Twelve Points of the Second World War Book Review

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'Looking for the Good State of war' Says Our Nostalgia for World War II Has Done Existent Harm

• Nov. 29, 2021

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Toward the stop of "Looking for the Good War," Elizabeth D. Samet's discerning new book about the gauzy mythology that has shrouded the historical reality of Globe War 2, she reminds us of the 2019 speech that so-President Trump gave at Normandy, on the 75th anniversary of D-Twenty-four hour period. Some listeners were so surprised past the solemnity of Trump'due south words that they eagerly welcomed it as evidence that he was donning the mantle of dignified statesman. But Samet, a professor of English at West Point who has previously written about teaching the literature of warfare, refuses to grade on a bend.

She briskly enumerates the speech's jumble of platitudes — "'Nifty Crusade' (Eisenhower), 'Freedom's Altar' (a Civil War vocal), 'consecrated to history' (bastardized Lincoln), 'new frontiers' (misappropriated Kennedy), 'heat of boxing,' 'fires of hell,' 'Nazi fury,' 'awesome ability,' 'breathtaking scale,' 'cherished brotherhood,' 'undying gratitude' (clichés) and 'tough guy' (extemporaneous)." What Samet calls our "tin-eared age of tweets" can make it harder to distinguish soaring oratory from flimsy bombast, but "most of the sentences won't bear the weight of careful reading," she writes.

And "careful reading," every bit Samet provocatively (and persuasively) argues, tin in fact exist a matter of life or death. Glib treatments of Earth War II have done existent impairment, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how nosotros arroyo the futurity. As "the last American military machine action about which in that location is anything like a positive consensus," World War II is "the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of baseborn ones."

Her book is therefore a work of unsparing demystification — and there is something hopeful and even inspiring in this. Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see Globe War II equally something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. But she maintains that it's been a national fantasy to presume that "necessary" has to mean the same thing every bit "good."

Among the most credulous offenders, she says, have been figures similar Stephen Ambrose and Steven Spielberg, who came together for the HBO mini-serial of Ambrose'south "Ring of Brothers" — an ode to American might and pristine intentions. Ambrose may have been an academically trained historian, but he seemed to pride himself on existence a hagiographer. "I was ten years old when the state of war ended," he once recalled. "I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the globe from atrocity. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper."

Non that Ambrose's heroes would accept necessarily recognized themselves in his beatific portraits. Samet quotes a memoir by the Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 in society to escape a dire economic situation in rural Wyoming. "We were children still," he wrote, "and, like all children, fascinated with killing." Such children may take fought valiantly, Samet writes, "just their motivations were inappreciably lofty, their experience less than ennobling."

The farthermost depravity of the Nazis would retrospectively sanctify the "inglorious piece of work" of the Allied try, merely Samet points out that even after American entrance into the war, liberating the Jews was never a priority. "Why We Fight," a series of propaganda films that Frank Capra made between 1942 and 1945, made no mention of the Nazis' systematic attempt to exterminate the Jews, even though the American regime learned of the Final Solution" as early as the summer of 1942.

The Us only entered the war after the set on on Pearl Harbor — and even and so, Samet says, contemporary observers remarked on "a general American indifference to the fact that the world was on burn." The war in the Pacific was "begun in revenge and complicated by bitter racism," she writes. She quotes a Marine's memoir recounting how Americans' contempt toward the Nazis couldn't compare to their "burning hatred" for the Japanese. "Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive," the journalist Ernie Pyle wrote, "the mode some people feel virtually cockroaches or mice." Surveying the records of the era, Samet contrasts this dehumanization with the portrayal of European fascists, who were more typically described as "gangsters."

Despite the swift rise of the "good war" mythology, there was a moment afterwards World War Ii when a more complicated moving-picture show persisted — and traces of it continue to this day, even if an "open, ambivalent, reflective way of remembrance" has been largely obscured, Samet writes. She seems to have seen every noir picture show featuring a disillusioned veteran who struggles to adjust to the postwar American dispensation. But she also shows how Hollywood was quick to overwhelm the culture with its "habitual optimism." The 1947 film "The Hucksters," for instance, begins with a veteran returning to the ad business concern only to detect himself feeling disgusted by information technology; the happily-e'er-later on ending comes non with him rejecting the industry but with his resolve to "sell adept things, things that people should accept, and sell them with dignity and taste."

The autumn of Saigon in 1975 may have temporarily hobbled the American strut of exceptionalism and invincibility, but the end of the Common cold War and the beginning of Operation Desert Tempest worked to restore some American conviction. Withal as good as such confidence can feel, information technology can also be deadly, Samet writes, feeding a "pernicious American sentimentality" that "brusk-circuits reason."

She ends with a affiliate on the old Lost Crusade mythology of the Civil War, which nosotros have turned into "a kind of theme park," suffused with symbolism and nostalgia, ignoring the expansionist wars this mythology later on enabled. The country'south imperialist ambitions in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were promoted as a nationalist project that would finally unite the North and Due south against a foreign enemy.

Only Samet is mayhap too insistent that the truth of the Civil War has been irrevocably lost to fanciful delusion. The myth, she says, is "then resistant to all subsequent attempts to undo information technology, the removal of a few statues and the renaming of a few buildings even so." This seems to me a pat way of playing down what's been happening over the concluding several years. Dismantling a few statues may not amount to a wholesale revision of historical retentiveness, but to write it off as extraneous detail is to submit to another abstraction, one where the edges of Samet'due south nuanced argument are tidier than they need to be. Every bit she herself puts it, "Wars are seething struggles, not object lessons."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/books/review-looking-for-good-war-elizabeth-samet.html

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