The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers (review)

In the ironically titled, The Good Occupation, historian Susan Carruthers chisels at the veneer of virtue applied to the United States' occupations of Germany and Japan (with nods to Italy and Korea) in the wake of World War II. "The exercise of dominance tends," Carruthers argues, "to foster cupidity and corruption, eased by an assurance of entitlement. . . Occupation's structural asymmetries generated stronger incentives to vice than virtue" (311). Her book is an extended litany of such vice, from the antiSemitism of George Patton to the casual sexism of the average uniformed man, from looting and black-marketeering to sexual dalliances and diseases. "These inconvenient truths were not unknown to postwar Americans" (312), a point Carruthers proves with dense citations from personal correspondence, press reports, diaries, instant histories, novels, plays, and films from the early postwar era. These she interweaves with the major secondary literature in English and her own vibrantly descriptive prose to create a highly readable but undertheorized book on the controversies, foibles, and failures of occupation.

"Unlike our generation," Carruthers insists, Americans at the time "needed no reminding that occupation" is a morally messy and often unpleasant business (312). But does the straw man Carruthers ambiguously dubs "our generation" really need reminding? Carruthers finds disarray, demoralization, and vice easily enough when she looks for them, but so have countless other scholars of occupation writing in dozens of languages. Few students or scholars of the era will be surprised by her findings. Nor will those versed in military culture or history be shocked by reports of homesickness, demoralization, indiscipline, drunkenness, and what a Victorian moralist might call debauchery amongst American troops in foreign lands. Possibly Carruthers intends to capture a popular rather than scholarly audience. Her book 's vivid prose, grunt's-eye view, Manichean morality, and grammatical informality (Carruthers uses contractions, but so sparingly that each contraction startles) would be accessible and entertaining to undergraduate and general readers. It invites judicious classroom use.

Too often, Carruthers's tawdry anecdotes read less like data than like tabloid exposé, for she spends less time analyzing than listing incidents of "vice" amongst occupation forces. We might grant for the sake of argument that a historian's purview is to pass moral judgment on so complex a phenomenon as occupation or so heterogeneous a group as occupation forces. Unfortunately, Carruthers fails to clarify the grounds on which to judge goodness, which leaves the book a conceptual and moral muddle. Is the criterion of goodness the occupation's success in effecting demilitarization, democratization, or economic reconstruction in the territory of a former Axis power? Apparently not, for Carruthers scarcely mentions these key policy goals and historiographic concerns. A newcomer to the field could be forgiven for concluding, upon finishing her book, that the occupations had neither intelligible policy goals nor defensible outcomes of any kind. Is the criterion of goodness the impact of occupation on the occupied? Apparently not, for the occupied are little more than a shadowy backdrop in this all-American morality tale. Carruthers excludes from consideration sources in any language native to the occupied, an exclusion that sits uncomfortably alongside her own repeated chastisement of occupation personnel for their indifference to the languages and concerns of the occupied. Carruthers offers no higher or wiser path.

If anything, she establishes too little critical distance from her midcentury American informants. If they construed extramarital sex, divorce, or venereal disease among occupationaires as evidence of immorality, should we also? These putative vices can be seen from diverse perspectives, perhaps as morally neutral or even as liberatory and progressive. Rather than wrangle with such moral and theoretical complexities, Carruthers seems content to cite almost any contemporary critic as evidence that occupation was not deemed uncontroversially "good" at the time and must therefore not be judged "good" in retrospect. In so doing she comes surprising close to reaffirming some reactionary values.

At other moments, Carruthers...