Looking for the Good War

November 1, 2021
The popular perception of WWII as the "Good War" hides a darker reality, according to this iconoclastic study by West Point English professor Samet (No Man's Land). Challenging rose-colored takes on the war as the triumph of the democratic common man over fascist tyranny, Samet argues that America's war was a morass of indiscriminate carnage fought by draftees with little ideological motivation—and, in the case of Black soldiers facing racial discrimination, deep ambivalence—amid considerable public disaffection on the home front. Worse, she contends, the retrospective veneration of the war as "a testament to the redemptive capacity of American violence" justified misbegotten military adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere. Concentrating more on critical theory than politics or history, Samet probes interpretations of war in literary and cultural works from Shakespeare's Henry V to 20th-century war novels, Saving Private Ryan, and film noir's jaundiced view of an America coarsened and corrupted by the conflict and the troubled veterans returning from it. Samet's analysis is sometimes incisive but more often rambles through age-old indictments of the glorification of war. Ultimately, this intriguing provocation is too broad and unfocused to reveal much about why America keeps going into battle.

November 1, 2021

Americans tend to look at World War II as a "good war" that defined the country's preeminence and presumably exceptional role in the world. Author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning Soldier's Heart, West Point professor Samet has a different take, drawing on examples from literature and film to show that in the immediate postwar period Americans were more ambivalent about the war--and war generally. Later, World War II mythology escalated to the resplendent role of the military hero in post-Vietnam period, which, says Samet, gets in the way of our dealing with more recent military conflicts. With a 20,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from October 15, 2021
Samet investigates a vital question: "Has the prevailing memory of the 'Good War, ' shaped...by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good?" The author, a professor of English at West Point, engages in a simultaneously deep and wide exploration of the way the meaning and memory of World War II have shaped American identity, its sense of standing in the world, and narratives of other wars: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, "and, retrospectively, the Civil War." Drawing on a vast number of sources, including histories; firsthand accounts in letters, memoirs, and reportage; fiction; movies (produced during and after the war); comic books; and the Army's guidebooks for soldiers, Samet smoothly distills the myths Americans have told themselves to justify the epithet of the "Good War" for a noble battle to liberate the world from fascism. That self-righteous myth, Samet asserts, "appeals to our national vanity, confirms the New World's superiority to the Old, and validates modernity and the machine." The experience of the war was marked by disillusion and confusion in the battlefield and on the homefront. The author underscores the ambivalence that pervaded the nation. Even as reports circulated about Nazi atrocities, most Americans were indifferent. The Pacific war, writes Samet, was "complicated by bitter racism" against the Japanese, while postwar novels and films "exhibit [the] confusion, discontent, and disaffection" felt by many returning soldiers. Furthermore, violence became not just associated with battle, but "an end in and of itself." For example, "in the absence of a foreign enemy against whom to deploy their violence, comic books moved in the direction of brutality and horror." Violence remains a lasting legacy of the war, leading Americans "repeatedly to imagine that the use of force can accomplish miraculous political ends even when we have the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to tell us otherwise." Not just timely, Samet's work is incisively argued and revelatory in its criticism. A cogent analysis of the cultural realities of war.

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