Slusher: Luck, courage and 'a sense of the time': Another early-June anniversary to commemorate

We talk today of wars gone by. Yesterday's news. These are days to remember debts to the past.

We have just left behind the cemeteries of Memorial Day. As our editorial elsewhere today recalls, we commemorate today the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which was so audacious in its uncertainty and its dread consequences, which has become the familiar idiom for the launch of any do-or-die endeavor.

And here, I must add another decisive hour from the Second Great War to commemorate, another somber reason to pause during the first week of June.

The Battle of Midway. June 4 through June 7, 1942.

It, too, was a turning point for freedom. Of it, too, could be said all the things we say of Omaha Beach. This carnage in air and sea, too, held the fate of a free nation in its precarious balance. It, too, is a story of technology, intelligence, planning, deception and plain luck. It can be seen as the Japanese D-Day repelled. The Japanese intended to finish off the entire United States Pacific Fleet and gain a foothold from which to move on toward conquering the North American continent. They did not.

Whatever it is called, Midway ought not be forgotten. Nor relegated to a lesser place in history.

I often think of the battle at this time of year as the images and memories of D-Day appropriately dominate our reflections. I am taken back to the raw, inspiring, spellbinding, reverential, heartbreaking description of the battle in Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance." If you've read the account, you did not forget it. If you haven't, you should, even if you choose only those few-score pages devoted to Midway in Wouk's two-volume, 1,900-page World War II epic.

I'm not historian enough to vouch for its accuracy. I am human enough to vouch for its wondrous spirit.

Wouk, you may know, has just died. He passed away May 17, at the age of 103. This, I'm sure, is another reason I'm drawn so earnestly to reflections on Midway this year. "The Winds of War"/"War and Remembrance" rank in the top ten of the most meaningful and moving books I have read. I don't want them to be forgotten, and I don't want the lessons of Midway and of war I took from them to be overlooked.

Those lessons include that war is a setting for a peculiar kind of heroism, and that war is awful. They include that this bent-toward-justice arc of history we hear so much about so often tilts on dumb luck, but with the help of courage.

Of one phase of the Midway battle, Wouk writes, "It was a perfect coordinated attack. It was timed almost to the second. It was a freak accident." At another point, quoted on a Midway-focused website, he eulogizes "What was not luck, but the soul of the United States of America in action, was the willingness of the torpedo plane squadrons to go in against hopeless odds."

And later in the book, he offers a crucial insight that applies, yes, to Normandy, and to Midway, and to Gettysburg, and to the Battle of New Orleans, and to Trenton, and to Lexington and Concord, and to a thousand other battles, recent as well as long past, that have enabled our freedom. "The very hardest thing to imagine, in looking back on this old war," he writes, "is that it could have gone other than it did. Yet, the overwhelming reality during the war - which one must try to grasp, to get a sense of the time - is that nobody knew how it would go."

These memories of wars gone by are not meant just to give us a "sense of the time." They give us also a sense of our own time. We can forget such a truth when reading a history because we know how it "ends." Perhaps we forget it when reading even history's first draft, the daily newspaper, which devotes far more time and space reporting on events and issues as they develop than on how they end. Wherever your focus lands amid all this talk of early-June heroism, resolve and dusty decisive battles, keep this thought in mind. It applies to all the controversies that shape our lives.

Nobody knows how they will go. We struggle without any assurances for what we value. Blessings and thanks to all those who so value freedom.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is a deputy managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.