Our COVID sacrifices pale in comparison with 1943

If you want to understand the world we occupy — the challenges we face, but more important, the failures we endure — forget for a moment that this is a day in late December 2021. Think instead that it is October 1943.

The singer Kate Smith has just completed 18 straight hours on CBS radio, a national-unity effort that prompted 39 million Americans to buy $107 million in war bonds. The fourth in a series of wartime ration books is being distributed. American women are scrubbing railroad locomotives, welding aircraft bodies, packing surgical kits to send overseas. Girl Scouts are planting victory gardens. A poster reads: Have you REALLY tried to save gas by getting into a car club?

October 1943 is about 660 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that thrust the United States into World War II. This week is about 660 days from the World Health Organization’s declaration in 2020 that a global pandemic had broken out.

Americans were weary of war in October 1943; they did not know that nearly two more years of privation and death would transpire before the guns would still. Americans in December 2021 are weary of COVID restrictions; we do not know whether we face another two years of masks, social distancing, overflowing hospitals and death.

World War II accounted for 407,316 military casualties, according to the National World War II Museum. The coronavirus has caused twice that many in half that time. As terrible as World War II was — an unprecedented threat to freedom, a horrifying global plunge into theretofore unknown human depravity — COVID is exacting a far bigger toll among Americans.

And yet, the contrast in national harmony and sense of national purpose is dramatic.

Some 660 days into World War II, Lawrence Bresnahan, the local director of the Office of Price Administration, took to the airwaves on Boston radio station WHDH and said, “Today, thousands of Massachusetts residents stand ready to accept any inconvenience or make any sacrifice that will help to bring victory one day sooner or save one more American life.”

Some 660 days into the pandemic, many Americans regard wearing masks an intolerable inconvenience and practicing social distancing too great a sacrifice and thus defy scientific expertise and governmental authority.

Bresnahan asked thousands of teachers to help distribute new ration books, which included 96 red, blue and green stickers for the purchase of sugar and coffee and other items. No one regarded those as intrusions on personal freedom or unendurable diktats from a tyrannical central government. The hardships asked of 21stcentury Americans include the washing of hands and restrictions on large parties.

In the summer of 1943 — the equivalent in the COVID period of around Labor Day this year — President Franklin D. Roosevelt posed several questions in a radio address:

“Are you working full time on your job? Are you growing all the food you can? Are you buying your limit of war bonds? Are you loyally and cheerfully cooperating with your government in preventing inflation and profiteering, and making rationing work with fairness to all?” Then he added: “It is not too much to say that we must pour into this war the entire strength and intelligence and the willpower of the people of the United States.”

Around that time several