THE WASTE OF WAR: The Second World War

On the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, Ryle Dwyer reflects on the conflict in which his father was killed

ONE of my earliest memories of studying history in primary school is of a Christian Brother condemning Daniel O’Connell for denouncing bloodshed. It was as if O’Connell was guilty of some kind of treason.

That Christian Brother saw something glorious about killing and dying, but, as the son of a soldier killed in Germany during the Second World War, I had a different perspective.

Growing up in Tralee during the 1950s there was no television, so movies were a popular form of nighttime entertainment.

War movies were particularly popular, but I realised very early that when the soldiers would be coming home at the end of the movie, my mother would always be crying silently, so my brother and I learned to go to those movies by ourselves. We also developed a habit of not mentioning the war at home.

As a result we knew very little about our father’s part in that conflict. My mother kept all of his letters in a box in the attic and I read through some of them while growing up. He was already at the front in France for more than a month before any of my mother’s letters reached him. He wrote back to her on the back of her letters.

“I am writing this on your letters so that we can save them for Ryle to know what we were doing and thinking during these unusual days,” he wrote from the front in France in October 1944. “I think some of them will give him something to think about — don’t you?”

Before the war he was a chemical engineer with an oil company, which tried to keep him out of active service by claiming that his work was indispensable. He had joined the army reserve while at university and he balked at the company’s attempt to claim an exemption. But he was obviously having second thoughts at the front.

“I spend about half my time trying to figure out a way to beat the next draft for a certain young man of our acquaintance,” he wrote.

“I could kick myself when I think about some of the ways I had of getting out of this myself — and passed up. Well, when it’s over we can say we did our part and made our sacrifice for what we hold dear.”

I was obviously “the young man” referred to, although I was not yet six months old.

I was confronted with a somewhat similar predicament while at university in Texas during the Vietnam War.

The most eloquent defence of the war that I ever heard was an address by Henry Kissinger at the university one day. Then he took questions from the audience.

One person asked if the US was backing a government that was refusing to hold free elections. I was surprised at the question — sure, that would negate the sacrifices of all those Americans killed in the Second World War, I thought to myself.

Kissinger ignored the question, and answered several other queries before somebody else asked that question again. He tried to ignore it a second time, but the next person that he called on, politely asked to answer the previous question first.

The people asking that question knew that he could not answer it truthfully, he said, because of his position as an adviser to Henry Cabot Lodge, the US Ambassador to South Vietnam.

That really answered the question. The Americans had prevented agreed free election in 1956 because, former President Dwight Eisenhower explained in his memoirs, he never met any informed person who thought that Ho Chi Minh and the communists would win less than 80% of the vote.

In the ensuing war more than a million Vietnamese people were slaughtered and over 59,000 American service personnel died. For what?

I felt that I could not serve in the American forces during that conflict, without betraying my father’s sacrifice. To avoid the draft I went on to graduate school immediately. While at the university I had joined a fraternity, and one of the lads who joined at the same time, graduated a year ahead of me. He was drafted and served in Vietnam.

When he got back I had begun graduate school and we met at the fraternity house, where I introduced him to the younger members. They asked questions about the war and the rumours of atrocities. He candidly admitted seeing American troops shoot civilians — men, women, and children. He deplored one horrific example that he personally witnessed.

He came back to university and we shared a place for a semester. He often talked about the war. He stressed that he never shot a civilian without honestly thinking his own life was in danger, but he also said that if he were ever to satisfy his conscience, he would have to go back on the other side “because we had no fucking business there”.

IN November 1969, he was in the room when the news broke on radio of the My Lai massacre in which more than 530 Vietnamese civilians — mostly women and children — were murdered by American soldiers in March 1968. “That’s where I was,” he said. “We called it Pinkville.”

In the following days when Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley were charged and tried for the massacre, my friend stressed that there was actually a Colonel in charge in a helicopter overhead. It later came out in court that My Lai was indeed called Pinkville, and that Col Oran Henderson had been overhead in a helicopter. Henderson was later tried but acquitted by a military martial of involvement in the massacre.

I often wondered why I never asked my friend any questions about My Lai, or the war. I just listened. Looking back I can only presume that I had conditioned myself growing up, not to ask questions about the war.

I only learned the details of my father’s killing quite by chance some 60 years after his death. One night on the internet, I traced one of the soldiers in my father’s company. I emailed Tom Ingram and got back an amazing reply. He was beside my father when he was shot near Wallmerath, Germany, on January 31, 1945. Tom was actually awarded the Bonze Star for staying with my father under fire until he was beyond help.

I was invited to a reunion in France in 2010 and one of the stops was the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg. Tom Ingram directed me to my father’s grave and I was photographed there with him. He then left me to my thoughts.

As I stood there looking at my father’s headstone against the backdrop of the 5,074 others headstones for people who had lost their lives in what I believe was a necessary and wholly justifiable struggle to stop Hitler and the Nazis, I felt that idealism had been shamelessly betrayed in Vietnam. For me that day there was no perception of glory, just an overpowering sense of the appalling waste of war.