I did not expect to find a George Dewey monument in Union Square in San Francisco on our recent visit. But it was there. And it was big. The Goddess of Victory, atop her column, appeared to be hailing a cab across the street at the St. Francis Hotel.

This is why it’s there: In 1898, in the Spanish-American War, Commodore George Dewey led an American fleet into Manila Bay and annihilated the Spanish Asiatic Fleet there. We lost one sailor, felled by sunstroke.

The vicious three-year war that followed, the Philippine Insurrection, tore Americans apart. It claimed 200,000 lives among the people who’d made the mistake of assuming that Dewey and the Americans were their liberators. They would have to liberate themselves, not from the Spanish, but from the Americans.

In 1904, Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō took on a Russian fleet in the Tsushima Straits. The Japanese sank 21 Russian ships, including seven battleships, and captured seven more. Togo lost three torpedo boats. Over 5,000 Russian sailors were killed; Togo lost 117.

Revolution tore Russia part the next year, 1905. It turned out to be the dress rehearsal for 1917. The little fellow today may be borrowing from the Totalitarian Guidebook to Europe between 1936 and 1939, but’s reaching farther back in history. He wants Tsar Nicholas’s empire back again, so he started with what he thought would be a cheap victory.

Pride is cheap when it comes from cheap victories. Battles like these, when confined safely to history texts, can seem comic, but more than a century ago, two new world powers, competing for power in the Western Pacific, would inevitably meet each other in unimaginable tragedy.

So, in a way, the roots for the war that ended in Hiroshima were planted with the Dewey Monument’s cornerstone in San Francisco. The keel for Sōryū, one of the fleet carriers that launched its planes at Pearl Harbor, was laid down in November 1934. In Hiroshima. I am not suggesting an equivalency here.

This is what I am suggesting:

The worth of nineteen-year-old battleship sailors from Oklahoma on December 7 or Hiroshima schoolchildren in their uniforms on August 6 is incalculable. They are precious beyond our understanding.