Running From Hitler

ITS HARD TO BELIEVE that the World War Two generation is almost gone. Few are still alive who remember the war at all; even fewer who participated in it. The "Greatest Generation" was born around 1920, within a few years before or after. My mother was a 21 year old single nurse when Pearl Harbor "went down", and she wanted to enlist and presumably kick Japanese butt. but her father, brothers, and boyfriend, who later became my father, talked her out of it. America needs nurses on the home front, they told her. August 28 would have been her ninety seventh birthday. She died three and a half years ago, a good and long life. My father, born in 1918, got a law degree in 1940, became a junior partner in his father's law firm, and responded to Pearl harbor by trying to avoid the war by joining the FBI. He ended up in the navy, as an officer. He learned how to fly, and was stationed at the big American naval base hard against the Panama Canal. One day, flying a routine air patrol, my dad's plane was hit by a surface to air gun on a German U Boat, and he returned the damaged plane to base, safely. Safety, but not glory. It was his job to report the submarine and its location, not to engage in combat with it and sink it and captured its entire crew, although that, one must confess, would have been a truly extraordinary and heroic feat. My father, personally attacked by representatives of Hitler, retreated. Ran. Thus a member of my family engaged in a very small battle with the enemy during the second world war, lost, and retreated. It is, admittedly, tempting to twist the story a wee bit, and end up with a sunken submarine and a captured crew. We've been hearing a lot about "fake news" recently. Fake history is always with us. Not only that, but in a way we often live at least partially in a fake reality in a fake here and now present.