Historical birth date not widely known but should be

Most folks know the historical significance of anyone born June 6, 1944: D Day, the largest invasion in history, signaling the demise of Nazi Europe.

My birthdate, March 10, 1945, just 9 months, 4 days later, is also a significant day in world history. But it is virtually unknown by anyone not a serious student of WWII history.

That’s partly because the event, by itself, does not identify its place in history. But this Friday, as I awake on birthday 78, it will come to mind as it does every March 10.

As I was busy was busy being born in a clean, safe Chicago suburban hospital, a hundred thousand Japanese were being incinerated under 1,510 tons of napalm bombs dropped on Tokyo by 282 B-29s. A million were left homeless from the disappearance of 268,000 mostly wooden homes. American airmen donned their oxygen masks at low altitude to ward off the smell of burning flesh.

Its historical significance? It was the deadliest single day of human destruction from war in history. Ask anyone and they will likely answer that occurred from the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombings 5 months later. Not so.

It’s a dubious distinction I cannot separate from my entrance to life. Try as I might, it always emerges from my psyche upon awakening to mark another birthday. I learned about it around 1952, staring in horror at pictures of the man-made firestorm devouring one of the world's largest cities. The Cold War was raging. McCarthy was rampaging. I feared a similar fate awaited me from nuclear war, the current threat to mass destruction back then. Seventy-one years later it still is. Possible nuclear war against Russia and China is in the news daily. The Doomsday Clock is 90 tics from midnight, the closest in my life. That is not progress.

Our schools do a good job teaching kids about the significance of D Day. Not a word tho, about the deadliest day from war in man’s 2 million years waring on Earth. That is a shame. We need to put more focus on man's incessant penchant for war with its horrific death toll, and our obliviousness to its impending approach on a scale infinitely larger than my birthdate, March 10, 1945.