A Jewish WWII hero?

But—but Pat Buchanan and his buds all say that Jews don’t serve in the U.S. armed forces. (Tell that to my father and two uncles. WWII and Korea.)

Robert Rosenthal, a World War II bomber pilot who twice survived being shot down in raids over Europe and later served on the U.S. legal team that prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, has died at age 89.

[…] With 16 decorations including the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for heroism, Mr. Rosenthal was a quintessential example of the young Army pilots, some barely out of their teens, who defied seemingly hopeless odds to carry out daylight strategic bombing raids against Germany’s industrial war machine from 1942 to 1945.

Despite being able to absorb punishment, the B-17 Flying Fortresses, carrying 10 crew members, took staggering losses over Germany, especially when flying raids beyond the range of their England-based fighter escort.

Mr. Rosenthal’s 52 missions included one, on Oct. 10, 1943, in which his aircraft was the only one of 13 to return from a raid on Munster, the rest having been downed by anti-aircraft fire and waves of Luftwaffe fighters. Mr. Rosenthal’s B-17 reached England with two of its four engines gone, severe wing damage and two wounded crew members.

But that’s not all. Look what else he did.

Born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1917, Mr. Rosenthal was football and baseball team captain at Brooklyn College, a summa cum laude graduate of Brooklyn Law School and was working at a Manhattan law firm when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He enlisted the next day and insisted on being trained for combat.

“I couldn’t wait to get over there,” he told Donald Miller, author of the 2006 book, “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany.”

[…] After Germany surrendered, Mr. Rosenthal was training to fly B-29 Super Fortresses over Japan when the war ended in August 1945. He returned home to a law practice but soon returned to Germany as part of the American legal team chosen for the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Aboard the ship bound for Germany, he met Phillis Heller, another attorney, whom he married in Nuremberg. During the trials, he interviewed ex-Luftwaffe commander Herman Goering, the highest-ranking Nazi defendant, who would evade the hangman by committing suicide, and former general Wilhelm Keitel.

Ooh, that’s gotta hurt. First he drops bombs on the Nazis, then he puts them in prison after the war.

Mr. Rosenthal is survived by his wife, sons Steven of Newton, Mass., and Daniel, of Weston, Conn.; a daughter, Peggy Rosenthal, of Manhattan; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

He and his wife had nine descendants. They’re from the same generation of Jewry that was decimated in Europe. I always wonder—always—how many more Jews there would be in the world, if Hitler had not risen to power. A million and a half children were murdered… how many descendants would they have had? At a guess, tens of millions more Jews would be alive today.