The danger of American nostalgia for World War II
‘Looking for the Good War” is a remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words some 350 pages later. It is a stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war, written by an English professor who teaches Homer, Shakespeare and Styron to future officers of the U.S. Army. Elizabeth Samet is a professor of English at West Point. Her classroom high above the Hudson River must be a lively spot.
Samet is a fine writer with a gift for powerful arguments articulated in elegant prose. Her mission is to confront her compatriots with painful truths about our capacity to romanticize the wars in our history, and especially the one often referred to as “the good war” - World War II. She ends her introduction with one of many memorable passages: American “nostalgia for the war years remains a bulwark against doubt and disillusion, a great golden age to which we can always retreat to remember who we were and might be again, seeking safety through violent conflict because once we thought we found it there, retaining a faith in the American capacity for exceptional violence. Victory in the twentieth century’s second global conflict transformed the world and at the same time condemned the United States to a futile quest for another [war] just as good, just as definitive, just as transformational.” Even after half a dozen readings, these two long sentences still resonate.
Samet argues that in the decades since World War II, American attitudes have changed: A country once described as “the great nation of futurity,” preoccupied with enthusiastic anticipation of its glorious future, has become nostalgic for a comforting past that the culture has oversimplified and mythologized. Samet finds “a particular irony in dwelling so stubbornly in the past.”
She is particularly critical of two popularizing writers of history whose work has made a powerful impression on American culture: Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Ambrose’s volumes on the men who fought World War II, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Willies and Joes in the trenches, were enormously popular and, Samet argues, profoundly misleading.
“Ambrose carefully sculpted his stories, all of which share a worshipful tone and largely ignore contradictions or complexities that prove disruptive to a sentimental account of American decency and goodness. He promulgated a fantasy that American soldiers somehow preserved a boyish innocence amid the slaughter required to save ‘the world from barbarism.’ ” After dismembering Ambrose, she gives readers an intriguing review of the sociological literature on the motivations of soldiers in combat. They fight to survive and to protect their comrades; heroic patriotism is not a common attribute of men at war.