Memorial Day reflections on war

Memorial Day once again brings to mind the folly of war to settle political disputes. This letter writer recalls several schoolteachers who were in the first World War. They spoke out about this senseless way to settle political differences and remarked another such war could be even more disastrous with advanced technologies to come.

The end of that war produced a politically and economically rudderless Germany which put Hitler, a political rabble rouser, in command. He quickly put Germany to work making advanced war goods and developing hundreds of miles of wide-lane highways to quickly transport the goods of war when or if it came.

German science was interested in how to split the atom for peacetime energy. A proponent of this theory was Einstein. Einstein moved to America with his colleagues in turn. Similarly, in Italy, Enrico Fermi who did not trust Mussolini and he helped fill in the missing links.

When American forces finally located a German research lab, they found out the Germans had already made a quantity of uranium, a key element of the atomic bomb. They gathered it up and brought it to America and added it to what we had. That uranium added to what we had served to bomb Japan into submission.

This last war was a question popper. American surnames are heavily Germanic, second to those of English origin. The Germans became aware of this fact and were wondering who was fighting whom.

Last but not least, an early America had to decide on an official national language. Would it be German or English? English won out by a slim vote raising the ultimate question. Would Hitler have declared war on a German-speaking America if it had been so?

Walter Santi

Bloomingdale