A black-and-white war fought in full color

I once mused aloud to my father, a World War II veteran, that his war appeared to have been fought in black and white. I was joking about the newsreels from the days before the rise of color film. He stopped me with a quiet, sobering reply: "Yes it was black and white-good and evil."

He believed then, and still does at age 90, that mankind hung in the balance, and that his duty was to resist both the Germans and the Japanese.

I've followed with disgust the news over the past 18 months about Japan's attempts to whitewash its war record. I wanted my dad's perspective, and so I called him the other day.