A WAR TO REMEMBER? : They are fewer now. Those who bore witness to WWII are passing, and with them, the truth about its triumphs and tragedies. Now, with the country so different than when they fought, they don’t want to fade away.

Fifty years ago they were masters of the universe, the young American veterans of World War II. Fresh from triumphs in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, they came home from making history, glad to be alive and civilians again. In the half century since, that remarkable generation has often seemed eternal, at least to their children and grandchildren.

But in this 50th anniversary year of Allied victory, that once comforting fallacy is being relentlessly exposed as another postwar illusion. Indeed, the passing of the World War II generation has been a poignant--if frequently unspoken--motif in the countless commemorations of “the Good War,” which ended with Japan’s surrender on Aug. 14, 1945.

Both the statistics and the veterans themselves confirm that time’s sniper fire is thinning their ranks at a quickening rate, a pace that is expected to climb dramatically after the turn of the century.

As this last act of the war unfolds, many of America’s surviving veterans apparently have taken little comfort in this year’s feats and oratory.

Hometown parades, TV specials and praise by politicians young enough to be their children have failed to ease gnawing concerns about their legacy. Unafraid of sounding like old fogeys, some of them have sharp words for younger generations, asserting that their successors have only the haziest notions of the war’s cost in death, fear and disrupted lives.

Perhaps, surprisingly, some even question whether their generation will be remembered at all in a country that has changed beyond recognition since V-J Day.

One thing is certain: They are not willing to go peacefully--at least not yet.

First, the numbers: During World War II, some 16.5 million men and women served in the U.S. armed forces, including 406,000 who died in battle and from other causes, according to the Veterans Administration.

Last year, in its most recent estimate, the VA reported that about 8.1 million remained alive, including 832,000 in California. Their median age was 72.1. By the year 2000, the VA projects that the number of living World War II veterans will decline to 5.6 million.

In the new millennium, the agency forecasts a dramatic increase in the tempo of mortality. By the year 2010, the agency estimates that just more than 2 million veterans will still be living, median age 87.

“The people who witnessed all this [World War II] are passing away,” says Kathleen Krull, a 43-year-old baby boomer and San Diego author. “I think more and more families now have no one old enough to remember the war.”

The knowledge that “such an enormously earth-shattering event is edging away from consciousness” was the chief impetus behind her new book, “V is for Victory: America Remembers World War II” (Random House), she explains. “I kept running into kids who were 11, 12, 13, 14 years old who didn’t know anything about the war.”

Aimed primarily at young readers, the book--heavily illustrated with photos, posters and newspapers of the era--is designed, according to the flyleaf, “to inspire grandparents and parents to pass on their own stories.” Krull adds that her sense of the war’s importance grew as she worked on the book. “It occurred to me that every family in the world was influenced by World War II,” she says.

Yet Krull stresses that the book is not simply an exercise in patriotic nostalgia. It does not, she says, “sugarcoat” the war’s dark and ghastly aspects, including the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Despite such efforts as the one by Krull, some veterans wonder if younger generations care much about the war and about them. In gloomier or crotchety moments they may also question whether today’s fragmented families, communities and institutions are capable of retaining any vision of the past.

Former Marine and best-selling author William Manchester, for one, thinks that “younger Americans don’t have time for us. . . . I think they’re all rather bemused by the 50th anniversary observations. . . . We thought if we survived the war we would be remembered.”

Manchester, whose works include an account of the Pacific War titled “Goodbye, Darkness,” suffered a head wound on Okinawa.

In a society where memory and history are respected--even treasured--”the broad reach of the generations can be astonishing,” says Manchester, 73. For instance, “J.E.B. Stuart’s widow taught my mother in Sunday School,” he reports, referring to the Civil War’s reckless and daring commander of Confederate cavalry, killed in 1864.

Manchester’s point may be amplified with two other examples: The last Civil War veteran died in 1958, aged 112. The last veteran of the Spanish-American War died in 1992, aged 106.

Other veterans seem less sensitive than Manchester to the regard in which they are held. Former American Legion official Robert E. Lyngh, 75, notes that the many conflicts--from Korea and Vietnam to the Persian Gulf--the United States has been involved in since World War II may have eroded that war’s distinction.

“I suspect that Generation X and the generation after that probably look on [World War II] the way we looked at World War I, maybe even the Civil War,” says Lyngh, who served as an aircraft mechanic in Europe and now lives in Washington, D.C.

Moreover, surviving veterans are not ready to retire from life just yet, Lyngh says. He expects veterans to be a potent force in the 1996 presidential election. And he points out that one veteran, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who turned 72 in July, is running for President, hoping to stress his generation’s maturity. Dole lost a kidney and the use of his right arm from wounds inflicted in Italy in 1945.

Still, many veterans have found this to be a bittersweet and elegiac year.

In Alabama, for instance, Marine veteran Eugene B. Sledge Jr., 71, notes that he hasn’t “watched any of these commemorative things” on television. His avoidance, he says, stems from the horror and grief he experienced in the Pacific, where he fought with the elite First Marine Division.

“What got me down the worst is the friends I lost,” says Sledge, who became a professor of biology after the war. “A lot of the ones who were wounded suffered every day” that they lived during peacetime, he adds. Of about 235 men in Sledge’s rifle company at the beginning of the battle of Okinawa, only 26 had escaped death, wounds or disease by the end of their savage 82-day struggle. Sledge was among the “fugitives from the law of averages.”

Lately, Sledge says, advancing age has shortened the odds against the Marines once more. Until a few years ago, the bimonthly newsletter for veterans of his division typically carried death notices of three or four former Marines. Now the obituaries have swelled to 15 or 20 per issue, he says.

Inadvertently, Sledge may have attained an immortality of sorts both for himself and his outfit. Many years ago he began writing a private memoir for his family about his war experience. From that humble beginning, Sledge produced a manuscript that was first published in 1981.

Attracting little notice at the time, the book might have sunk without trace had it not attracted the attention and admiration of prominent military historian John Keegan, author of such books as “The Face of Battle” and “A History of Warfare.”

When it was reissued by Oxford University Press in 1990, the British historian praised “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa” as “one of the most important personal accounts of war that I have ever read.” The term “Old Breed” refers to the grizzled Marines in service at the outbreak of the war who trained and led volunteers such as Sledge.

“Old Breed” drew praise for its unsparing and straightforward narrative of the Pacific Island war in which both sides took few prisoners. For example, Sledge recounts that the fight for one hill on Okinawa was so fierce that the muddy, artillery-churned ground became saturated with the dead from both sides. Marines who slipped and slid down the hill came to rest with their clothes full of maggots.

“We didn’t talk about such things,” Sledge writes. “They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans.”

Yet despite the “insanity” of the war and the nightmares that tormented him for years, Sledge retains an unabashed pride in his war service. “The First Marine Division, it was just top-notch. It could be shot to ribbons and still fight,” he says.

Whether discussing the gruesome or the heroic, Sledge and other veterans repeatedly cite their war service as the ultimate reality check. They would like to pass their hard-earned, hard-eyed knowledge of the war’s complexity--its waste and its necessity--to the future.

But they don’t think that’s likely, at least in unadulterated form.

Paul Fussell, who at age 20 commanded an infantry platoon in France and went on to become an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the loss of living memory will lead to “the inevitable dilution of the real war.” Fussell, now 71, adds, “The veterans as they die carry off the bad news” about the war.

“Everybody forgets that the war was about mass murder. Boys like me just out of high school were trained to do the killing,” he says bluntly. Nonetheless, Fussell believes “the war was absolutely necessary” because it defeated fascism.

Echoes Sledge: “Many people today don’t realize that World War II was lose all or win all.”

Like Sledge, Fussell, a noted scholar and writer, wrote a book as a message to the future. “Wartime” (Oxford University Press, 1989), a social history of life in Britain and America during World War II, portrays the conflict as both boring and hideous. Nonetheless, Fussell expects that eventually the war will be wrapped in a romantic, rosy glow and will “become a sort of elegant moment in the country’s history.”

Here is one final note, and perhaps a surprising one. Since the war ended, the world has changed so much that at least some veterans say they don’t recognize it. The country today certainly isn’t the one they were fighting for back then, they say.

“I often feel as though I’m living in an alien country,” Sledge writes in a letter to a reporter. “This perception is shared by most of my surviving wartime buddies.”

Manchester puts it this way: “I don’t love this country that much. There’s too much of it from which I feel alienated. It’s not the America I knew. I don’t dislike it. I just don’t feel like I could lay down my life for it.”