The New Yorker - USA (2021-11-29)

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THE NEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 29, 2021 87

than comic-book thought bubble.” Ob-
sessed with notions of masculinity and
chivalry, Ambrose indulges in “a fan-
tasy that American soldiers somehow
preserved a boyish innocence amid the
slaughter,” she writes. If anything, the
boyish innocence may belong to Am-
brose himself, who admits that he grew
up venerating veterans of the Second
World War, a youthful hero worship
that, Samet notes, “tends to overwhelm
the historian’s mandate.”
For a more accurate account, Samet
highlights a multivolume study, “The
American Soldier,” by the sociologist
Samuel Stouffer and a team of collab-
orators. During the war, they studied
the ideological motives of American
troops, and concluded that, “beyond
acceptance of the war as a necessity
forced upon the United States by an
aggressor, there was little support of at-
tempts to give the war meaning in terms
of principles and causes.” Samet finds
this real-time depiction of a nonideo-
logical American soldier to be credi-
ble. In the words of the military sociol-
ogist Charles C. Moskos, who studied
the motivations of soldiers in the Sec-
ond World War and in Vietnam, each
man fights a “very private war... for
his own survival.” Or, as John Hersey
put it in a later foreword to “Into the
Valley,” his narrative of U.S. marines
battling on Guadalcanal, the soldiers
fought “to get the damn thing over and
go home.”
Samet argues that Steven Spielberg’s
blockbuster movie “Saving Private
Ryan,” from 1998, is “wholly unrepre-
sentative” of Second World War atti-
tudes toward the individual soldier. She
contrasts the 1949 film “Twelve O’Clock
High,” in which a brigadier general
(played by Gregory Peck) insists that
his men place collective loyalties above
personal ones. After one pilot breaks
formation, during a sortie over Nazi
Europe, in order to assist a fellow-aviator
at risk of being shot down, Peck lashes
out, “You violated group integrity....
The one thing which is never expend-
able is your obligation to this group. . . .
That has to be your loyalty—your only
reason for being.” By focussing on the
fate of a single survivor, Samet writes,
Spielberg’s film “effectively transforms
the conflict from one characterized by
mass mobilization and modern indus-

trial warfare to something more old-

fashioned, recalling the heroism of an-

cient epics,” in which individual glories

and tragedies take narrative precedence

over the wider war.

Samet is particularly harsh on Tom

Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,”

also from 1998, with its “explicitly mes-

sianic agenda” of showing us a cohort

so packed with honor and honesty and

self-sacrifice that it was, as the news-

man writes, “birthmarked for greatness.”

In a section titled “Shame,” Brokaw ac-

knowledges the racism that was so “per-

vasive in practice and in policy” in this

greatest of eras, but he responds with

uplifting sketches of members of racial

minorities who manage to overcome it.

(“It is my country, right or wrong,” one

of them concludes. “None of us can ever

contribute enough.”) Samet dissents,

stressing, for instance, that the conflict

in the Pacific, “begun in revenge and

complicated by bitter racism” against

the Japanese, has been overshadowed

by the less morally troubling sagas of

European liberation.

“Unity must always prevail,” Samet

writes of the war myths. “Public opinion

must turn overnight after Pearl Harbor,

while the various regional, racial, and

political divisions that roiled the coun-

try must be immediately put aside as

Americans rally toward a shared cause.”

A more complicated reality emerges in

Studs Terkel’s 1984 “ ‘ The Good War’ ”

(the title includes quotation marks be-

cause the notion of a good war seemed

“so incongruous,” Terkel explained), an

oral history that amasses the recollec-

tions of wartime merchant marines, ad-

mirals, U.S.O. entertainers, G.I.s, and

nurses. Their views on the war span “the

sentimental and the disillusioned, the

jingoistic and the thoughtfully patri-

otic, the nostalgic and the dismissive,”

Samet writes.

To investigate cultural attitudes to-

ward G.I.s in the aftermath of the war,

she considers such novels as John Horne

Burns’s “The Gallery” (1947), in which

American soldiers in Italy engage in

black-market transactions with locals;

and such movies as “Suddenly” (1954),

in which Frank Sinatra portrays a vet-

eran turned contract killer who hopes

that his war record will win him sym-

pathy. (“I’m no traitor, Sheriff. I won a

Silver Star.”) In other noir films of the

sullivan associates

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