Elizabeth D. Samet - Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

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In memory of my father,

Theodore S. Samet

(19242020)

Staff Sergeant
126th Army Airways Communications System Squadron
Pacific Theater
World War II

War would only be a remedy for a people always seeking glory.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, part 2 (1840)

Some insisting on the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these being the two great American specialties.

D. H. Lawrence, foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Yeswhat the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

William Dean Howells on the failed dramatization of Edith Whartons tragic novel The House of Mirth; quoted in Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (1934)

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Wallace Stevens, from the Adagia (1957)

So youre unhappy. Relax. Theres no law says you got to be happy. Look at me. Im not happy. But I get my kicks. Gee, how could anybody stand it if they didnt get their kicks?

Pat (Mary Astor), Act of Violence (1948), dir. Fred Zinnemann

Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective good mated to the noun war is so incongruous.

Studs Terkel, note to The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984)

During World War II, American automobile owners were required to affix gas-rationing stickers to their windshields. Drivers were classified by occupation (A, B, C, etc.), each authorized a certain number of gallons per week. The backs of many of these stickers posed a pointed question to the man or woman at the wheel: Is This Trip Really Necessary? Designed to train civilian attention on an unseen war being fought far away, the sticker became at once a badge of sacrifice and a practical necessity. It would soon become a valuable black-market commodity. In May 1942, to save fuel and tires, a number of states also introduced a thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit: Victory Speed. As the literary critic and combat veteran Paul Fussell proposed in his angry, provocative 1989 book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, the resulting inconvenience served to remind Americans that there was a war on. That the public should need reminding; that there was in fact a robust black market (chiefly in beef and gasoline), operated, as John Steinbeck noted in a 1943 newspaper article, not by little crooks, but the best people; that the government felt the need to launch an unprecedented propaganda campaign to motivate civilians and soldiers alikeall these facts suggest the degree to which the goodness, idealism, and unanimity we today reflexively associate with World War II were not as readily apparent to Americans at the time.

John H. Abbott was a conscientious objector assigned by the authorities to a series of stateside public works details until he refused even this duty. Convicted in 1943 for failing to remain in a public-service camp, he served two years in a federal prison. Years after the war, in an interview with Studs Terkel, Abbott recalled a prank he and some of his fellow COs used to play: These gasoline stickers for rationing that you had on your windshield had a little note on it: Is this trip really necessary? Wed scratch out trip and write war: Is this war really necessary? One can disagree with Abbottin other words, one can, as I do, believe that the United States involvement in the war was necessaryyet still question the way that participation has been remembered in the wake of wars considerably less galvanizing and unifying. Has the prevailing memory of the Good War, shaped as it has been by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good to Americans sense of themselves and their countrys place in the world? Has the meaning of American force been perverted by a strident, self-congratulatory insistence that a war extraordinary in certain aspects was, in fact, unique in all? Has the desire to divorce that war from historyto interpret victory as proof of Americas exceptionalismblinded us to our own tragic contingency? Finally, has the repeated insistence by so many on the countrys absolute unity behind the war effort effectively exacerbated ongoing social and political divisions?

These are some of the questions motivating this book. More than seventy-five years on, World War II remembrance continues to distort the countrys past and thus to obstruct the realization of a more expansive future. But that belief hasnt prevented me from asking myself while writing this book, Is this trip really necessary? Such is the sacral force of wars mythology, especially that of World War IIthe good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten onesthat I embarked on this project with some trepidation, even as I perceived the need to explore the ways in which retrospective interpretations of the Second World War, the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus, have shaped our thinking about American identity and, in particular, about American violence abroad and at home.

Myths grant life and take it away, give birth to nations and tear them apart. All the countries that fought World War II developed particular narratives about this cataclysmic event. SeveralFrance and Germany most conspicuously, perhapshave already undergone serial, substantive revisions to their initial versions. There has always been a double edge to the American mythology surrounding World War II: for a long time now, it has simultaneously fortified and diminished the United States. In this book I set out to explore the ways in which the meaning and memory of World War II have evolved and periodically intersected with those of the other wars that have punctuated American history: Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War; our more recent wars; and, retrospectively, the Civil War. These conflicts, about which Americans tend to feel far more ambivalence, lie as close as World War II does to the heart of national identity, even if we prefer to think otherwise. Such trips into the past really are necessary if we are to see our way toward a viable future.

We crossed the Belgian border and went for Mons at 4 oclock in the afternoon on September 2, 1944 When the first tank crossed the border it stopped. The general was riding behind it and he got out and the first thing he did was urinate. That is the kind of a commander he was, and that is what he thought of World War II

If wed got here nine days sooner, I said, it would have been the thirtieth anniversary of the British retreat from Mons.