Angus MacLean – father, soldier, liberator
Angus MacLean's path through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp and a career in the military during the Cold War personified an experience of the American century marked by strength, resilience and service.
I have before me a faded black-and-white photograph of a young man standing in front of a department store window. In the window is a mannequin dressed in 1940s midwestern finery – a dress with large, white lapels and a hat at an angle that, on a man, might be called rakish. The reflection in the glass allows us to see what the person sees – a bus, an office building, some unnamed, unburned American city at peace. He is barely a man.
He is dressed in a tailored winter suit – with a tie even broader than his lapels – that looks good on him. He’s holding the jacket to adjust it, self-consciously, and his ambiguous expression could mean slight embarrassment, or confidence that he knows he looks good, or both. He wears it like it’s the first good suit he’s ever owned, like he’s only owned it for a few minutes, like he didn’t expect ever to own something quite this fine. He has a thick, teased-out bounce of dark hair, is tall and slender and well-built. Pinned on his lapel is what appears to be a US Army Combat Infantryman’s badge.
I am in middle age now – almost exactly twice the age of this kid in the picture – and no matter how many times I contemplate it, I marvel. Not just because the young man in question is my father, who died many years ago. And not just because I was a late arrival in his life and knew him only as an older man. But because I know what he had been through to get to the point where he could sport that suit. This young man with his tongue in his cheek and playful attitude had participated in the liberation of Dachau; he had earned two Purple Hearts, one in Italy and one in France; in the latter country, he had received a battlefield commission, becoming an officer. In the Second World War, he had…