Well, that's a very good question.
Earlier, someone asked what some of the important questions are. One of the questions students are interested in, and we make very clear, is that war is a terrible thing. And as a veteran, I want to have them understand that we are not a military nation; we have no interest in military activity to subjugate other people and so on. We only became involved in World War II when it was a matter of whether we were facing the question of either slavery or maintaining our way of life. And after the whole nation was convinced we must draw a line here against the Nazi conquest of Europe, we explain, then it was only as the last resort that we became involved. And one of the problems with that, of course, was that we were not prepared for it and it was a great struggle and strain for us.
For, let's say, the Japanese children who are in the class, I always point out that the Japanese people were just as much the victims of their military dictatorship as the allied forces were, and that they too were victims of a bad political system, and that 2.9 million Japanese died in that terrible war. Far more died in the fire-bombing of Japan than were killed by the atomic bombs.
So we try to point out that the matter of politics is very important in avoiding the terrible conflict we've just been through. But I've never really heard any question as sophisticated as that, about how we do something even more significant. We just try to explain our history, how terrible it was, and we say in effect, I'm afraid.... One of the attitudes is that it was a terrible thing but the good news is that we retained our freedom. We pretty well stop there.
But we are very sensitive to the children who come from other cultures, because they have different ideas about what the war was about and we want them to hear our side of it.