The Second World War came to its horrific end 75 years ago. The generation that fought it is nearly gone; the June 2020 issue of National Geographic, devoted largely to “The Last Voices of World War II,” reports that only 2.5% of the Americans who served in the war remained alive by 2019. And their ranks are dwindling fast.
This Saturday marks the anniversary of the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion, a critical step toward ending the conflict. A fitting commemoration of that bloody, brutal day would be to review the prayer that President Franklin Roosevelt delivered on national radio as the landings were still underway and their success was uncertain. The prayer’s text and a 6.5-minute recording of Roosevelt delivering it are available at www.fdrlibrary.org/d-day.
If ever a war was justified, World War II was. Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich had imposed a genocidal racial tyranny on Europe, studded the continent with industrially efficient death camps, and, enthralled by a Social-Darwinist cult of war, unleashed systematic mechanized violence that killed many millions, military and civilian. Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan were equally evil. (So was Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, but that was an issue for another day.)
And yet many who were compelled to fight under the banners of Nazism, fascism and Japanese imperialism were themselves victims of their respective regimes. Perhaps especially for those familiar with Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan and their people, it is painfully obvious that President Roosevelt’s moving prayer for Allied victory was inescapably also a prayer for the injury and death of others.
Mark Twain’s powerful “War Prayer,” which he considered so potentially inflammatory that he delayed its publication until after his death, makes this terrible point poignantly clear and theologically challenging. It’s online at warprayer.org.
“We were sent to die for the emperor and imperial nation,” Japanese veteran Nobuo Nishizaki told National Geographic, “and everyone acted like we believed in it. But when the soldiers were dying, the young ones called out to their mothers and older ones called out their children’s names. I never heard anyone calling the emperor and nation.”
When President Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address in 1865, he was in the midst of another justifiable war. But he saw that war as emblematic of terrible human evil and human failure not confined solely to the enemy. Speaking of both Union and Confederacy, he said:
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Gen. George S. Patton (a native of my southern California hometown) sometimes seemed to relish war, and he was brilliant at it. But he also knew its tragic cost at first hand. One of his last recorded comments came just minutes before the mysterious Dec. 8, 1945, road accident in Germany that ultimately killed him. Driving past the wrecked and abandoned cars along the roadside, he remarked, “How awful war is. Think of the waste.”
Do you need proof of the fall? War is enough.
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs interpreterfoundation.org, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.