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Chapter 3 Public Sentiments and the American Remembrance of World War II John Bodnar Victory in World War II did not mean that all Americans saw this cataclysmic event in the same way. Some people spent the war years helping to build bombers or partying in crowded nightclubs. Some slogged through jungles fighting enemies, and others mourned in the privacy of their homes. Americans have often referred to the experience as the“good war,”but no one epithet could capture the full range of personal and national experiences that citizens encountered in the early 1940s. To be sure the war created winners and losers and transformed the lives and politics of individuals and nations. Less noticed, however, was the fact that the war engendered a vast public debate over its significance that outlived the time of battles, bombs, and killings. Because the war was global and war experiences innumerable, cultural discussions over the meaning of the war and its remembrance after 1945 were widespread and reflected an ongoing struggle to organize knowledge about the implications of all that had taken place in the early forties and beyond . And because the meaning of the war cut so close to the sense Americans had of who they were as a nation, the discussion and contest over meaning was heavily implicated in the continuous need to restate American national identity. Nations that fought wars could not escape the problem of remembering them nor the civic need to cast a war effort into the larger story of the nation itself. The public debate over the war involved not only competing interpretations of the larger experience but fundamental epistemological issues of how to frame all of the bits of information about the event that circulated in public and private space. For the sake of discussion, this essay intends to stress the tension that existed between ways of knowing that can be labeled traditional or sentimental, on the one hand, and ironic or modern on the other. In his penetrating study of the “form and content of mourning” after World War I, historian Jay Winter revealed how Europeans—in a general response to widespread grief and death—turned to“traditional motifs”in order to understand and accept all the dying and suffering that had just occurred. He found in public commemoration of the war—in monuments, poetry, and rituals—the widespread use of ideas grounded in what he termed “sentimentality ” and “traditionalism.” Specifically they included representations of the war centering on “patriotic certainties,” “honor,” religion, and masculinity. For Winter this language of “traditionalism” helped to explain why so many had to die and served what he felt was a universal or human need of people in several nations to mourn and put the war behind them. Winter’s arguments put him in opposition to the classic work of Paul Fussell, who felt the Great War was recalled and understood in terms that were more “modern” than traditional. That is to say that conventional values seemed discredited after the war and that for many the scale of loss and destruction prevented the ready acceptance of rational descriptions of the war or consolation after all of the carnage. Traditional interpretations of the war promised to bring to individuals and groups honor, moral clarity, and comprehension. At the heart of modern memory were tropes of tragedy and trauma and the sense of “utter powerlessness” war brought to some individuals. How to establish the former over the latter was at the heart of the public discussion over the war in the first place.1 This essay seeks to examine this problem of remembering World War II in the United States. Clearly, America did not suffer the sort of homeland devastation that Europe saw in either World War I or World War II. Yet, nearly 400,000 Americans died in the conflict and nearly one million came home with physical wounds. The number with emotional scars has never been counted. The contributions Americans made to the defeat of evil regimes in Germany and Japan certainly contributed to a generally positive view of the war and of the nation that helped to win it. But efforts to understand how Americans might have reacted to both the significant number of casualties from their own country and the reality of all the killing and trauma around them have not often been made. Perhaps, in the glow of victory and the return of prosperity, Americans simply failed to take notice...

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