Not all wars have victors – some just have survivors and their wartime success can be measured only in the degree of their loss.

In the Second World War, the U.S. won; their infrastructure was not only undamaged, it was producing at a level not known before...anywhere.

But this war was complex and the peace-time period following it was just as complex.

One winning combatant country lost as much as the losers and immediately, in peace, just changed the form of tyranny; another started rebuilding by making grandiose patriotic gestures while in denial to avoid the national embarrassment they should have felt; still another set to work business-like, using the rubble of their bombed cities as a quarry for a new beginning, while turning their back on the leader who made the new beginning possible; another country even had the basis of their religion disqualified and suffered the loss of their old age while beginning of a new age; and one tried to cope with a country not in ruins but one firmly and exclusively geared to wartime production -- a production that would shift to meet the peace-time, good-life demands for which the GI had been fighting.

During the war, the changes in the U.S. social psyche had come about slowly and out of necessity. After the war, the attempt to merely turn back the clock to a prewar thinking was too abrupt and the citizens suffered a national culture-shock. Perhaps this could not have been done any other way.

Thank Heavens for Abraham Levitt!  Levittown was named after its designer and builder Abraham Levitt, owner of Levitt & Sons. It was started in 1947 and was the first, mass-produced suburb. It had limited choices of common floor plans and it established the system for housing developments in the U.S.

In 1965, I was walking the chilly streets of cold-war Berlin and I noticed the bright, new products behind show-room windows, and everything on the side of the street where I walked looked good.  The store fronts appeared the same when I looked across the boulevard, but when I raised my view from ground level to the second story, there were many walls pitted from bullets and shrapnel. There might be a different type of stone or style of brick used in the repair of a building corner. The third floor was often rebuilt, the old one being too damaged for reconstruction.

And I noticed the old women walking along the sidewalks.  Old women seemed to be everywhere at night -- in groups of three or four, or perhaps five, some helping the more infirm by holding their arm and steadying them at the curb.

There were very few old men.  The old men, when young, had gone away to war and not returned.

Seeing a large city where there was a whole generation of just old women made me think of some apocalyptic novel I might have read in high school in the early 1950s.

One of the few old men I saw reminded me of his problem when I returned to the hotel on the Kurfursendahm and retrieved my room key. I would come in from my business and he would struggle off his stool, and as soon as he was moderately erect, he would take a deep breath and say "Forgive me...for I am old and slow and an invalid from the war."

This was not so much an explanation for his studied movements but rather a deliberate statement developed in real or imagined self-defense. If it was an apology, it was a constant one for him being one of the relatively few male survivors of his generation.   He said the same thing to me each night when I returned to the hotel. I am sure he said it to every one.

And I am sure he fought on the Eastern Front.  All German soldiers did.  My uncles in the 36th Division commented to me that was where all German soldiers must have been because immediately after the shooting stopped, every German they met had just arrived from the Eastern Front and had not engaged Americans in combat.

My uncles were confused by this.  One asked me, "If they all were in the east, who the Hell were those guys in German uniforms shooting at me and killing my buddies?"  (I think he knew.)

The posing, cheerful GI in this image has plenty to smile about. The combat was not likely to overtake him because his uniform is clean and his weapon is in a cover leaning on the trailing edge of the German fighter plane, an Me-109. The plane had been under-going maintenance and/or modification.

It has a band on the fuselage which indicates that it is a home-defense aircraft. They all had been "home defense" for a long time but did not want to accept it.

I have reason to believe that this photo was taken in mid-April, 1945, though the identity of this German air base and location is unknown other than it was most likely north of the Hartz mountains. The GI’s shoulder patch appears to be that of the 9th Infantry Division. On March 7, 1945, they crossed Remagen Bridge over the Rhine into Germany and pushed into the German Hartz Mountains.

(Military records of the 9th now show that their last command post of the war was Köthen and this was established on April 24, 1945.  When these images were originally posted, I had no idea of the actual location but now, more adept historians have agreed that the location must be Köthen, 80 miles SW of Berlin.)

And now this GI knows the war is drawing to a close and he might survive it after all.

He knew the Russians were on the out-skirts of Berlin and he had reason to believe the war would be over within a day or two after the Russians blasted their way into the city center.

It was.