Do New Generations View WWII as a "Good" War?
Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, with the signing of the peace treaty aboard the USS Missouri. On August 22 the last American flying ace of the war died at the age of 103. My own father passed away last December just short of 98. He was about as young as someone could be and still be a WWII veteran. What had been 16 million servicemen is now about sixty thousand. The GI generation or “greatest generation” is rapidly passing away, and their view of World War II as “the good war” may pass with them.
All US wars before and after WWII were very divisive. The War for American Independence was virtually a civil war, with estimates that about a third of the population were Tories and another third on the fence. Some eighty thousand Tories were exiled after the war and much of their property confiscated. The War of 1812 was deeply unpopular in New England, where proposals of secession were not uncommon. Many Republicans denounced the Mexican War was an unconstitutional war of aggression. The Civil War, by its very nature, was divisive on both sides. Large numbers of prominent anti-imperialists opposed the Spanish-American War, and the Wilson administration had to do a great deal to “sell” the First World War to the American people. Ill-feeling about the First World War was largely responsible for our reluctance to enter the Second.
But World War II became the uniquely "good" war due to Pearl Harbor and Hitler. Pearl Harbor ended the very prominent prewar “isolationist” or “America First” movement. The “Old Right” was dead. The Japanese regime was sufficiently aggressive and militarist, and Hitler’s came to be seen as uniquely evil, to end (or at least silence) virtually all antiwar sentiment.
Some left-wing criticism of the war remained. The Communist Party of the USA followed Stalin’s orders to oppose the war-preparation effort while he was Hitler’s ally (1939-41). Communists became the most ardent supporters of the war after Hitler invaded Russia. Even before the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some people developed qualms about civilian bombing, and the internment of tens of thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans could never be justified. A few voices, like that of George F. Kennan, the architect of our postwar “containment” policy, noted that World War II was really the “tragic war” or just a “necessary war.” Perhaps the best wars can never be better than that.
The Cold War led many historians of the “New Left” in the 1960s to see World War II as tragic because it was the prelude to containment. They replaced the prewar Isolationists’ “America First” slogan with what Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “Blame America First” interpretation.
But the good-war view largely withstood the 60s and strengthened in the relatively conservative 80s and 90s. Tom Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation in 1998. Historian Steven Ambrose, who early work was quite critical of US foreign policy, recognized the appeal of the GI generation and became one of its most prominent chroniclers. That generation reached its apex and began to crest by then—every president from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush was born between 1905 and 1925. 50th anniversaries of World War II marked the 1990s. The World War II Museum opened in New Orleans in 2000, and the WWII Memorial in Washington DC in 2004.
The Neo-Isolationists are on the American Right, those who point out the high cost of the post-Cold War “nation-building” and “forever wars.” It has spilled over into a new judgment about World War II. Andrew Roberts recently wrote about how Winston Churchill is widely seen as one of the chief villains of the Second World War by young people. The WWII generation is also passing away in Germany and Japan, and young people there will surely be more open to revisionist interpretations their “bad wars.” Japan has been less willing to admit its wartime misdeeds, but even young Germans are starting to think that their country has been excessively guilt-ridden.
In 1999 David Kennedy concluded his award-winning volume of the Oxford American History series, Freedom from Fear, with an alternative way that Americans might have remembered the good war: We were too slow to wake up to Hitler’s threat; we didn’t take in his refugees; we needlessly provoked Japan to attack us; we let the Russians do most of the fighting in Europe; we engaged in unnecessary and racist overkill in the Pacific theater; inter alia. With the passing of the GI generation, that view is probably going to become more common.
