US History: WWII part 2

We have moved into a more personal part of our US History mega unit.  WWII was the part of the history book I always hoped we'd get to in school, but we never did.  My dad was a small child during the war, and my Mom was born near the end.  I know my Grammy Ann (who reads this blog!) was in the Navy as a very young woman during WWII, but I don't know the details (and would like too, hint, hint!).

I had a lot of names floating around, allusions that had never quite gelled into real places, people or things: the Maginot Line, Ardenne, Vichy France, The Desert Fox, barrage balloons. But I grew up with people for whom all these things were real, in the way that the Twin Towers are real to me, and not to my children.   When I visit New York, it's like an absent tooth in the skyline and an almost physical pain, but to the next generation, they were never real, it was always a hole.

In the same way, as I learn more about this war, it's ghosts coalesce and become real to me, and I can see the world that shaped my parents and grandparents.

We've been moving rather chronologically, from the causes of WWII and the rise of Hitler, through the Nazi expansion throughout Europe, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Japanese expansion in China, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

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I told the Zoomlians it was a month after D-Day and they each had to write a letter to me explain which branch of the service they had joined and why they just had to do it.  I loved their answers, by turns silly and touching.

Klenda was an Army Nurse, helping save as many soldiers as she could, Leena joined the Navy so she could (improbably) "nuke the Nazis," Mxyl joined the Air Force because "We can't just assume that if we ignore the war, the war will ignore us anymore," Zorg joined the Army, got a grenade launcher and summed it up, "The US Army needs help and I'm givin' it!"