INTRODUCTION: One War at a Time
We crossed the Belgian border and went for Mons at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on September 2, 1944 … When the first tank crossed the border it stopped. The general was riding behind it … and he got out and the first thing he did was urinate. That is the kind of a commander he was, and that is what he thought of World War II …
“If we’d got here nine days sooner,” I said, “it would have been the thirtieth anniversary of the British retreat from Mons.”
“Who cares?” one of the guys said.
“Nobody cares,” I said, “but you don’t have to get sore about it.”
“Nobody’s sore about it,” he said. “Just let’s fight one war at a time.”
“I don’t want to fight any of them,” I said. “I’ll give you both of them.”
—W. C. Heinz, war correspondent, “The Retreat at Mons,” True (1950)
World War II transformed the way Americans understood the country and its role in the world. The United States, so isolated only a few years before, would take a leading role in reconfiguring the world order, most conspicuously at first by means of its economic and physical-security assistance to Europe. A new set of assumptions found official political as well as unofficial cultural expression. In 1945, the United States was a power as dominant, its vanquished enemies as inhumane, as any the world had seen. The depravity against which Americans had fought, most clearly evidenced by the Nazi death camps, ultimately came to gild the unprecedentedly intense and indiscriminate violence that achieved victory. Miraculously, the deadliest conflict in human history became something inherently virtuous. To interpret the war in this way required a selective memory. “If the character of Hitler and his paladins gave to the Allied side a moral justification unusual in warfare,” argues the philosopher and veteran J. Glenn Gray, “the Western nations have no reason to forget their share of responsibility for Hitler’s coming to power or their dubious common cause with the Russian dictator.” But forgetting was the order of the postwar day, and every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it. As the latest expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan reveal, the United States continues to struggle beneath the burden of its last good war.
We continue to search in vain for a heroic plot comparable to the one woven out of our experience in World War II, a war into which the American GI was pulled belatedly, yet out of which he marched a heroic liberator armed by destiny. Force, when exercised by the United States, seemed to have acquired an innate, exceptional goodness. In the summer of 1941, on the eve of our entrance into the war, the archetype of the reluctant American warrior was given an old-fashioned showcase in Sergeant York, the top-grossing film of the year, which recruited a hero from World War I for overtly propagandist aims. The film documents Alvin York’s gradual conversion from Christian pacifist and conscientious objector to calmly efficient infantryman and eventual recipient of the Medal of Honor.
The GI of the European—but generally not the Pacific—Theater would become a legend largely through identification with several iconic acts preserved in photographs and newsreels: giving chocolate bars to hungry European children, being kissed by grateful Frenchwomen (and sometimes, to his consternation, by men), having his hair adorned with a flower by his liberated Italian host. William I. Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe offers a sobering chronicle of European perspectives on their “liberation.” The travel writer Norman Lewis, who served as a British intelligence officer attached to the U.S. Fifth Army during the invasion of Italy, recorded a scene in his diary, later published as Naples ’44, of shock and despair as he made his way through a series of towns on the way to Naples: “We made slow progress through shattered streets, past landslides of rubble from bombed buildings. People stood in their doorways, faces the colour of pumice, to wave mechanically to the victors, the apathetic Fascist salute of last week having been converted into the apathetic V-sign of today, but on the whole the civilian mood seemed one of stunned indifference.” (Similar scenes can be found in many eyewitness accounts.) But a recognition that the totality of the war’s devastation made pure gratitude an impossibility—that ambivalence could signify something other than ingratitude—is inconsistent with the myth of our deliverance of Europe.
World War II left behind the dangerous and seemingly indestructible fantasy that our military intervention will naturally produce (an often underappreciated) good. Each succeeding conflict has led to the reprise and reinvention of the Good War’s mythology in order to justify or otherwise explain uses of American power. The idea of war’s nobility, and the attendant rhetoric of religiosity and chivalry, was in truth far more characteristic of Alvin York’s war than of World War II. But the origins of the high-flown language later associated with the Second World War can be found in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day radio address to the troops. “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower exhorted his audience. “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” Eisenhower’s speech, harmonizing with those of Churchill and Roosevelt, supplied a sense of one grand unifying cause that seems to us in retrospect always to have been there but was in truth far more elusive. The title of Eisenhower’s 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe, harked back to this speech.
World War II was in crucial ways an exceptional war: a struggle against the unremitting brutality of totalitarianism, albeit one that America joined late, and only in response to direct attack. The Roosevelt administration’s own inclinations and sympathies notwithstanding, the proximate cause for the country’s entrance into the conflict was not proactive, but reactive: the attack on Pearl Harbor, not a quest to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples. As the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote in Collier’s in 1945 after visiting the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, “We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again.” As much as we would later make of our role in liberating the camps, their liberation, even after our entrance into the war, was never a priority. The Roosevelt administration first learned of Hitler’s Final Solution as early as the summer of 1942, but as late as January 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. presented to the president his department’s “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” It was only then that Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, which was entrusted with developing a plan “for (a) the rescue, transportation, maintenance, and relief of the victims of enemy oppression, and (b) the establishment of havens of temporary refuge for such victims.” Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942–45), the widely circulated propaganda films created, as Capra recalled in interviews with George Stevens Jr. at the American Film Institute in the 1970s, in response to Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall’s desire for “a series of films that will tell these boys why they are fighting,” made no mention of the Nazi program for exterminating the Jews.
Fussell was blunt on the subject of ideology: “The war seemed so devoid of ideological content that little could be said about its positive purposes that made political or intellectual sense, especially after the Soviet Union joined the great crusade against what until then had been stigmatized as totalitarianism.” Fussell’s position may be extreme, but it sheds some light on the perspective of the soldier on the ground, where the mandate of near-term survival left as little room for the long view in this war as it has done in virtually every other. Even a soldier as committed to big ideas as J. Glenn Gray—he received his doctorate in philosophy and his army induction notice on the same day—found it impossible to tell a hermit he met on an Italian hilltop “what World War II was all about” even as he marked the “bitter, hateful … heritage the Nazis” left in their wake. Such reflections make plain the fundamental ambiguities and contradictions the mythmakers smoothed over when they transformed the consequences of victorious force—the liberation of Europe from fascism and Asia from the imperial abuses of Japan chief among them—into an animating sense of purpose.
The year 1945 began a new chapter in the ongoing narrative of American exceptionalism. Charting the evolution of the term in The New American Exceptionalism, the literary critic Donald E. Pease calls attention to the remarkable elasticity of this national “fantasy” and to the violence in which our national “victory culture” has been rooted from the start. As Pease notes, the Cold War energized the concept of exceptionalism, but the idea, if not the term, had been in place since colonial days. Ever since John Winthrop, on his way to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, alluded to his future home “as a city upon a hill” toward which “the eyes of all people” would be directed, the notion of exceptionalism has inspired yet also distorted American cultural and political thought. In language similar to Winthrop’s, Eisenhower’s speech called attention to this sense of national mission. Because it unfolded on a global stage, World War II galvanized a faith that America was different, special, unique in the history of nations. American force had likewise come to be understood as exceptional force, an assumption helping to guide foreign policy in the decades that followed and contributing not a little to the overheated rhetoric surrounding our twenty-first-century wars, which have been so deeply indebted to the visceral, volatile motive of vengeance. American violence, as distinguished from that enacted by other nations, took on a special luster that combined righteous might and comic-book exuberance with native decency and a sense of fair play.
Geography has long been at the heart of the myth of the United States. Winthrop devised his rhetoric en route to a haven long distant from Europe. The continent’s vast expanse—and the social and economic opportunities it made possible—was central to Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on the colonial experiment and later to the shrewd French observer Alexis de Tocqueville’s understanding of the nature of American exceptionalism, which was for him primarily geographical. The fact that the continental United States had not experienced war’s destruction since 1865 confirmed twentieth-century mystical ideas about national destiny and influenced American attitudes about the use of force elsewhere. Victory in World War II seemed somehow the ultimate revelation of all these formative mysteries. Lewis H. Lapham alluded to this phenomenon in 1979, in an often-quoted Harper’s article: “The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.” Postwar foreign policy, Lapham proposed, became “a game of transcendental poker, in which the ruthless self-interest of a commercial democracy … got mixed up with dreams, sermons, and the transmigration of souls.”
A faith that violence had been unleashed in the name of American liberty and decency disguised the fact that the bare essence of war itself has remained largely unchanged since its mythic Western origins at Troy. Indeed, its violence has grown only more indiscriminate and encompassing. “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force,” the French philosopher Simone Weil argued soon after the fall of France in 1940. This is the opening claim of her treatise L’Iliade ou le poème de la force, which was published in the Marseilles literary magazine Cahiers du Sud in 1940–41, and in an English translation by Mary McCarthy in Politics in November 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the war. Weil defined force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” No cause, however noble, could alter the nature of that force—even if technology amplified it to a heretofore inconceivable scale—and Weil discerned a fundamental continuity between the seemingly alien world of Homer and that of 1940s Europe:
Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.
Allied victory would shatter that crystalline mirror for all but the most stubborn witnesses of force. The always inglorious work of war gradually became sanctified by virtue of its having been waged against regimes of unequivocal maleficence. In the process, war, the inherently violent thing itself—rather than the causes force might serve—became the subject of nostalgic remembrance and heroic celebration.
In this book I explore many attitudes toward the war as they evolved over the decades: individual and corporate, some expressed directly but others obliquely, full-throated patriotic fairy tales and remorseless satire. In addition to the eyewitness reportage of Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, John Hersey, and others, I examine the work of later journalists, historians, and commentators, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Studs Terkel, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Stephen Ambrose, and Tom Brokaw. I explore the postwar fiction of Ross Macdonald, Dorothy B. Hughes, David Goodis, and others, together with Hollywood films, the latter as collaborative expressions—involving not only screenwriters, directors, and actors, but also studio executives concerned chiefly with the marketability of their products—of a very different way of telling the World War II story. I am especially concerned with those observers who express doubt or confusion, ask questions, or otherwise complicate our picture of the war, for they illuminate at once the power and perils of mythmaking. Their work suggests that there are many other ways to understand and to tell the national story. Immune to the American horror of ambiguity as some kind of Old World con, these thinkers largely lack the “national vanity” Tocqueville attributed to us:
All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner. The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogy is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties, they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, while it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time.
It is Tocqueville to whom the champions of American exceptionalism like to trace their doctrine. But those champions tend to read him selectively; they forget not only that the chief source of exceptionalism as he saw it was national geography (largely protected by oceans and rich in resources) but also that the generally admiring Tocqueville was attuned to potential fault lines in the great experiment he was witnessing. It is his fascinated ambivalence they have conveniently forgotten.
The most potent and highly polished version of the World War II myth, which crystallized in the celebration of the Greatest Generation in the late 1990s, arose during and in the aftermath of the war’s fiftieth-anniversary commemorations. Its emphasis on a set of superior national virtues—generosity, decency, love of freedom—concealed a fundamental chauvinism. Its chief evangelists were the historian Stephen Ambrose, the journalist Tom Brokaw, and in certain respects the filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Today, in a young century defined by renewed confusion about why we go to war and how we get out of it, World War II endures for many as testament to the redemptive capacity of American violence. Long axiomatic, World War II’s goodness—and the greatness of the generation that fought it—has survived subsequent questions about the atomic bomb’s necessity and condemnations of the firebombing of German and Japanese cities. It withstood, and gathered strength from, a gradual erosion of American confidence in the latter half of the twentieth century, when a series of misguided military adventures failed to achieve anything like victory.
In the 2015 preface to his incisive book The Best War Ever: America and World War II, originally published in 1994, the historian Michael C. C. Adams proposed that the “widely accepted version” of the “Good War” was “fading or being put aside … as seemingly less relevant to the situation facing us in the second decade of the twenty-first century.” I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, the hold exerted by the Good War remains strong, one of the few national stories still available to both major political parties in a deeply partisan nation. It was especially attractive to the retrograde preoccupation with greatness that characterized the Donald Trump presidency and its commitment to the doctrine of America First. The appropriation of this term, originally the name of the committee of isolationists and fascist sympathizers who opposed our entry into World War II, is a symptom of American amnesia. Not even the Trump administration, for which nothing seemed sacred and everything appeared a target for disruption, dared to dismantle the myth of the Greatest Generation. Indeed, in June 2019, Trump engaged in what has become a presidential ritual—the D-Day anniversary speech in Normandy—with unaccustomed piety and restraint.
After the Allied victory in 1945, a Manichaean worldview, masterfully articulated in the rhetoric of Churchill and Roosevelt, outlived its propagandist purpose and the existential desperation that produced it to shape the Cold War. It required a paradoxical about-face: the USSR, mistrusted before the war, our ally during the conflict, became the new enemy, recognized as a totalitarian regime that outpaced even Nazi evil. It was a reversal so complete that in 1985, President Ronald Reagan claimed to be speaking for “most Americans” when he declared that the American volunteers (some of them communists) who fought against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War were in fact “fighting on the wrong side.” In a prime example of tortured cold warrior logic that same year, Reagan joined the German chancellor Helmut Kohl in a wreath-laying ceremony at a German war cemetery at Bitburg, home to the graves of SS as well as Wehrmacht troops. On this occasion, Reagan proclaimed that the buried soldiers were “victims of Nazism just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps.”
Reagan’s tendency to miss the “key point,” was, as Joan Didion suggests in a 1989 essay on the Reagan White House, “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” one of his defining characteristics. He was a man who engaged the “big picture,” not the crucial detail. It was the way he understood the Cold War: “The Soviet Union appeared to Ronald Reagan as an abstraction, a place where people were helpless to resist ‘communism,’ the inanimate evil which, as he … put it … had ‘tried to invade our industry’ and been ‘fought’ and eventually ‘licked.’ This was a construct,” Didion continues, “in which the actual citizens of the Soviet Union could be seen to have been,” like Hollywood during the Red Scare, “‘invaded’—in need only of liberation. The liberating force might be the appearance of a Shane-like character, someone to ‘lick’ the evil, or it might be just the sweet light of reason. ‘A people free to choose will always choose peace,’ as President Reagan told students at Moscow State University in May of 1988.”
After 1989, once the specter of communism officially stopped haunting us, the war myth would be invoked with renewed energy. George H. W. Bush’s service as a navy pilot in World War II invested him with a certain authority during the Gulf War, a credibility that perhaps predisposed the nation to support it and, as the former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington suggests, subsequently blinded the public to not only the abandonment of the Shiites and Kurds who had risen up against Saddam Hussein at America’s urging but also Bush’s indifference to the Gulf War syndrome suffered by many veterans and the longer-term consequences of our military intervention in the Middle East. Before the war began, Bush himself framed the problem by explicitly comparing Saddam Hussein’s regime to Hitler’s: Iraqi forces “have committed outrageous acts of barbarism,” he claimed, a degree of “brutality that I don’t believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in.”
That this war would redeem Vietnam for Bush also became clear: “Prior to ordering our forces into battle,” he told the nation in his announcement of Operation Desert Storm,
I instructed our military commanders to take every necessary step to prevail as quickly as possible, and with the greatest degree of protection possible for American and allied service men and women. I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam, and I repeat this here tonight. Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world, and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back. I’m hopeful that this fighting will not go on for long and that casualties will be held to an absolute minimum.
It is impossible to fight one war at a time. After the war, Bush proved far more interested in the metaphorical “Vietnam syndrome” than he was in the actual syndrome affecting Gulf War veterans: “By God,” he proclaimed in the wake of Desert Storm, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Vietnam constituted the most serious threat to the World War II mythology; victory in Iraq allowed us to hear once again the positive, life-affirming signals still pulsing from Bush’s own first war. This was the culmination of Reagan’s revisionist work.
In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the case for war was once again made through analogy with Hitlerian evil. George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others used a vocabulary inherited from World War II to shape the post-9/11 dispensation. The coinage Islamofascism yoked an amorphous new enemy with an old one that was easy to picture. Bush hailed American soldiers as liberators and described the enemy as an “axis of evil,” a phrase that evoked the Axis Powers. Analogies to Pearl Harbor appeared everywhere, stoking a desire for vengeance that, at least initially, generated support for the war and a great deal of show-patriotism. In Cultures of War, the historian John Dower, whose work has immeasurably complicated and enriched our understanding of the war in the Pacific, illuminates the ways in which, after 9/11, Pearl Harbor became a “code” for righteous American vengeance and “everlasting remembrance.” As public opinion turned against the Iraq War, Rumsfeld revived the specter of Hitler to justify its continuance. Typical of Rumsfeld’s rhetoric was a 2006 speech to the American Legion in which, in an argument about appeasement, he likened the world situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century to that of the 1930s:
It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies, when those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and Nazism were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.
Rumsfeld went on to suggest that the world was facing “similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.” As early as 1946, George Orwell pointed out that the word fascism had lost its specificity and had become a term that could be indiscriminately applied to any enemy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, history offered no more useful word for an administration facing increasing opposition to its seemingly unending military campaigns. Trump, whose foreign policy seemed to be guided by anachronistic isolationism combined with good measures of caprice, greed, and contempt, also returned to World War II, albeit in unconventional fashion, to justify his October 2019 abandonment of the Kurds to their Turkish enemies. The Kurds, he explained, “didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.” Pundits who called attention to the fact that Kurds did fight on the Allied side missed the larger point: World War II, eighty years in the past, could still be invoked as a kind of loyalty test.
This book explores various incarnations of—and alternatives to—a versatile, durable myth that still serves as a dangerous lodestone in American culture. The first chapter anatomizes its most influential version, that of the Good War and the Greatest Generation. There are many competing narratives of the war and always have been, and the second chapter looks back at the deeply ambivalent attitudes expressed toward World War II while it was being fought. My third and fourth chapters explore postwar reinterpretations, some crafted in response to successive conflicts, while the final chapter explores the powerful and particular connection between the country’s most significant foreign war and its monumental domestic conflict, the Civil War.
There have been several significant anatomies of the World War II mythos over the years. The historian John Bodnar offers an overview of strands of the myth in The “Good War” in American Memory, in which, he explains, “the sweet sounds of valor ultimately eclipsed the painful cries of loss.” Bodnar’s book illuminates various costs of American sentimentalizing of the war and suppression of alternative perspectives. He does not trace the consequences for foreign policy. Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building and the literary critic Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America have addressed World War II within a broader national history and specifically in connection with the idea of the frontier, while further complicating our understanding of war, violence, and memory, but both books were written before the turn of the century. In his recent book Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature Roy Scranton interprets our postwar attitudes toward projections of American power as the product of a reverence for the figure of the “trauma hero” and an undue deference to the veteran’s special, exclusive knowledge of war. That reverence, he argues, has been instrumental in concealing some of the war’s fundamental “contradictions,” and it led to a corresponding neglect of those literary responses that exposed them.
Recent alternative military histories have also illuminated aspects of wartime life that had been largely eclipsed by sentimental remembrance. These books include Mary Louise Roberts’s What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, which explores the destructive behavior of American soldiers in France, and Aaron Hiltner’s Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front, which documents the war’s unleashing of violence at home in the form of “uncontrolled and aggressive troops,” most conspicuously on the streets of “liberty ports” and army-post towns. “Nationwide,” Hiltner explains, “the papers filled with lurid stories of criminal activity perpetrated by soldiers and sailors.” Such work helps to remind us of the dangers of preferring myth at a moment when nostalgia for a good war, a greatest generation, and a simpler time remains as seductive as ever.
The ambiguities of Korea (the “forgotten” war that, technically, has yet to end), the mendacity and failure of Vietnam, the transitory triumph of the First Gulf War, the ultimate confusion of a seemingly unending war against what has come to be called global extremism, and, in the last few years, the prospective dissolution of the postwar liberal world order under the Trumpian mandate of America First: all these events have invoked, reflected, and renewed the mythical status of World War II. Each generation has found a new use for the Good War. Nostalgia for the war years remains a bulwark against doubt and disillusion, a great golden age to which we can always retreat to remember who we were and might be again, seeking safety through violent conflict because once we thought we found it there, retaining a faith in the American capacity for exceptional violence. Victory in the twentieth century’s second global conflict transformed the world and at the same time condemned the United States to a futile quest for another just as good, just as definitive, just as transformational. Wars never can do the work of redemption, even when their causes meet generally agreed-upon criteria for justice.
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth D. Samet
copyright © 1984 by Studs Terkel
