Was World War II really such a "good war"? Popular memory insists
that it was, in fact, "the best war ever." After all, we knew who
the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for. The war
was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. A battle of
tanks and airplanes, it was a "cleaner" war than World War I.
Although we did not seek the conflict-or so we believed-Americans
nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation's
soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight. But
according to historian Michael C. C. Adams, our memory of the war
era as a golden age is distorted. It has left us with a
misleading-even dangerous - legacy, one enhanced by the
nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E. Ambrose and Tom
Brokaw. Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period,
Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience
of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities. In
the book, originally published in 1994, Adams challenges
stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the
simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification. The
Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s
and reveals the realities of ground combat: no moral triumph, it
was in truth a brutal slog across a blasted landscape. Adams also
exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the
war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age
divisions split Americans. Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia,
shell-shocked soldiers grappled with emotional and physical trauma,
rigorously enforced segregation, and rampant venereal disease. In
preparing this must-read new edition, Adams has consulted some
seventy additional sources on topics as varied as the origins of
Social Security and a national health system, the Allied strategic
bombing campaign, and the relationship of traumatic brain injuries
to the adjustment problems of veterans. The revised book also
incorporates substantial developments that have occurred in our
understanding of the course and character of the war, particularly
in terms of the human consequences of fighting. In a new chapter,
"The Life Cycle of a Myth," Adams charts image-making about the war
from its inception to the present. He contrasts it with modern-day
rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror, while analyzing the
real-world consequences that result from distorting the past,
including the dangerous idea that only through (perpetual) military
conflict can we achieve lasting peace.
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