One cannot look across the long, seemingly endless rows of crosses and Stars of David that dot the cemeteries at Omaha Beach, St. James, and elsewhere in Europe and the Pacific without a sense of the terrible cost of victory in World War II. The cold stone memorials underscore the ages of those whose lives war cut short at eighteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty years – men who never again saw their families and homes. And as each year passes, fewer and fewer visitors come to these lonely corners of America.

As the past recedes from memory to words printed on a page, historians will start to depict victory in that terrible conflict in soft, ill-measured words. They will suggest that our efforts were nothing more than the reverse side of a coin – that in fact there was little moral worth to the Allied cause, that for every German or Japanese war crime there were similar American or British crimes (a Hamburg, Berlin, or Dresden), the refusal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, the starvation of German POWs at the war's end, or Hiroshima – undoubtedly this summer we will hear ceaseless comments about dropping the atomic bomb on Japan as a “crime against humanity.”