When I Wanted to Be a War Historian

An inscription in a book about World War II that I found at my parent's house.

Words from the Wise

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory. But boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror, but if it has to come, I am there.”

William T. Sherman, “Speech to His Former Troops at Columbus, Ohio”, (August 11, 1880)

For Your Ears and Eyes

Useful Trivia

There is a small, uninhabited island three miles from the coast of Martha’s Vineyard that was converted from a private hunting preserve for former Harvard tennis champion Joshua Crane to a Naval practice bombing range during World War II. Because hundreds of the dropped bombs did not detonate, public access and fishing were banned after the Navy transferred the island to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1998. The island’s name, translated from the language of the Wampanoag people who first inhabited it, is Nomans Land.

The immediate cause of World War II in the Western world was the German invasion of Poland in 1939. However, some scholars suggest the war’s true beginning was either the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 or the Second Sino-Japanese War, which started near Beijing with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937.

Between 70 and 85 million deaths can be attributed to World War II. Of these, more than 45 million of the dead—at least 53%—were civilians. By conservative estimates, if the number of dead soldiers and citizens were reanimated and formed into a country, it would be the 20th most-populated in the world, just ahead of France and the United Kingdom.

Mull It Over

Whenever I’m at my parents’ house in Bayonne, I go through the drawers looking for things that didn’t make it into my GMC Jimmy when I made the one-way trip to Knoxville in late July 2011. That’s one of the reliable things about parents: when their children leave home, they usually keep the useless relics of their adolescence around for the lonely nights when they miss them badly.

Within an hour of arriving with Alba two Fridays ago, I’d consumed five or six of my Nona’s homemade empanadas and drank a vermouth (or three). This was the fuel I required to spend the next hours scouring through furniture and closets for long-forgotten treasures. In my childhood dresser, situated in what’s since been redesignated as Alba’s room, I found a class yearbook, a youth soccer jersey from when I was 13, and a black travel case with sleeves full of burned CDs from my emo years. Across from the dresser, on a simple shelf that my dad built to hold encyclopedias before they became obsolete, are thick textbooks from my college days. Mixed in with the bunch is Warfare and the Third Reich, a history book Jeremy gifted me on my 17th birthday and which, like the others, I haven’t read.