Seventy-Five Years

September 11, 2001. I am not sure that even now, more than four months later, I know how to think about it. I have heard young people say, "September 11 is the worst thing that ever happened to America." I am tempted to reply, "In your lifetime." I will be seventy-five years old this year and I have lived through quite a few dark days in my life. Perhaps it will not be entirely inappropriate for me to try to put September 11 in perspective by reflecting on some of those earlier moments.

I was born in 1927. Although I was too young to understand it, the stock market crash of 1929 had serious repercussions for my family. As I was becoming aware of the world in the middle 1930s, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all in power, and the Japanese were at war with China. I remember being the one who brought in the paper every morning, and in those days before television, it was the newspaper that we depended on for news (though I do remember listening to speeches by Hitler and Mussolini on the radio, and the reassuring words of FDR). How many mornings I saw huge black headlines reporting the latest disaster! In March 1938 came the Anschluss, Hitler's annexation of Austria. In September of that year there was the infamous Munich pact, through which the British and French handed over the Sudeten border area of Czechoslovakia to Hitler; followed early in 1939 by Hitler's occupation of the whole country. And on September 1, 1939, Hitler, now acting on the basis of a secret pact with the Soviet Union, invaded Poland. The period of appeasement was over; the Second World War had begun. One might think these were events in Europe, not events affecting the United States, but those of us who lived through those events, even a twelve- or thirteen-year-old child as I was at the time, knew that these terrible events were happening to the United States because they were happening to the whole world.

Auden's famous poem "September 1, 1939" was written, as its opening line tells us, in New York, and it expresses not only what an Englishman, but what many Americans were feeling at that moment:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. ¹

Although the Polish campaign was over in weeks, many more dark headlines were to come. In April 1940 Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway with little opposition. In June he overran the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with lightning speed, although most of the British army was successfully evacuated from Dunkirk. The ensuing air war over Britain was inconclusive, and Hitler turned his attention from a possible invasion of Britain to what he expected to be a lightning campaign against the Soviet Union. In early 1941 the total failure of the invasion of Greece by Italy, Germany's ally, diverted his attention to the Balkans, where again he made short work of Yugoslavia and Greece. He was now master of almost the whole of Europe right up to the Soviet frontier, but he wanted more. On June 22 the Russian campaign began, initially with enormous success, driving to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad by the end of the year.

However breathlessly we watched the fall of Europe, on December 7, 1941, something terrible at last did happen to the United States. I have recently had to remind my younger friends that the horrifying attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, pale in comparison to the defeat suffered by the United States on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was a military disaster of the first order. The U...