Skip to main content

The Good War

By


The further a war drifts into the pages of history, the better it is remembered.  That is certainly the case with World War II, which has been called The Good War because the allied forces were able to defeat the axis of Fascism that threatened the make up of Europe.

D-Day is for Americans and Europeans what Victory Day is for Russians.  The successful invasion of Normandy eventually brought an end to the war, but the Germans were already back on their heels after the defeat they suffered at Stalingrad.  This was a German army clearly on its last legs, and while we finished them off, Soviet forces claimed much of Eastern Europe as their spoils.

The number of deaths as a result of this war was absolutely staggering.  An estimated 50 million people died.  60 per cent of the deaths were civilian, as city after city was laid to waste.  It was only after the defeat of Hitler that we were able to see the carnage.

But, D-Day is a day of remembering heroic moments and even re-experiencing them as Jim "Pee Wee" Martin did.  The spry nonagenarian relived his jump from 70 years earlier on "Utah Beach," recalling to a bevy of reporters what it had been like before.


Many persons believe this was the "Greastest Generation" for having lived through Depression and War.  It doesn't take much effort to read into the margins and discover that this generation wasn't much different than any other. The United States was a deeply divided country which deferred most of the difficult decisions to the next generation, i.e. Civil Rights.  But, the fact that this generation won the war made the men (and women) seem larger than life.

We are blessed with so many indelible images of this generation from the famous kiss at Times Square (which came after V-J Day) to Rosie the Riveter.  The Navy had John Ford make a documentary of the Battle of Midway.  Countless other documentaries filled the screens, making World War II the first war to be directly broadcast back in America, focusing on the more glorious aspects.  It wasn't until afterward that films like The Best Years of Our Lives appeared, showing the downside of coming home, but even this film is remembered in heroic terms.

It is not to diminish this defining moment in World War II, but if this day was "world changing" then why did it take so long to see something positive come out of the war?  No sooner did we celebrate V-E Day a year later than we saw the world plunged into a Cold War that would spawn proxy wars all around the globe, notably in Burma and Vietnam.   Dictatorships lingered on in Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal.  Africa began to burst at its colonial seams, giving rise to fratricidal conflicts throughout the continent.  The United Nations was formed to try to address these conflicts, but it was relatively powerless to do anything about them, since the Soviet Union was given a unilateral veto just like the United States.


It was only in the late 1980s that we began to emerge from all these post-WWII conflicts to have a brief moment of peace.  It seemed we could finally enjoy the post-war society the defeat of fascism had promised more than 40 years before.  Alas, no sooner had we embraced this moment than we found ourselves plunged into a new conflict in Iraq, with the United States equating Saddam Hussein's regional ambitions with that of Hitler, threatening the stability of the Middle East.  As Chris Hedges noted, war is a force that gives us meaning.  We don't seem to appreciate the benefits of peace.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more