gold

Most days it doesn't happen, but not many things are nicer early mornings than to lift the laptop lid, tap the little envelope that symbolizes email, and discover a note from an old friend. Just so in this Good Friday predawn darkness, a note, brightening my day hearing from, even though it brings news about aging including his knee surgery today - - for which prayer and blessing.

Over our Time, he and I have much different in life, but share much more in common of experiences in life and values about life, and to still be in touch after more than half a century is as good as life can be. Life Is Good. Something about make new friends, keep the old; one is silver, the other gold.

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Today is Good Friday the seventh of April, ano domini twenty twenty-three. Out on the Cove School playground for recess a morning in, say, nineteen forty-three, who'd have thought. In fact, my thoughts that morning more likely would have been on warplanes, every boy memorized and knew every American and enemy plane, and most boys had favorites, mine being our P-38 Lockheed Lightning with the double fuselage,

the Jap Zero of Pearl Harbor infamy,

and the streamlined looking German Stuka with fenders covering the landing gear,

their dive-bomber with a siren that screamed as the plane dove, to terrify and panic everyone on the ground below.

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Which brings to mind the project, my Lent 2023 discipline undertaking to read a stack of books, eight and more, about our Allied carpet bombing campaign against German population centers. Stirred by a "This Day in History" article about our February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, my project started with the earlier firebombing of Hamburg in July 1943. From all sides, German, British, American, my books ranged from detailed technical descriptions of bombs and plane loads, routes and weather and schedule delays, bomb shelters, home conditions, alerting systems, war plans, strategic and political decisions, tactical approaches, attitudes, crew makeups, treatment of individuals and populations as a whole, biographical details about many families and individuals and their experiences before, during, and after, interviews with dozens of Germans of all possible views, persuasions and experiences, a personal autobiography of a Hamburg boy whose father was a Wehrmacht officer and hero, who was lost and presumed dead, whose mother later had an affair with, fell in love with, and married a British soldier in the occupying forces and emigrated with the family to Wales, although the boy's father later showed up from having been a POW of the Russians. The autobiography of another boy, quite brilliant and well spoken, born and raised German in Russia and Ukraine, whose family returned to Germany during the Third Reich, later escaped the Russian occupation, studied medicine, and emigrated to America to practice as a physician. Eight or nine books, and parts of another, a 500 page doctoral dissertation exploring and documenting antiSemitism, a long history of prejudice against Jews.

Why did I do this, what was my objective? Better to understand history and not just the cultural hysteria on both sides, ours and theirs, that developed immediately and continues; to decide for myself; to resolve personal, bitterly deep hatreds developed in our own wartime propaganda as I grew up during World War Two as an American watching the Third Reich in Germany.

So, I'm satisfied with my motives, the thoroughness and integrity of my reading selections, my feelings that surfaced during the readings, my views that formed and reformed.

I'm done with it now. I'm informed and decided, and I'm as much at peace with my German heritage as I can ever be. I'll synopsize my conclusions, which are totally my own and not inviting further consideration.

Instead of humane treatment with views toward longtime, permanent peace, after World War One the Allies laid punishing, crippling, humiliating reparation and recovery burdens on Germany. These were intensified by the worldwide financial collapse and depression in 1929. In reaction, populist political extremism took hold in Germany and Hitler's national socialist movement came to power and instituted economic reforms that worked, but along with a murderous social program and determination to warring vengeance against Germany's enemies. There was vicious enforcement of Hitler's programs, but they were totally and entirely encouraged and supported by the German people as long as Germany was in its new "driver's seat" and winning.

The Nazi program was enthusiastically supported by the German people, who developed into a nation of arrogant, entitled monsters - - brutalizing all the rest of Europe and also mercilessly tormenting its own minorities and political dissenters.

There came a Time, internally from 1933, and beyond Germany's borders from 1939, that Germany, nation and people, were so complicit in unspeakable evil, that every exercise of force to bring Germany down to total destruction was called for, necessary, warranted, justified. What the Germans brought down upon themselves involved horrendous pain, suffering, agony, including for millions of German children and German innocents. Late 19th and early 20th century history laid all the groundwork and all sides have guilt, and as we read about their on ground experiences we have great empathy with German innocents, but vehement criticism of Allied determination, means and methods, is misplaced. There are any number of apt proverbs including what goes round comes round, you get what's coming to you, karma, you start it we stop it.

It is incontestable that if Germany had won World War Two, we and all Europe would be living under racist dictatorship of the Nazi type. There would be no Jews on earth, and political and social dissent would be put down brutally. Every German of the Third Reich would have continued in their full support of the regime and its programs. The evil was absolute, and they only became sorry when it all fell apart. Moral criticism of Allied offensive destruction of Germany is misplaced, uninformed, and ignorant.

On Good Friday, that's where I am. Time to move on.

image: sleeping little ones; by midmorning they will all be facing the sun