The Boys' Crusade.

These young Americans played a major role in this colossal emancipation. Until the war, many of them had never left their home states and had never seen anyone who looked different from them. Now they were in places they never expected to see, exotic lands like the Philippines, North Africa, and China.

For many foreigners, this was their first glimpse of Americans as well. Before that, their only views came from Hollywood movies. These big, handsome soldiers with easy smiles proved their preconceptions to be pretty accurate - they all seemed to look like matinee idols. And they were extraordinarily generous. Yes, Americans were better supplied than all the other armies, but they were generous with all the people they encountered, including their former enemies.

Because this large portion of humanity owed its freedom, in large part, to the United States, millions of Asians and Europeans of that generation have always held a positive feeling toward this country. The United States helped rebuild and feed these people, which, of course, added to the warm feelings. The quiet American military cemeteries across the globe, with their immaculate rows of white crosses intermixed with Jewish stars, serve as further reminders that this mass freedom came at a more significant cost than just U.S. tax dollars.

It is ironic that this positive attitude runs completely counter to a much more negative narrative that is mostly homegrown. It came originally out of leftist circles in the 1950s and began to take a solid hold in academic institutions as baby boomers entered teaching positions in the late 1960s and '70s. Howard Zinn's extremely influential A People's History of the United States (1980) only reinforced this view. Thanks to the many teachers who felt obliged to assign Zinn's book in their high school and college history courses over the past 35 years, hundreds of thousands of students, maybe even millions, were introduced to their country as America the empire, America the rapacious, America the evil.

William Ayers, the 1960s Weatherman terrorist turned education professor, is a high-value speaker at universities across the country today. Ayers often lectures on the issue of social justice. The man who admits only that the bombs set off by his group 40 years ago were "not enough" is often treated as a hero on campus. At the University of Oregon, Ayers told his young audience that they are a lucky generation. They could very possibly live in a world without a powerful United States. This new world, according to Ayers, will offer more freedom and opportunity because the United States will no longer determine everyone's future, and a small percentage of the world's population (Americans) will no longer consume a disproportionate amount of the Earth's resources and wealth.

The aging population around the world that was actually liberated from totalitarian rule in 1945, and again in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, might not see Ayers' vision as a good thing. Their real-life experience refutes the revisionist theory that a weaker America is better for the world. They understand what real evil looks like. They lived it. And they witnessed with their own eyes something unique in world history - a victorious army that wanted only to leave the lands it conquered and go home as soon as it arrived. They didn't colonize; they fought to end colonization. They freed a large swath of humanity, fed them, and gave them billions of dollars to rebuild.

In his latest book, World Order, Henry Kissinger tells of visiting President Harry Truman in Kansas City in 1961, when the former secretary of state was a young professor. During their conversation, Kissinger asked Truman what in his presidency had made him most proud.

"That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations," Truman replied. "I would like to think that only America would have done this." Kissinger writes that Truman "wanted to be remembered not so much for America's victories as for its conciliations."

Did America get something in return? Of course it did. Free countries, more stable democracies, new markets, trade partners, and strong allies for sure. But add something else to the obvious list of benefits: wiping the tears from the eyes of a young girl with a number tattooed on her arm, and seeing the amazement on an 8-year-old Dutch boy's face as he tasted bread and jam for the first time.

In the ledger of what these young Americans, these boys, accomplished 70 years ago, we cannot fail to include these simple acts of kindness multiplied by tens of thousands.