Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. Last week I lived through World War II again. When the Ken Burns series, “The War,” appeared on television last fall, I was in Canada.
My friend and I searched on the local TV, but it didn’t appear. So when I stumbled upon it one night last week, I cleared the decks and sat down to watch it for most of three evenings. This, after all, was my life.
The history of World War II was my history, too. As I watched, the clock moved mercilessly back, wrenching my stomach, icing my spine. Sometimes, truly, I had to close my eyes.
It was hard for me to acknowledge — seeing the slaughter on D-Day, the deadly climb on Okinawa — that all this had happened in my lifetime. It was hard to appreciate what it must be like, for the men who lived through it, to have such horrors still lodged in their minds. The six episodes I saw dwelt on the invasion of Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, the landings on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the inhuman events in Santo Tomas and the Nazi death camps.
Perhaps I knew, more than 60 years ago, that all these nightmares were taking place, but somehow the full truths escaped me. At home we saw sanitized newsreels, the front pages showed maps not battle scenes, and the music was thick with patriotic sentiment and romantic pathos. Could I have known how dreadful D-Day was — so dreadful that my dear boyfriend of the time still has no words to describe it? Even today, when my brothe.
