Dad liberated the dress sword from a German officer in the final days of the war. The last time I saw it, long and imposing in its black-and-silver scabbard capped by a swastika and an eagle, a few specks of rust were just beginning to invade its sheen. The flag, its stars and stripes folded snugly in a compact triangle, was presented to my four siblings and me by the army honor guard at Dad’s funeral in 1971.
Despondent after my mother’s death six months earlier, Dad had skirted doctor’s orders, played tennis and keeled over on the court. The Veterans Administration ruled that his death was due to a chest injury in April 1945. An antitank round had blown him off the armored vehicle his squad was riding into the Battle of Leipzig. Until Dad briefed his two oldest kids on the family finances after Mom died, I didn’t know that for most of the time I was growing up the wartime damage to his heart had provided a 30 percent disability pension from Uncle Sam. It was a princely $90 a month by 1971.
The sword and flag are gone, but I have his dog tags, campaign ribbon, Bronze Star and citation “for heroic achievement … during an armored infantry attack through murderous enemy panzerfaust and machine gun fire.” There is no Purple Heart in the collection-ironic, since the wound ultimately killed him-because Dad hadn’t bothered to ask for one.
The citation, now crumpled and yellowing, was banged out on a dirty typewriter in a field headquarters two days after the war in Europe ended. It describes how, despite injury, Dad handled prisoners, reorganized the shattered squad that had been cut off behind German lines and got the group out through snipercovered streets. “Under heavy fire,” it reads, “his courage, leadership and devotion to duty, at the risk of his life, reflect the highest credit upon Staff Sergeant Betts and the armed forces of the United States.”
Writing from Leipzig, Dad circumvented censorship to let his parents know where he was by drawing a picture of the obelisk they would remember from a prewar trip to the city. Then the division continued eastward. When the lead elements of Dad’s battalion entered Torgau they saw troops on the opposite bank of the Elbe. They exchanged a few shots until both sides realized they had met Allies instead of Germans. I remember Dad recalling the euphoria of the meeting with the Russians: lots of hugging, dancing, singing, drinking.
World War II was over, but the cold war was coming. Dad was one of the first Americans to run into the Iron Curtain. After he was released from the hospital, he was assigned light duty as a chaplain’s aide. Realizing they were near Wittenberg, the chaplain wanted to visit Mar-tin Luther’s church. (Little did he know that Dad, in a move shocking to some of the staunch Protestants in his family, was about to marry a Catholic.) They piled into a jeep and took off, only to be stopped at a checkpoint by two submachine-gun-toting teenage Soviet soldiers who couldn’t be budged by any of the Americans’ pleading.
The war was not a big topic in my father’s later life, nor would his humble style have suggested to anyone that he was a minor hero. But I was always aware that this history professor’s small role in the liberation of Europe made him a Part of History, and for me that made history real. The intensity of personal experience that marks combat veterans of any war was uniquely connected to world-shaping events for veterans of the world’s biggest war. The reasons I made the study of war and peace my profession were mainly Vietnam, nuclear terror and the crises of my own lifetime. But sensing that connection between the personal and the epochal in my father’s life must have had something to do with it.
His flag and sword are gone. And so perhaps will the rapt attention to World War II, briefly widened by the anniversary celebrations of the past few years, soon be gone. Generational arithmetic steadily makes that war less a matter of personal participation in History in the minds of living citizens and more a matter of just plain history.
Even the cold war is fading into history, though middle-aged colleagues and I still occasionally slip and refer to the Soviet Union in the present tense. This year, half my students didn’t know what the My Lai massacre was. When my youngest son was born on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I joked that no one would have trouble remembering his birthday. Then it dawned on me that for his generation, Dec. 7,1941, will mean nothing special. It will be as remote to them as the sinking of the Maine is to me.
But maybe not. Students may know little about My Lai, but they all know about the Holocaust. Some of them are surprised to hear that at least 50 million people died in World War II, but most know that it shaped the world more than anything else in this century. Maybe the Normandy celebrations and other anniversaries, or stories heard at grandparents’ knees, have transmitted the sense of awe to one more generation.
On what would have been his 77th birthday, I read Dad’s citation to my 5-year-old. She listened respectfully but blankly. After all, to her my Dad is only an old black-and-white photograph. And she also had to ask me, “Daddy, what’s a war?” When she’s older, maybe she’ll understand why I read it to her, and why my voice cracked. That’s what souvenirs are for. I think I’ll take just one more look for the sword and the flag.
