On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941

Notes

246 / Memory’s End? Appropriately enough, given what happened to the memory of World War i after 1945, eby’s works for Abbott laboratories largely eclipsed his drawings and etchings of World War i—so much so that few Americans today even know of the artist’s connection to the earlier conflict. While eby’s drawings of the Pacific theater have become fixtures in books and Web sites devoted to the Second World War, his earlier war scenes remain (with the exception of September 13, 1918: Saint Mihiel) largely forgotten . indeed, yale University Press never even bothered to renew the 24. Down the Net—Tarawa (1944) by Kerr eby. Courtesy of the navy Art Collection. Memory’s End? / 247 copyright on War; anyone wishing to reproduce the remarkable images in that volume may do so free of charge. eby’s prominence as an artist of the Second World War rather than the First arguably reflects the superior quality of his final sequence of war pictures. At the same time, however, the obscurity of his work from the interwar decades mirrors a larger dynamic in collective memory— namely, the overshadowing of World War i by World War ii. As historian Mark A. Snell observes, the greater scale and duration of America’s war from 1941 to 1945 made this memory gap inevitable. The Second World War cost the nation far more “treasure and casualties [than the First], and it was even more global in scope.”60 Approximately sixteen million Americans served in the armed forces in World War ii—as opposed to the roughly four and a half million inducted in 1917 or 1918—and as these men and women streamed home in 1945, they completely changed the complexion of the veterans organizations that had earlier focused on the memory of the First World War. Former doughboys became minorities in their own American legion or vFW posts, surrounded by younger veterans who would transform the nation into a land of suburbs, shopping malls, and highway overpasses, a supersonic America whose ties to the quaint era of Woodrow Wilson, biplanes, and hand-cranked victrolas seemed increasingly tenuous. By the early 1950s, American World War i veterans already seemed sidelined by history—an irony given the crucial role of the American legion , as led by former AeF officers, in the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (or Gi Bill), the benefits package that drove much of the postwar prosperity. however, during the 1960s, with the advent of the American war in vietnam, World War i made a comeback in terms of collective memory. indeed, the two conflicts seemed in many respects similar, an impression reinforced by both academia and hollywood. For professors and filmmakers alike, World War i became a metaphor for military futility, a forerunner—because it supposedly achieved nothing—of the quagmire in Southeast Asia. in 1967 literary historian Stanley Cooperman published his landmark study, World War I and the American Novel, which concluded (based on a survey of works by ernest hemingway, John Dos Passos , Thomas Boyd, William March, and others) that disillusionment and revulsion defined the American literary response to the First World War.61 Colored by vietnam-era politics, Cooperman’s book in effect aligned war writers of the 1920s and 1930s with war protesters of the 1960s and, in 248 / Memory’s End? the process, largely ignored the ideological subtleties and contradictions that characterize many American World War i novels. less explicitly tied to contemporary politics, historian edward Coffman’s important study of the AeF, published in 1968 (the year of the Tet offensive), nevertheless reflected the mood of the country through its ironic title: The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I.62 Three years later, hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo, formerly blacklisted, directed a well-produced screen version of his 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, the story of an idealistic doughboy who is horrifically wounded in battle.63 As historian Michael e. Birdwell notes, the film’s marketers stressed the cautionary relevance of the First World War, a proto-vietnam, to the flower-power era: the movie’s poster “featured a hand, forming a peace sign with a doughboy’s image going over the top on its base.”64 Significantly , Trumbo’s was the first major motion picture to focus on American troops in World War i since John Ford’s remake of What Price Glory? in...