World War II was the war of my parents\u2019 generation. They remembered where they were when they first learned of Pearl Harbor the way I remember where I was when I got the first report of the Twin Towers attack on 9\/11. That massive conflict involved so many moving parts, and so many people, that we\u2019ll never know all the details.
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Fortunately, thanks to dedicated historians such as James Holland and Al Murray, some of those details constantly come to light even today.
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Flying home from teaching a MAG-40 class at the excellent Nebraska Shooters<\/a> range near Lincoln and not far from Omaha, I read the book \u201cVictory \u201945: the End of the War in Eight Surrenders,\u201d<\/a> in which co-authors Holland and Murray taught me some things I didn\u2019t know even though I had been reading about the conflict my whole life. For instance, though Franklin Delano Roosevelt had seen the war coming on both fronts, he seems to have concentrated on Europe more as he built his \u201carsenal of democracy\u201d beginning in the 1930s, but appears to have neglected the Pacific element. American interests in the Philippines were woefully inadequate. The White House had to have known that Corregidor was doomed, leading to its fall and the Bataan Death March. General MacArthur can be forgiven for abandoning the place \u2013 FDR apparently ordered him to do so \u2013 but he left General Wainwright in charge along with his hopelessly small and undersupplied contingent of troops. At the end of the war, the survivors of the brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese Empire were a sorry sight, Wainwright himself down from 170 pounds to a skeletal 125. When he finally met MacArthur again after the war was won, we are left surprised that he greeted his commanding officer collegially instead of kicking him in the crotch.
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