“It’s ironic,” said Irwin Smoler cheerfully of some long-ago acquaintance, “He joined the Navy, but he got killed anyway.” Irwin Smoler (father of our contributing editor Fredric) was not in the Navy; he was in the infantry and survived the awful Ardennes fighting of late 1944.

My father was in the Navy. In fact, North Atlantic anti-submarine work could sometimes be not all-that-comfy, but to Mr. Smoler’s point, my father readily admitted that he’d never once had to sleep in a hole in the ground during a blizzard.

I do remember, however, standing with him at a party while a neighbor of ours strenuously advocated war in Southeast Asia. This was perhaps 1964—I think it’s the first time I ever heard anybody say the word Hanoi —and my father listened noncommittally while Mr. O’Connor (not his name) called down all the furies of hell on the Republic of North Vietnam.

Afterward, I remarked that Mr. O’Connor had been pretty fierce. “Well, sure,” my father replied equably, “he was on an LMD during the war.”

“What’s an LMD?” I asked.

“Large mahogany desk.” I’ve thought of these two remarks quite often during the last few weeks, because their amiable, sardonic derision echoes what the articles in this issue offer: the voice of the people who fought World War II.

I’m happy to say that you can still hear Irwin Smoler’s actual voice. But my father’s has been stilled for five years now, as have the voices of most who served in the war. That is why this issue commemorating its ending is unique and will remain so: Everything here is eyewitness. We are marking the last significant anniversary on which the story can be told by the people who wrote it, both on the loftiest rung of statecraft and from the close-to-the-ground viewpoint of the ordinary GI.

World War II continues to fascinate us not only because it is the most important event in the last century and a half, not only because its ramifications are still all about us, from the civil rights struggle to the computer, from America’s unprecedented power in the world to the bitter fight going on in the Middle East, but also because it is a profound moral fable.

I’ve managed to be involved in the raising of three generations of children, and I’ve increasingly found my attempts to teach them ethical lessons couched in the terms of this war. Here was an event that offered immense examples of pure evil, true good, and every declension of human behavior in between, and my children could talk it over with people who’d been there.

Did Noah’s Ark really float? they’d ask me; Did Lazarus really rise from the grave? I don’t know. But I do know that, in the southwest Pacific on the night of February 7, 1943, Howard Walter Gilmore, commanding the USS Growler in a surface action, was struck down by machine-gun bullets from the gunboat that