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We took a trip recently to New Orleans where we made a stop at the World War Two museum which is located there. The museum is housed in several modern buildings and has a large collection of world war two memorabilia including tanks, planes, and other military vehicles that were used extensively during the war. The museum was the brainchild of several world war two veterans of that area of the country but it never really got underway until the help of Tom Hanks and producer Steven Spielberg and their film “Saving Private Ryan� gave it the needed boost to achieve the status that it has today.

The one thing that impressed us most was the film “Beyond all Boundaries� that is shown at the museum. It is narrirated by Tom Hanks and is an overview of the totality that World War Two really was. As the film so accurately shows, the second world war went beyond all existing boundaries that mankind had ever experienced before. At the start of the film, it is pointed out that sixty five million people died as a direct result of the effects of the war, a total that dwarfs what had ever been lost before. Perhaps the most poignant deaths occurred in Europe when around thirteen million Jews and gypsies and others that Adolf Hitler found to be inferior were put to death simply because they were who they were.

The sins of the fathers were visited on their sons and their daughters as so many died quiet, desperate deaths as they were told that they were being given a chance to clean up by going into a communal shower that was really a facility for death. The pictures that came out of the concentration camps at the end of the war were a horror that so many still deny today. The pastor of my church in southern Illinois had a father who was among the troops to liberate the first concentration camp found toward the end of the war. A good friend of mine has a now deceased relative who was a doctor who was among the first to go into Auschwitz at the close of the war. The man did not speak of his experiences until almost the end of his life when he finally revealed to his family what he had done and what he had seen.

To say that the allies liberated these camps was a possible misuse of a term. When the allied troops got to these camps, they were too late to help so many who were already staring at the angel of death and whose hollow eyes merely gazed out giving evidence of what had gone on there over the time that the battles had been raging. If there was ever a need for meaning to a war, what these soldiers saw at the close of it gave a meaning that is so graphic and poignant that it should never be forgotten. My pastor’s father took pictures of his own as he went through the camp and many years later when the first of the holocaust deniers came forward with their claims that there had been no such thing, this man brought forth the photographs to help put their claims to rest.

The story is well known how, when general Eisenhower took a tour of the camps, he ordered that as many allied soldiers as possible be given a tour because he knew that the horror was so great that it would be easy for later generations to claim that it had never occurred at all. It had stretched the boundaries of human evil so much that it was almost beyond belief.

The generation that fought in this great war, if you can call any war great, are leaving us at record numbers today as the last of them stare up at us through now ancient eyes as they wish us well in our trek through the rest of the twenty first century. The last one of them will not die for many years because their numbers were so great that the law of averages will hold them with us for a very, very, very long time. But their influence has already faded as can be seen in our current congress who has no members from the war left in it at all. Now we are populated with a congress that has veterans mainly coming out of a volunteer force that features no draftees at all. There are those who despise the draftee but they were citizen soldiers who waited for their country’s call before they went to take up arms against its real and potential foes. Now we have the professional, better paid soldier who is so often in the service because they love that sort of thing.

Anyone who saw what those who went through Hitler’s concentration camps witnessed could never be called a romantic, lover of war. They were, as the simple soldiers who fought the seemingly never ending conflict that raged across Europe and the Pacific, simply those who were cast into a situation that was not of their own making but was theirs to struggle with after all. One of the Pacific theater correspondents stated that death had become such a commonplace thing toward the end of the war that those who still lived had almost come to hate the dead, perhaps because they no longer had a war to face.

Hitler was defeated and dead in Europe by the end of April, 1945 but the war raged on in the Pacific and those there found no real comfort in the fact that a part of it had come to a close. They had seen the kamikaze attacks and had heard the Japanese emperor state that his soldiers were to fight on to the death. As the war dragged on, those common soldiers who were fighting it realized that they could only win this war if the last fighting Japanese had been finally been given their reward. They saw the invasion of the Japanese mainland coming and their leaders had ordered a quarter of a million body bags in preparation for the event.

We once talked to an old soldier, a veteran of this period of time, at our desk a number of years ago. He broke down and cried as he described the news that the bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities and that the end of the war had come because he was sure that he would have perished in the invasion of the main Japanese island. As a counter to those who hate the bomb, this man and an army of others just like him, owed their life to the bomb. It was one of the many miracles of the war that the Germans did not get it first

Words, although there have been enough of them written, can not really describe what went on during World War Two and the atrocities that were done by both sides during the conflict. For those who think that the allies were blameless in this regard they only need to look at the firebombing of the defenseless and militarily unimportant city of Dresden to see the folly of those thoughts. Sixty five million people died during the course of the second world war and many of them were innocent and helpless non combatants thrust into a situation that they had no control over by a group of mad men who wanted to control the world and create a master race who would perpetuate it forever. They called it the thousand year reich! They said that Hitler had a large globe with his ambitions written all over it that was found in the ruins of his headquarters at the close of the war. And it is sad to have to say that the nation that might come closest to duplicating what this madman tried to accomplish might be the United States of America today. There are elements who have been in power and who still seek it today who have already made the statement that this nation is an empire. And that is indeed a very frightening thought!

Tomorrow we will commemorate the day that the First World War ended and demonstrate a thank you to all veterans for all that they have done. It is the last time that we will do so before we begin the centennial of the war to end all wars whose end gave the date its place on our calendar. A soldier cannot really tell you what they went through in war but the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman probably said it best when he noted simply that “War is Hell.� When we think of war in particular and the title to the film “Beyond all boundaries� we think that it might refer to the ever expanding boundaries of Hell itself. Because, in the final analysis, that it what war is. Just ask a combat vet! They may not say much but their deeds far exceed anything that anyone can speak.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe