As a teenager I experienced combat in Germany while serving in the 9th Armored Division, followed by a stint in the Military Government for Bavaria, assisting in the economic recovery of civilian industries.  This was part of a transitional protectorate by the North Atlantic and Western European Allies during which temporary foreign administrators oversaw the rehabilitation of their former enemies, the Germans, and the promotion of democracy.
   One military lesson of the war in Europe became apparent to me: While strategic bombing served to reduce the enemy's logistic capabilities, ground troops were essential to bring the war to a successful conclusion.  Gen. Eisenhower observed that our division's capture of the only bridge left standing across the Rhine -- at Remagen -- and the successful establishment of a major bridgehead into which Allied ground forces poured (with minimal air support), broke the Wehrmacht's morale, and shortened the war in Europe by three months!
   Another lesson: After liberating Italy, France, and the Low Countries, the Allies did not stop at their borders with Germany and offer to negotiate a face-saving settlement with Adolf Hitler.  Instead, to put an end to his tyranny, it was necessary for the Allies to invade and occupy his realm.  Although, there were good Germans opposed to Der Fuehrer (with some of whom I later worked) and good Italians opposed to Il Duce, the Fascist dictators, who controlled the military and secret police, could not have been overthrown without massive outside intervention.
   At the 50th anniversary of the capture of the Bridge at Remagen, our host, the town Buergermeister declared that the townspeople didn't appreciate it at the time, but they were most thankful that the Allies liberated them from Hitler's regime.
   The chauvinist propaganda used by dictators to brainwash their peoples and make their neighbors into enemies, spreading death and misery, made a great impression on me, as it did on Emery Reves, who in 1945 published The Anatomy of Peace.  It was apparent that much was rotten in a nation-state system under which otherwise intelligent inhabitants (along with members of the mob) succumbed to the siren-song that their people were favored by a deity, and to hell with the others!
   Confronting this pernicious mindset, I have long felt that we, the people of the Earth, are all human beings and potential citizens of a well-governed world.  Europeans needed to be encouraged to overcome the artificial, tension-producing blinders of ultra-nationalism and to join together in a United States of Europe.  In fact, after graduating from Washington University, I embarked upon a dissertation on that very subject.  (However, a desire to experience more of the world and its people led to working abroad again, abandoning a topic that may have been fifty years too soon.)
   During World War II, while also having to face Japanese aggression in the Asian-Pacific War, people in the North Atlantic and Western European Allies -- the original "United Nations" -- were taught to ignore the shortcomings of one major ally, the Soviet Union.  After Hitler and Stalin had negotiated the Molotov-vonRibbentrop Pact of 1939, the two dictatorships proceeded to invade and partition Poland, setting off World War II, as the Soviet Union invaded the Baltic republics.
   Working near Nuernberg, I occasionally drove past the International Tribunal, which tried German war criminals, as a similar one across the globe in Tokyo tried Japanese war criminals.  There were also camps with thousands of Eastern European refugees, who had fled after the Soviet occupation and ethnic cleansing earlier in the war.
   After the war, while the temporary occupation of Western Europe and Japan by the Western Allies led to the speedy rehabilitation and democratization of those countries -- thanks in Western Europe to the Marshall Plan -- Stalin, by then head of the world's largest empire, seized land and people from all nine of his Eastern European neighbors, imposed Communist dictatorships on half of the Continent, and sent millions to the gulag , effectively thwarting the desire of the peoples for democratic self-determination.
    In the process, in Yugoslavia a Croat Partisan, Josef Broz (Tito), emerged, replacing a pre-war Fascist Serb dictatorship with a Communist one.  Despite its anti-democratic government, shortcomings were overlooked as it was welcomed by the West after separating itself from Stalin's control.
   What relevance does this have today?  Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, by 1989 the corrupt Communist parties of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European vassals (even Albania) started falling like dominoes.
    By 1999 only two Eastern European countries remain under anti-democratic dictators.  Although the ruler of Belarus obstructs democratization in his country, his repression has been rather muted.  That leaves only Slobodan Milosevic as a relic of the Allied "hot war" with the Fascist Powers and the Cold War with the Communist Power in an otherwise democratizing Europe.
    Will we ever learn such lessons of World War II, as:
• A brutal dictator cannot be overthrown without the use of sizable ground forces.
• It would be the height of folly to try to negotiate with any tyrant with a long history of terror, repression, and annihilation of people, or to expect a largely unarmed local population to overthrow the thug who controls the weapons.
• A military occupation would be necessary not only for the victimized Kosova, but also for Serbia, the aggressor state, and its most recent annexation, Voyvodina.
• Arkan -- the recently indicted Butcher of Vukovar, Gen. Mladic -- the indicted Butcher of Srebenica, their boss, Milosevic, the newly indicted (!) Butcher from Belgrade, and their collaborators and propagandists should be arrested and tried as criminals for fomenting and launching wars and other massive crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia, most recently and horribly, the Kosovars.
• Along with temporary protectorates for Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro (if welcomed by their people), Kosova, Serbia, and Voyvodina need to be placed under international transitional authorities (administered by the United Nations, the European Union, and/or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) until they can be rehabilitated, democratized, and able to join the European Union.
• The North Atlantic and European democracies should launch a latter-day Marshall Plan both to help the economies of other Eastern European countries to catch up, as well as to help restore the economies of the former Yugoslav territories.

  (A modified version appeared in the Spring 1999 Toward Democratic World Federation.)