To the editor:
My father-in-law, Sgt. James F. McClure, enlisted in the military December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. He entered service with the 388th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force and served as a waist gunner on a B-17 called “Shack Job.”
Flying out of England on March 6, 1944 for a daylight raid on Berlin, his plane was shot down and for the next 14 months he endured the brutal conditions of a German P.O.W. camp. He was liberated by General Patton and the Third Army April 29, 1945. Like most veterans who experienced war first hand and survived, he would be haunted by the experience the rest of his life. But he understood clearly, indeed the whole country understood, the dire threat Nazi Germany posed to our Democracy, and what a murderous, race-baiting psychopath Hitler was. So my father-in-law would never have thought it possible that in his country, the United States, that the leading Republican presidential candidate in 2024 would be parroting language from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” and that roughly 70 million of his followers would slurp up every poisonous word.
Our country narrowly escaped a Republican coup d e’tat on January 6, 2021. There‘s no reason to believe the same nightmare couldn’t happen again. Indeed, many of the insurrectionists are still in positions of power both in government and the Republican Party. Democracy is on the line again. This time all you need to do is vote to save it.
Thomas Shaver Northport
