Remembrance. Leitz Telyt-V 200mm

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, the day the nation honors its war dead.  What better time to ponder these things? 
 
I have been reading a book entitled, “Count Not The Dead”, an account of the popular and political view of the German U-Boat through two world wars.  It is written by Canadian academic, Michael L Hadley.
 
During WW2, according to many sources, 30,000 of a total of 40,000 young men, perhaps the best and brightest, were sent to their deaths in the “Iron Coffins”.  And this is without the toll of Allied naval and merchant seamen that they killed during the longest campaign of the entire war.  I’m still missing something here: what possessed the nation with arguably the greatest total contribution to western civilization in terms of both art and science, to be mesmerized by the rantings of a syphilitic psychopath, and inflict such suffering on the world while destroying its own?

Cousin Crispin counted the soldiers a few days back.  “Oh, when will they ever learn?”