United States - World War II - Homefront, 20th Century American History - 1900-1945, 20th Century American History - World War II, United States - World War II Armed Forces

The Best War Ever

Name: The Best War Ever
Author: Professor Michael C.C. Adams
ISBN: 9780801846960

by Professor Michael C.C. Adams

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Overview

Was it really such a "good war"? It was if popular memory is to be trusted. We knew who the enemy was. We knew what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. It was a war of tanks and airplanes - a cleaner war than World War I. Americans were united. Soldiers were proud. It was a time of prosperity, sound morality, and power. But according to historian Michael Adams, our memory is distorted, and it has left us with a misleading - even dangerous - legacy. Challenging many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues that our experience of World War II was positive but also disturbing, creating problems that continue to plague us today. Combat was so brutal and demanding that 98 percent of men in action continuously for more than thirty days suffered breakdowns. Some American tanks and submarines were inferior to Axis models. Despite heroic fighting by African-American units, officially sanctioned racism kept Army facilities rigorously segregated. At one point in the Italian campaign, VD cases outweighed battlefield wounds. But because Americans at home saw their boys as "pure," the military considered sex education a covert operation. Censorship was strict; if journalists didn't censor themselves, the government did it for them. In short, says Adams, World War II was everything that war is: violent, uncertain, costly, and an arena for the best - and the worst - of human behavior. "When nostalgia drives us to depict war as a golden age in our cultural development," Adams writes, "a time of unending cheerful production, team spirit, prosperity, and patriotism, we trivialize the event by slighting the real suffering that took place. And we lose sight of the fact that war is inherently destructive - wasteful of human and natural resources, disruptive of normal social development. We risk initiating human catastrophes in the questionable belief that history shows wars will cure our social problems and make us fee

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Editorials

Booknews

Argues that the US experience of World War II was not nearly so positive as contemporary reports and subsequent history would have us believe. Explores such taboo topics as the emotional breakdown of soldiers, institutional racism, equipment inferior to that of the enemy, the devastating toll of venereal disease, the reluctance of the government to provide sex education, and the high degree of censorship. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

This book will be most valuable to students and general readers who have not given World War II serious study but who are interested in achieving a better understanding of America's experience in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called 'the Great Crusade.'.