Victory Through Valor: A Collection of World War II Memoirs (review)

This edited collection offers excerpts from oral histories related to efforts of the U.S. during the Second World War. The project was funded and supported by the St. Louis Gateway Chapter of the Battle of the Bulge, a nonprofit organization of veterans. This collection is a welcome contribution to the rapidly growing World War II literature. Like this work, a number of recent volumes leverage oral histories as a primary method of documenting the lived experience of servicemen and those on the home front. This volume features brief snippets of dozens of oral histories, primarily collected from the St. Louis region. The collection’s primary focus is not only on the experiences of men stationed overseas during the war but also features a modest collection of interviews with women who worked in defense industries, joined the service, or worked in other various capacities on the home front. The majority of those interviewed were born in the St. Louis region, though some were born elsewhere in the Midwest.

This project represents a worthwhile example of an oral history project brought to completion by a self-funded and self-organized group of individuals. While many of the interviews offer special insights to the fighting in Europe—especially the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and 1945—the recollections also document events such as Pearl Harbor as well as noncombat-related experiences such as wartime production in factories in the U.S. Some of the recollections offer striking, yet brief, descriptions of the carnage of battle. Lyle Bouck, Jr., describes his radio being shot out of his hand while trying to communicate during a firefight with Germans (42). Thomas Hancock relates learning how to judge where artillery shells would land based on the sound alone (102). Eugene Ganz explains the hardship of learning of his father’s death in a letter shortly after being wounded by German artillery (227). Significantly, many of these oral histories recount the first encounter GIs had with new German jet aircraft, an innovation that would gradually change warfare over the ensuing decades. The vast majority of these accounts are quite brief, only one to three pages. Each interview is introduced with a descriptive introduction providing some context for the brief oral history selections.

The primary weakness of the book is a lack of analytical reflection on the meaning of the vast array of experiences documented in this book. Although presenting lightly edited sections of oral history interviews is a worthwhile endeavor, the reader would certainly benefit from an analytical review of how these sections were selected from the larger body of interviews. What sorts of events or experiences were prioritized and why? How were narrators selected? How do the interviews fit within our existing knowledge of American social and cultural history? Who conducted the interviews and what were their primary interests? This book is also fairly overt in its celebratory tone of the so-called “Greatest Generation.” While celebratory language is appropriate in recognizing the contributions of individuals who lived through this time in U.S. history, it can also distract from a more complex and richly textured narrative that accurately recognizes the strife and hardship that was born out of racial, labor, and sexist tensions of the era. Momentary gains made by women and minorities were largely redacted following the war, helping to ignite both the Civil Rights Movement and Second Wave Feminism in the decades that followed the war. These types of narratives, among others, are buried by celebratory language.

Despite these criticisms, this volume offers another valuable and accessible addition to available source material of the oral histories documenting the Second World War. As the sun begins to set on our ability as historians to document these types of first-hand accounts through oral history, we need to take extra steps to provide future generations of students and scholars with the most worthwhile and complete resources...