It was with some pride to remember the contribution made by Caymanians during World War II.

Last Friday (8) a beacon was lit off the coast of West Bay by the Turtle Farm as the Cayman Islands joined countries around the world to remember the heroes during the war, many of whom gave up their lives.

The lighting of the beacon was timed to coincide with the 70-year anniversary of the declaration of peace in Europe.

Members of the Cayman Islands Veterans were on hand to retell their stories and there are many families here in Cayman who had members who fought the terrible battle not only against Germany but Japan as well.

In my wife’s (Joan) immediate family she lost her brother Ladner whose ship was torpedoed and sank.

Because of this media house’s cry at the omission in the government release announcing the beacon lighting (see iNews Cayman story dated May 5 “Beacon lighting ceremony as Cayman Islands joins in the 70th Anniversary of “Victory in Europe”’) of the name of the Captain of the Home Guard special mention was made of him.

Premier Alden McLaughlin paid tribute to Cayman’s Home Guard, led by Maj. Roddy Watler, who manned watchtowers around the island to look out for German U-boats.

Roddy Watler was Joan’s father!

The premier said, “I’m most grateful to be part of this ceremony and to say to these men and to those who have gone before them how grateful and how proud we are of their contributions and how much we value, and forever will, their tremendous sacrifices.”

So why should we remember?

When we have such nonsensical celebrations such as Tuba Day, No socks Day and (in the USA where else?) Bonza Bottler Day doesn’t observing the victory in Europe and Nazi surrender make much more sense?

Yes we have monuments with the names of persons who contributed and lost their lives in World War II and The Great War preceding it.

Larry McGehee, the late Wofford College professor and author of the column “Southern Seen, wrote this in 1995 at the 50th anniversary of V-E- Day.

“History is probably always history, and doesn’t change much. What does change is the way we see it and interpret it. The World War II we remember was seamless. It had a wholeness to it that these remembrances 50 years afterward have lacked.

“Back then, it seemed the entire world was knitted together, even as it was divided into two sides. The war truly was a world war. More than that, all of the parts back then appeared to fit together. The battles and sieges and invasions, even when separated by time or place or units involved, were linked. Army, navy, and air force were one, and the Atlantic and Pacific were one.

“Of course, we were only 5 when America entered the war and only 9 when it ended. Children are more inclined to see life in generalities than in its particulars. But that view was more commonplace then among adults than the diverse array of commemorations might lead us to think.

“World war – the real thing, not its filtered re-enactments and reminiscences – unified the way most people, not just the children, saw things in those early 1940s. Furthermore, adults back then had had the lingering Depression of the decade of the 1930s to get them into the habit of seeing that ‘we are all in this thing together.’

“When World War II ended, we had our own home monuments – medals and flags and helmets shipped home to us by an uncle in Germany. But they have long since vanished, traded for comic books or baseball cards.

“What we had back then was a shared experience, gigantic in size, exhilarating even while simultaneously horrifying, from which no one – absolutely no one – was exempt. It was a human-engineered hurricane of global proportions from which no one could escape. Nothing since it was covered by a glacier has bound the whole world together, against its will, as did World War II. Maybe the Black Death of the Middle Ages comes close.

“Maybe the whole thing was just so big that it can’t be easily grasped. Maybe it was so dissected and spread out that there can’t be a symbol for it in one place, as the black-walled Vietnam monument is for that war. And, too, most of the veterans we knew back then didn’t want to think about it. They had lived in an inferno Dante would have envied, and they had survived it, and they were anxious to get on with their lives. The unprecedented and unpredictable sheer energy channeled by the veterans from combat into education and the economy in the post-war years will always be the best historical monument to the war.

“But now, 50 years later, we see it in part, as through a glass darkly. Like the blind men touching the elephant in separate parts and describing what it must be like, we grope for holistic descriptions and symbols. They are in short supply.

“Nothing yet has been able to memorialize properly the whole of what happened that was World War II. History was made, and all of us were part of it, but we have yet to find a unifying symbol that can encompass and express the holistic honors and horror of it all.”

That is why we must remember.

Do we want it to happen again?