“We were children still,” he wrote, “and, like all children, fascinated with killing.” Such children may have fought valiantly, Samet writes, “but their motivations were hardly lofty, their experience less than ennobling.” Samet quotes a memoir by the Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan, who joined the Navy in 1941 in order to escape a dire economic situation in rural Wyoming. Not that Ambrose’s heroes would have necessarily recognized themselves in his beatific portraits. Samet, whose new book is “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.” Credit. But she maintains that it’s been a national fantasy to presume that “necessary” has to mean the same thing as “good.”Įlizabeth D. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see World War II as something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Her book is therefore a work of unsparing demystification - and there is something hopeful and even inspiring in this. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.” Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. She briskly enumerates the speech’s jumble of platitudes - “‘Great Crusade’ (Eisenhower), ‘Freedom’s Altar’ (a Civil War song), ‘consecrated to history’ (bastardized Lincoln), ‘new frontiers’ (misappropriated Kennedy), ‘heat of battle,’ ‘fires of hell,’ ‘Nazi fury,’ ‘awesome power,’ ‘breathtaking scale,’ ‘cherished alliance,’ ‘undying gratitude’ (clichés) and ‘tough guy’ (ad-lib).” What Samet calls our “tin-eared age of tweets” can make it harder to distinguish soaring oratory from flimsy bombast, but “most of the sentences won’t bear the weight of careful reading,” she writes.Īnd “careful reading,” as Samet provocatively (and persuasively) argues, can in fact be a matter of life or death. But Samet, a professor of English at West Point who has previously written about teaching the literature of warfare, refuses to grade on a curve. Some listeners were so surprised by the solemnity of Trump’s words that they eagerly welcomed it as evidence that he was donning the mantle of dignified statesman. Samet’s discerning new book about the gauzy mythology that has shrouded the historical reality of World War II, she reminds us of the 2019 speech that then-President Trump gave at Normandy, on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Among men of the 'war generation' particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.Toward the end of “Looking for the Good War,” Elizabeth D. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the 'disillusionment story' of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. Some argue that a 'cultural chasm' developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home.

What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. This article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War.

Good real war says our nostalgia