The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (review)

Marianna Torgovnick examines our collective memories of World War II and the conflicts that followed. Because questions not easily answered are posed at the beginning, her book is an interesting read. But it has a number of flaws. Torgovnick should have separated the subject of warfare from quite distinct subjects: her personal experiences on September 11, her assessment of various novelists who write about war, Adolph Eichmann and the Holocaust. The War Complex would have been more compelling had she done more than focus on cultural memories of World War II and our "altered state of consciousness produced by large scale war [that] can last beyond the end of hostilities" (p. xxiii). I believe that she could have constructed a stronger narrative had she understood how cultural memories of World War I and how it was fought had a direct impact on World War II and how it was fought.

Torgovnick is correct in saying that our cultural memories of World War II played a major role in shaping our consciousness throughout the cold war. Politicians in democracies and dictatorships captured and distorted that event to suit their own aims, leaving some of their audiences delighted, others in rage. People in Hollywood found out that a carefully crafted story about World War II could make for a fine film while also making them a great deal of money. But such a film can also reinforce a cultural memory of the war that is critically distorted and historically inaccurate.

Torgovnick devotes two chapters to Eichmann, the architect of the plan that moved millions to the death camps and the Holocaust, but she should have also considered the man behind the massive bombing of German cities, the Royal Air Force's General Arthur Harris. If she had devoted less attention to Eichmann—simply another German robot—and examined Harris's conscience, her argument could have been taken down some very interesting roads. Harris knew that his bombing campaign killed millions of innocents; it also left a cultural memory of the vast efficiency of air power that carried into the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, even posing a temptation to use nuclear weapons once again.

How we identify with war depends on our cultural background and what we have learned in school and from the media. In shaping the cultural memory of World War II in the United States, the media have deliberately protected Americans from its realities. What sane person wants to see the actual effects of combat and aerial bombing? In her concluding chapter, "Towards an Ethics of Identification," Torgovnick writes that "World War I made polite fictions about death difficult to sustain, World War II made them even more so." Yet if "polite fictions" about death in both world wars are actually the case, why do American politicians so often travel to Normandy to give speeches extolling the sacrifice American soldiers made in June 1944? Why do they continue to ask us for more sacrifices in the name of what they consider to be America's world mission?