86 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
booksTHE GOOD FIGHT
The costs of sentimentalizing the Second World War.by carlos lozadaILLUSTRATION BY GÉRARD DUBOIS
T
he terrorist strikes of September
11, 2001, supposedly launched a
new kind of American war, with unfa-
miliar foes, unlikely alliances, and un-
thinkable tactics. But the language de-
ployed to interpret this conf lict was
decidedly old-school, the comfort food
of martial rhetoric. With the Axis of
Evil, the menace of Fascism (remixed
as “Islamofascism”), and the Pearl Har-
bor references, the Second World War
hovered over what would become known
as the global war on terror, infusing it
with righteousness. This latest war, Pres-
ident George W. Bush said, would have
a scope and a stature evoking the Amer-
ican response to that other attack on
the U.S. “one Sunday in 1941.” It wouldn’t
be like Desert Storm, a conflict tightly
bounded in time and space; instead, it
was a call to global engagement and
even to national greatness. “This gen-
eration will lift the dark threat of vio-
lence from our people and our future,”
Bush avowed.
Elizabeth D. Samet finds such famil-
iarity endlessly familiar. “Every Ameri-
can exercise of military force since World
War II, at least in the eyes of its archi-
tects, has inherited that war’s moral
justification and been understood as
its offspring: motivated by its mem-
ory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevita-
bly measured against it,” she writes in“Looking for the Good War: American
Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of
Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
A professor of English at West Point
and the author of works on literature,
leadership, and the military, Samet of-
fers a cultural and literary counterpoint
to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg in-
dustrial complex of Second World War
remembrance, and something of a med-
itation on memory itself. It’s not sim-
ply that subsequent fights didn’t resem-
ble the Second World War, she contends;
it’s that the war itself does not resem-
ble our manufactured memories of it,
particularly the gushing accounts that
enveloped its fiftieth anniversary. “The
so-called greatness of the Greatest Gen-
eration is a fiction,” she argues, “suf-
fused with nostalgia and with a need
to return to some finest hour.” Those
who forget the past may be condemned
to repeat it, but those who sentimen-
talize the past are rewarded with best-
seller status.
The mythology of the Second World
War features six main elements, by
Samet’s tally: that the United States
joined the war in order to rid the world
of tyranny and Fascism; that “all Amer-
icans were absolutely united” in their
commitment to the fight; that “every-
one” in the country sacrificed; that
Americans got into the war reluctantly
and then waged it decently; that the
war was tragic but ended on a happy
note; and, finally, that “everyone has al-
ways agreed” on the first five points.
The word choices here—“all,” “ab-
solutely,” “everyone,” and “always”—do
stretch the myths to the point of easy
refutability, but some of the best-known
popular chronicles clearly display the
tendencies Samet decries. “Citizen Sol-
diers,” Stephen Ambrose’s 1997 book
about Allied troops in Europe, presents
the reticence of American G.I.s in de-
scribing their motivations as a kind of
self-conscious idealism and aw-shucks
humility. “They knew they were fight-
ing for decency and democracy and
they were proud of it,” Ambrose writes.
“They just didn’t talk or write about
it.” But, without such oral or written
records, can one really divine such noble
impulses? Samet dismisses Ambrose’s
œuvre, including the nineteen-nineties
best-sellers, “Band of Brothers” and
“We search for a redemptive ending to every tragedy,” Elizabeth D. Samet writes. “D-Day,” as “less historical analysis