When our leaders talk about Remembrance Day, they talk about the sacrifices of those who fought in wars to defend our freedoms and our way of life.
Those sacrifices were real.
Many families, including my own and my wife’s, had fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, or cousins who served. Some of them made the ultimate sacrifice.
That was the case for my wife’s uncle, Mitchell Plaine, a U.S. marine corps photographer and filmmaker who died on the island of Okinawa, in 1945, days before the end of Word War II.
Mitch was married and had attended Cornell University when he joined the marines. Had he lived, he might have pursued a successful post-war career in a new and upcoming industry: television.
Years earlier, in the mid-1930s, Mitch’s younger brother Hy had talked him out of volunteering for the Spanish Civil War. Hy wanted to spare their immigrant parents the agony of losing a son on a far-distant battlefield.
Hy was prescient.
The Republicans fighting to defend democracy in Spain had lots of charisma. They attracted the support of celebrities such as Ernest Hemingway and spawned some stirring and romantic songs that endure to this day.
But Spain became a giant graveyard for the thousands, including thousands of international volunteers, who fought to defend the Republic against a well-financed and organized military uprising led by General Francisco Franco.
At the time, the western democracies were loath to get themselves involved in Spain’s internal conflict. But Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had no such compunctions. Spain became a testing ground for the kind of mechanized high-tech warfare the two totalitarian states were to soon unleash on the world.
When that global conflict came, staying home and staying safe were no longer options.
Mitch, Hy and their two younger brothers, Lou and Joe, all saw active duty in World War II. Three came home. One did not.
Training the air crews of many countries
My own father, Norman Nerenberg, and most of his friends served in World War II. Norman was underage when the war started, but the minute he reached the minimum age he signed up for the young and fast-growing Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).
It was a heady time. Canada had mobilized its human and material resources like never before.
A young man, still in his teens, who had barely finished Montreal’s Baron Byng High School (later made famous by Mordecai Richler), could almost overnight find himself an RCAF officer.
The air force saw so much potential in the young volunteer they assigned him to be an instructor, tasked with training other new volunteers and recruits.
Training was a key part of Canada’s war effort. This country was the prime location for the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, perhaps the largest aviation training program in history. It was a decisive factor in winning the war.
More than 130,000 air personnel were trained in Canada. They came not only from Britain and other Commonwealth countries, but also from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, the United States, and a number of other countries.
Norman Nerenberg took on his new role as a trainer dutifully and cheerfully, but chafed at being held back home in Canada. He did not seem to realize he had won the military lottery. He could usefully serve without risking his life.
The RCAF eventually gave my father his wish and shipped him off to Britain. If all had gone according to plan, he would have seen action in the dangerous European theatre of war.
But fate intervened, in the form of illness. Shortly after he landed on British shores, Norman found himself in a military hospital in Scotland, where the staff treated him for a stomach ulcer.
The war ended before my father could see action, but he did experience the VE Day celebrations in London, in May of 1945.
Not all wars are fought for enlightened reasons
World War II was the good war. The rhetoric about fighting for democracy, human rights and freedom against totalitarianism is true when it describes that conflict.
That rhetoric is not so accurate when applied to the earlier conflict that gave us Remembrance Day, the Great War, as it was called at the time, or World War I as we now call it.
We celebrate Remembrance Day on November 11 because the armistice that ended World War I was signed on that date, near Paris, France, at 11 a.m., local time.
The Great War was a conflict wrought by self-interested, competing empires. Humanistic ideals had little to do with it.
The conflict started in July of 1914, shortly after Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, shot and killed the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.
Princip and his co-conspirators were fighting for an independent country in the southern Slav portion the sprawling Austrian Empire. They called it Yugoslavia. Ironically, the man they killed was an advocate for decentralizing the empire.
Archduke Ferdinand wanted to grant a considerable measure of self-government to the Austrian empire’s many nationalities, within a loose federation.
The assassination did not help Princip’s cause, but it did quickly lead to what would become the most brutal and sanguine war in human history up to that time.
The Austrians believed a then-independent Serbia had plotted the killing of their Archduke, and quickly declared war on Serbia.
The Serbs’ main ally and protector was the giant Russian Empire, and, to make sure the Russians did not rush to Serbia’s aid, Austria’s main ally, Germany, declared war on Russia.
That brought in the French, who had a close alliance with Russia, which in turn, brought in the British, the closest allies of the French.
In due course, the Ottoman Empire, centred in Turkey, got dragged into the war on the Austrian and German side, while the Italians and Japanese joined the French-British-Russian side.
Finally, in 1917, the U.S. jumped in on the British-French-Russian side. The Americans wanted to stay neutral, but were irked at Germany’s attacks on merchant ships carrying U.S. citizens and cargo. The U.S. also suspected the Germans were trying to secretly draw their southern neighbour, Mexico, into an alliance.
Of course, the colonies and dominions of the British Empire, including Canada, had been engaged in the war from the outset.
We in Canada contributed a contingent of troops far in excess, proportionately, of our small population, which was less than 8 million in 1914. Nearly 67,000 Canadians died in that war and another 172,000 were wounded, many in life-altering ways.
World War I was a ghastly and bloody affair.
Populations on all sides had been whipped into patriotic frenzies by calculated and dishonest propaganda campaigns, designed to dehumanize and demonize the enemies.
The world’s leaders made a call to glory in battle, but for the troops in the muddy trenches there was nothing glorious or uplifting about their experience.
To look back more than a century and claim, today, that one side in World War I represented the light of democracy and freedom while the other incarnated the darkness of tyranny is not accurate.
In fact, the leaders of the era did not invoke any high ideals. Their rhetoric, on both sides, focused on God and Empire and country.
Nationalism and the pursuit of power and domination were the motivating ideologies of the war, not the pursuit of social justice and democracy. At the time, nobody pretended otherwise.
Peace that never seems to last
Scholars estimate the total number of World War I casualties at 41 million – 21 million injured and 20 million dead.
Many of the dead, including many Canadians, were never found. Others were never identified. That is why Remembrance Day ceremonies take place at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
World War I lasted for more than four years, and was followed by one of the worst pandemics of the modern era, the so-called Spanish Flu.
In the peacemaking process that followed the war, at the palace of Versailles, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson introduced the novel concept of self-determination as the basis for breaking up the Austrian and Ottoman empires into many new countries which had distinct national identities.
Gavrilo Princip’s dream of a nation for the southern Slavs came to life. That country, Yugoslavia, lasted for about seven decades. Then it broke up into a series of smaller states, in a process that was not always peaceful.
Other European countries for which Versailles acted as midwife, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are still around. Czechoslovakia, yet another Versailles creation, lasted for a long time, until 1992, when its two parts split, as amicably as possible, in a “velvet divorce”.
Wilson, who had introduced racial segregation into the U.S. civil service, did not extend the notion of self-determination beyond the white world. There was to be no self-determination for black and brown people.
Versailles handed the German colonies in sub-Saharan Africa to the British, the French or the South African minority white government.
It did the same for the vast Ottoman territories in the Middle East and North Africa. The British and French moved in and took full control.
The Great War weakened the Czarist regime in Russia and created the conditions for a successful Revolution in 1917.
The war had a similar effect in Turkey, where Kemal Atatürk and his secularists and modernist Young Turks replaced the once powerful monarchy. Before that transformation happened, however, in a last paroxysm of the old regime, there was a vicious massacre of the Armenian minority in Turkey.
The estimated death toll wrought by the Armenian massacre ranges from 600,000 to 1.5 million. At the time, Polish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin observed this horrific event and coined a new word to describe it: genocide.
In subsequent years that word has sadly become all-too-useful.
The victors in World War I decided to impose a harsh economic punishment on the vanquished, in the form of costly reparations payments. Those payments helped contribute to economic instability in Germany, which led to political turmoil, which led to the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933.
That’s one theory, at any rate.
Others say the biggest mistake the victors made at the end of World War I was in failing to put in place an occupying military force in Germany, to make sure the German people and political leaders understood they had truly lost the war.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is a fact that what folks then called the war-to-end-all-wars ushered in an even bigger and more brutal and costlier war a bit more than two decades later.
World War II, in turn, did not end all wars either.
Since the end of World War II war in 1945, we have had multiple wars of national liberation in developing countries, a number of civil wars, and some inter-state conflicts, notably in the Middle East, and, now, of course, in Ukraine.
In the post-1945 period we have also lived, daily, with the threat of planetary annihilation in the form of nuclear war.
Peace remains as elusive as ever.
Perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay today to those who served, sacrificed, and died in war is to dedicate ourselves to finding other means than warfare to achieve our goals and settle our disagreements.
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