I have posted about it several times, and I hope that this time it is from a slightly different angle.
My interaction with veterans of either World War were limited, and the one who talked to me the most about it was an American WW II veteran maned Robert Waltz.
When I moved into the Vancouver area, I ended up living in his basement for a while, and got to know him slightly over the six or so months I was there.
He read a lot.
He wrote a lot. Not much of his writing was published, but the information I have is that he published a few novels shortly after WW II, and then a long break before a last novel in about 1999.
He was a raconteur, and had lived a full life, with many wives, a lot of children and travel at a time when things were both easier and more difficult than now. The few stories he share about travelling with the Taureg in Morocco in the 1950's made me realise how different things are now, with our ease of getting to Morocco, but at the same time going between counties was much easier then, and for the most part instead of a passport, he used his military ID.
I never figured out a chronology for his life. I know he grew up somewhere in the states, and volunteered for the army, getting into a armoured unit and becoming a tank driver.
The first dichotomy in talking to him was the complete lack of anger or malice towards the German people as soon as the peace was declared, and the attitude of achievement of running over German soldiers with the tank. He even made sure that any troops who surrendered to him were taken to a place where their surrender was treated according to conventions rather than turning them over to the locals who were shooting them out of hand.
I have no idea when he went back to the states after his time in Europe, but he said he left a country where there was very little racism, and went back to a country he no longer had a connection with, because of the amount of racism he encountered.
I have a very hard time believing that statement from him, on the one hand, but on the other I think that he changed vastly in his time away, and the things he accepted as part of the culture when he had no foreign experience and the culture shock he felt upon return was strong.
He left the United Sates, and never returned.
He spent more time travelling, eventually ending up in Canada with a French wife and the two children he had with her.
Although he seemed blind to what we call race or colour, he was not blind about background and culture. He seemed to revel in pointing out cultural differences, not favouring one culture over another, just highlighting the differences.
I do wonder what he would have thought of the current divisive mess that is US politics. Not to talk about what should be changed, but to talk about the societal pressures that pushed them into the current fight they are in.
