I can only imagine.
Really, my forefathers came to America in the 1880's-turn of the Century, from Germany, Russia, Poland, Austria, Hungary... they would have been on both sides of the Eastern front war in terms of where they stood, and if there were ever any of my distant family that stayed behind in those countries...
What ever happened to them in that time?
What of their descendents?
And at home, immigrants from those lands were treated badly in the US, especially German/Austrian/Hungarian ones during WWI, and Russians because of the communist thing and the first Red Scare...
What they must have faced... I can only wonder...
And then the Second World War affected my family branch directly, like very likely all or nearly all of your families, I have a family member that served, 9th Artillery, US Army.
Think about that, just for a moment- ALL OU FAMILIES. And that's no stretch, in some capacity, fighting or trying to survive or avoiding perscution or persecuting or working in factories for supplies, nearly everyone was affected...
How?
In America, we were in WWI for not too long, a year, give or take a few months... played a decent part in that time, I suppose, but certainly we don't have the stories some of you Englishmen and others abroad must have in your families...
What did your fathers, grandtathers, great-grandfathers say it was like? What did they experience?
And that Second World War... we ALL have stories handed down to us from that...
I will never foret this one told to me by my grandfather, of Remagen, and the bridge collapsing under fire, and how the troops had to move across, keep going, and all the way, he said, looking all around, for any sign of pot shots...
Imagine that, walking in an open area like that, a whole mass of men, and all of them struck worrying if death was about to be rained down on them by a surprise they could not stop.
It still affects us, these things... even those of us like me, two generations removed from WWII and three from WWI.
The world we live in is STILL so shaped by what happened a CENTURY, now, ago.
We STILL have the mess in the Middle East that's always been, but really exploded during the World Wars, or, maybe more precisely, because of them... certainly without the Jewish troops that served on both sides feelings would have been different, Jewish guerrilaa fighters streaming into Palestine during the turmoil, the whole area just being left to the dogs, and then the Holocaust destroying so much... and yet...
Well, 6 MILLION people like me were murdered, terribly, as were other targets, the Yiddish language and culture nearly wiped out... that's a rich culture I can't imagine not being imbued in me, even just a bit, and it was nearly DESTROYED, completely.
But then, as a result, at least partially... Israel was allowed to exist, if for the better reasons of freedom and goodness, or the worse reasons of outright feelings of guilt in Europe.
Can you imagine a world without Israel? With no great wars in the Middle East? Or suicide bombers and jihad groups and over-agressive Israeli forces and nervous Israeli troops (they've been hit so many times, the Jews and Israelis, they're trigger-happy because of it, and the recruits are so young, it adds to it all... and the jihadists have young recruits on their side, nervous, too...)
Can you imagine a world where France is a battleground, her whole countryside just trenches and barbed wire and centuries old villages smashed over a span of two ars and forty or so years... and now she seems so gleaming again, but where are the scars?
A world where we don't hear "German" and instinctively, even in the slightest, think "bad guy?" It's an ugly truth, but THE truth, at least here in the US- you mention Germany, and the first things that come to mind to most people are Hitler and the Nazis and before that the Kaiser and they're just thought of as a brutal people, unforgiving...
A world where Russia doesn't bring that to mind as well, and what about a world where we don't think "communist" when we think of Russia? The Czars were none too great, at least not at that time, but what followed... and would it have been if Russia hadn't been embroiled on the Eastern Front?
America got its first taste of true modern warfare and truly being a world power and an international force, after wanting to be isolationist for so long, even back to Washington himself...
I can't START to imagine an America that's not a world power and helper at best, and a meddler at worst.
And on and on...
What stories do we have, from the First and Second Wars?
What was?
What is now?
Can you imagine what it must have been like back then, or what might have been, or a world that isn't like ours.
And, as Linus asked... what have we learned?