The "Good War" in American Memory (review)

Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, railed against what he called the Disneyfication of American understandings of World War II. The recent adulation of the "greatest generation" and the runaway success of films and television programs such as Band of Brothers may, if anything, have only brought the Disneyfication to another level. The war has become shorthand for all that was right with America and all that Americans can achieve when they are determined. Yet anyone who has read the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and so many others will instinctively know that the war had a dark side even for white male veterans (the group that the war most benefited), despite its relatively low cost for America, in comparison to the horrors the war visited on the Soviet Union, China, India, and so many other nations.

John Bodnar provides an analysis of the contested remembrance of the war in this wide-ranging study of American history and memory. While this kind of analysis has become rather common in studies of World War I, they are relatively new for the field of World War II. Bodnar takes great pains to show that the war's meaning was contested from the very beginning and has remained so ever since. Mixed with the heroic representations were more sober ones that focused on the suffering of the war and its inability to make the world the better place that politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt promised in his Four Freedoms.

America was, of course, different from the war's other major belligerents. It is unimaginable for the war to be remembered as "good" in the defeated nations of Japan, Italy, or Germany. Nor is it any more imaginable for those nations on the ostensible winning side like the Soviet Union, with its estimated 25 million dead, or France, where a great national "oublie" (forgetfulness) characterized memory for decades. The United States was never invaded or occupied, and many of its citizens recall the war as a time of relative prosperity and freedom from prewar mores. At the same time, of course, the nation had to confront its own deep racism, which produced widespread violence, a segregated army, and the internment of Japanese-Americans.

While Bodnar does not engage in an explicit comparison with the experiences of other nations, he does examine how a widely shared American faith in its own exceptionalism shaped its memory of the war. Having experienced a different war from the rest of the world, and having a different sense of themselves, Americans retained a belief in their distinctiveness through their books, movies, and commemorations. This sense of distinctiveness continues today, as the triumphal tones of American memory contrast with the much more ambiguous memories prominent elsewhere.

The central theme of Bodnar's work is that while Americans understood their war to be distinct, they nevertheless disagreed strenuously about its ultimate meaning. The Disneyfication that so enraged Fussell was present early on, but only became dominant as time passed and, most critically, as the Vietnam War seemed to heighten by contrast the virtues of America's World War II experience. A second, and perhaps more important, theme of the book is the contrast between both official and unofficial commemoration of the war and the experiences of the men and women who fought it. The destruction, death, and racism that soldiers experienced rarely found a place in the national memory, drowned out as they most often were by triumphant and heroic treatments.

These subjects bear serious consideration, for, as Bodnar notes (if at times indirectly) that these memories mattered to postwar-American domestic and foreign policy. As the triumphant vision of the war became more and more accepted, it became a part of the national consciousness. Consequently, Americans came to see the World War II model as normative and applied its "no substitute for victory" model to the wars in Korea and Vietnam without an appreciation of the major differences...