Today, images of dead and maimed children amidst the ruined streets of Gaza shock us regularly. From Sarajevo to Iraq to Syria to Ukraine and now Gaza and Lebanon, we have all seen how shells, rockets and bombs can destroy. Older images from World War II show similar destruction in German cities like Berlin, British cities like Coventry, and Japanese cities like Tokyo which were devastated by fire-bombings which killed many hundreds of thousands more people than the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Do we really understand the significance of this devastation? Or are we seduced by our own national narratives and social-military myths? Remembrance Day is the ideal time to recall the worldwide toll – the 100 million dead human beings – who perished in the mass conflicts of the 20th century. Separately, on Anzac Day we remember those 100,000 Australians who fought, served and died. Cultural memory matters, but often it's only now, generations later, when it emerges.
My father served in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). But after the war, he did not talk about the Middle East, Greece, Africa or the Pacific and the mates he lost, with one exception: on occasion he would compare his noisy children to the Stukas' scream as they dive-bombed the Sixth Division in Greece. My German friend Gunther, a former distinguished professor of English, did not talk about the war either.
That is, until a few years ago when he told me his story. Gunther was born in 1939, the.
