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  In memory of my father,

  Theodore S. Samet

  (1924–2020)

  Staff Sergeant

  126th Army Airways Communications System Squadron

  Pacific Theater

  World War II

  War would only be a remedy for a people always seeking glory.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, part 2 (1840)

  Some insisting on the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these being the two great American specialties.

  —D. H. Lawrence, foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

  Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

  —William Dean Howells on the failed dramatization of Edith Wharton’s tragic novel The House of Mirth; quoted in Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (1934)

  Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

  —Wallace Stevens, from the Adagia (1957)

  So you’re unhappy. Relax. There’s no law says you got to be happy. Look at me. I’m not happy. But I get my kicks. Gee, how could anybody stand it if they didn’t get their kicks?

  —Pat (Mary Astor), Act of Violence (1948), dir. Fred Zinnemann

  PROLOGUE: Is This Trip Really Necessary?

  Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective “good” mated to the noun “war” is so incongruous.

  —Studs Terkel, note to “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (1984)

  During World War II, American automobile owners were required to affix gas-rationing stickers to their windshields. Drivers were classified by occupation (A, B, C, etc.), each authorized a certain number of gallons per week. The backs of many of these stickers posed a pointed question to the man or woman at the wheel: “Is This Trip Really Necessary?” Designed to train civilian attention on an unseen war being fought far away, the sticker became at once a badge of sacrifice and a practical necessity. It would soon become a valuable black-market commodity. In May 1942, to save fuel and tires, a number of states also introduced a thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit: Victory Speed. As the literary critic and combat veteran Paul Fussell proposed in his angry, provocative 1989 book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, the resulting “inconvenience” served to remind Americans that there was “a war on.” That the public should need reminding; that there was in fact a robust black market (chiefly in beef and gasoline), operated, as John Steinbeck noted in a 1943 newspaper article, not by “little crooks, but the best people”; that the government felt the need to launch an unprecedented propaganda campaign to motivate civilians and soldiers alike—all these facts suggest the degree to which the goodness, idealism, and unanimity we today reflexively associate with World War II were not as readily apparent to Americans at the time.

  John H. Abbott was a conscientious objector assigned by the authorities to a series of stateside public works details until he refused even this duty. Convicted in 1943 for failing to remain in a public-service camp, he served two years in a federal prison. Years after the war, in an interview with Studs Terkel, Abbott recalled a prank he and some of his fellow COs used to play: “These gasoline stickers for rationing that you had on your windshield had a little note on it: Is this trip really necessary? We’d scratch out ‘trip’ and write ‘war’: Is this war really necessary?” One can disagree with Abbott—in other words, one can, as I do, believe that the United States’ involvement in the war was necessary—yet still question the way that participation has been remembered in the wake of wars considerably less galvanizing and unifying. Has the prevailing memory of the “Good War,” shaped as it has been by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good to Americans’ sense of themselves and their country’s place in the world? Has the meaning of American force been perverted by a strident, self-congratulatory insistence that a war extraordinary in certain aspects was, in fact, unique in all? Has the desire to divorce that war from history—to interpret victory as proof of America’s exceptionalism—blinded us to our own tragic contingency? Finally, has the repeated insistence by so many on the country’s absolute unity behind the war effort effectively exacerbated ongoing social and political divisions?

  These are some of the questions motivating this book. More than seventy-five years on, World War II remembrance continues to distort the country’s past and thus to obstruct the realization of a more expansive future. But that belief hasn’t prevented me from asking myself while writing this book, “Is this trip really necessary?” Such is the sacral force of war’s mythology, especially that of World War II—the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones—that I embarked on this project with some trepidation, even as I perceived the need to explore the ways in which retrospective interpretations of the Second World War, the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus, have shaped our thinking about American identity and, in particular, about American violence abroad and at home.

  Myths grant life and take it away, give birth to nations and tear them apart. All the countries that fought World War II developed particular narratives about this cataclysmic event. Several—France and Germany most conspicuously, perhaps—have already undergone serial, substantive revisions to their initial versions. There has always been a double edge to the American mythology surrounding World War II: for a long time now, it has simultaneously fortified and diminished the United States. In this book I set out to explore the ways in which the meaning and memory of World War II have evolved and periodically intersected with those of the other wars that have punctuated American history: Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War; our more recent wars; and, retrospectively, the Civil War. These conflicts, about which Americans tend to feel far more ambivalence, lie as close as World War II does to the heart of national identity, even if we prefer to think otherwise. Such trips into the past really are necessary if we are to see our way toward a viable future.

  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.”