Originally posted by kniz *

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David Simmons may disagree but I think one of the big differences between WWII and Vietnam is that people were opposed to getting into WWII. As everyone knows it took something like Pearl Harbor to get us involved. But after it got going there was more support and a willingness to put up with rationing, blackouts, etc. that never happened during Vietnam. When it started Vietnam was not unpopular, but then the longer things went on the more unpopular it got. So when we look back it is like reading a book, if it ended the right way who cares how it started? WWII had a good ending, Vietnam had a crappy ending.*

No disagreement with the points made. As John Kennedy said about the Bay of Pigs operation, “Sucess has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” The Pearl Harbor attack was a unifying and defining WWII event. Before that, isolationism was the dominant political stance. In my midwestern town a common pharase was along the lines of, “Well, we pulled their chestnuts out of the fire in the last war and they never paid us the war debts so …” followed by the speakers other pet peeves. Aside to British and French posters: Don’t rain all over me, I know that our contribution to WWI was minor at the most, but I’m quoting the opinion in my part of this country.

In my farming town there were two types of people. Farmers and town folks and there was no little friction between them. Farmers got “B” gas ration cards, townies “A” cards. The former got a lot more gasoline than the latter. So much more that farmers really didn’t feel the restrictions of the rationing all that much. Farming was also an essential occupation so the farmers’ sons could get a draft exemption if they wanted one badly enough and this caused a lot of resentment. The terms “slacker” and “wearing the white feather (cowardice)” were not uncommon. Behind the farmers backs, of course.

The idea that it was “one for all and all for one” is not only wrong, it borders on ludicrous. And I went into the Army in 1943 so I don’t know if things got tenser as the war went on. But I doubt if they got any easier.

**That I believe is why there were more volunteers and yet you hear so much about draft dodging, during the Vietnam War. **

And as for the soldiers in the two wars, the incidence of AWOL, in Europe at least, in WWII was much higher than in Vietnam (or, for that matter, in Korea). During the Battle of the Bulge in Dec. and Jan. 1944-45 riflemen were in such short supply that cooks and bakers and company clerks who hadn’t had any infantry training since Extended Order Drill in Basic Training were put into the line. At the same time, according to historian John Tolandin Battle: Story of the Bulge, the equivalent of a division of infantry was AWOL somewhere in France.

Not that we were all a bunch of gold-bricks, but we were far from the unified heroes as Tom Brokaw would have it. The war was regarded as a nasty job that had to be done so it was. But very few people went out of their way to push themselves forward into the thick of the action. If we had to go we went, for the most part anyway, and that was about the size of it.

By they way, this is all my view of things. I’m sure you will find others who remember WWII differently.