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  • The Limits and Fears of Flesh and Blood
  • Michael J. Allen (bio)
William I. Hitchcock . The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe. New York: Free Press, 2008. vii + 446 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00.
Andrew J. Huebner . The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. x + 371 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95.

Speaking at the dedication of the National World War II Memorial on the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, President George W. Bush praised "the modest sons of a peaceful country" who gave "their lives to the greatest mission their country ever accepted." "Wherever they advanced," he averred, "they are remembered for their goodness." To prove their beneficence, Bush told the story of a displaced Polish man liberated by advancing Americans. "We started hugging each other, crying, and screaming 'God sent angels down to pick us up out of this hell place,'" the Pole recalled. "Our boys weren't exactly angels," Bush allowed. "They were flesh and blood, with all the limits and fears of flesh and blood." But that only made them more remarkable. For these ordinary Americans faced an extraordinary ordeal, he continued, quoting Ernie Pyle, "of Jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C-rations and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing and of laughter too . . . and of graves and graves and graves." Those graves—evoked by the 4,048 gold stars on the monument's Freedom Wall, one for every 100 Americans killed in the war—were the true measure of the Americans who "saved the liberty of mankind."1

Whatever his limitations as a public speaker, Bush eloquently articulated the Second World War's meaning for most Americans, just as the monument where he spoke, despite its artistic flaws, accurately reflected the war's central place in American memory. A war of liberation, not of conquest—"Americans came to liberate, not to conquer" the monument proclaims—it marks the United States not only as exceptional, but as providential. "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation," former [End Page 539] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once insisted, citing her own history as a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as proof for this view.2 For her, as for so many Americans, World War II remains the nation's lodestar, its eidolon more haunting with every failed military venture it inspires.

Since the most spectacular of those failures, the American war in Vietnam, historians have sought to challenge this reverence for "the good war." Starting with the war's defining horror (Robert H. Abzug, Inside The Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, 1985), its most brutal theater (John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 1986), and its most murderous weapons (Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, 1987), scholars soon came to write critical general histories of the war (Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, 1989), the home front (Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, The War In American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, 1996), and traffic between the two (George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II, 1993). This work reflected and fueled the rise of the new military history, which led historians to bring the study of war down to the experiential level, yielding powerful insights on World War II's "awful animal indecencies" (Gerald F. Linderman, The World Within War: America's Combat Experience In World War II, 1997, 320).

Yet however much their work changed scholarship on the war, it failed to corrode the war's popular mystique. If anything, emphasis on war's horrors inspired a greater self-regard on the part of many Americans, as those who never went to war adopted a solicitous concern for those who did. A sense of indebtedness...

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