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| 151 Epilogue The Second World War ignited just twenty years after the signing of the peace treaty that ended the First World War. In the later conflict political ideologies, such as fascism and communism, were at stake. Many more nations aimed much more toxic weapons against one another. The horrors of trench warfare identified so closely with the earlier war had transformed into an air war that peppered battle lines, pummeled villages and towns, and punctured European landmarks in city centers. In the later conflict the fighter pilot was too common to be considered “romantic.” The Vaterland was reduced to rubble in places, unlike the First World War that had left the German landscape largely undisturbed. Because of newly developed technologies , propaganda spread more quickly. While genocide—a word coined during the Second World War—shamed humankind in both conflicts, the Holocaust obliterated many more millions of people than did the 1915 Armenian genocide. The atomic bomb that ended World War II spawned a new breed of international antagonism known as the Cold War. Destruction and death overall occurred on a much more vast scale. Almost 300,000 U.S. military personnel lost their lives in the later conflict , and 83,500 war widows survived them. Little had changed for Second World War widows when compared with their Great War foremothers. In the 1940s more women heeded Uncle Sam’s call and helped produce the weapons that killed other women’s husbands. In Germany, the Nazi regime required six months of service to the state from single women, regarded as the female equivalent of young men’s compulsory military service (feminist Minna Cauer finally got her wish—she had championed female service during the earlier conflict).1 In both wars, female employment in war-related industry was, by and large, intended to be only for the duration.2 Like their Great War predecessors, widows received compensation from the U.S. and German governments for their losses, but once again that benefit was contingent upon the woman’s remaining a widow. The stigma attached to a widow’s choosing a second husband had allegedly disappeared, and yet war widows 152 | Epilogue continued to worry what others thought of their plans. The specter of the frivolous, self-indulgent female derided during the Great War reappeared in the 1940s.3 Feelings of grief and despair over losing one’s life partner had not changed much, either. Mrs. Abe C. Webb’s sorrow over her husband’s death during the war nearly drove her to take her own life. In July 1946, the Canton, North Carolina, war widow penned a letter to her husband’s army chaplain, Ben L. Rose, a fellow North Carolinian by then living in New York City. Mrs. Webb confessed to Rose that she had lost her Christian faith since facing the death of her husband. She began her letter by asking Rose if he remembered Webb, a member of Troop E 113th Cavalry who had been killed in a vehicle accident on May 8, 1945. She reminded the chaplain that Webb had attended his services frequently during his army stint. Mrs. Webb confessed to Rose that while her husband had been away she had prayed and had had faith that he would return to her and their two small children. She assured Rose that she had not doubted Webb’s homecoming and had kept God’s commandments , and now she could not understand why her husband’s life had not been spared. “I blame God,” she cried, “for taking part of me away.” Reverend Rose responded to the war widow’s inner turmoil by enumerating the instances in the Bible where God tested believers. To comfort her, he assured her that her husband’s faith had been with him on the day that he died. No follow-up letter from Mrs. Webb appears in Rose’s papers, which he donated to the North Carolina State Archives in 1999. About Mrs. Webb’s missive, the Presbyterian minister appended a typewritten notation dated September 1, 1999, explaining that the enclosed letter had been written by a grieving wife whose husband had been killed in the service. “The sad part of it,” admitted Rose, “is that Abe Webb was killed . . . the very day the Germans surrendered.” Webb and some of his buddies had been poking around among some abandoned machinery on an air field that the U.S. Army had taken, according to the chaplain. Webb had been toying with a forklift...

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