The idea that we went to war specifically or primarily to liberate Europe is largely a fiction, even though we obviously helped to accomplish that feat. It is also the case that Pearl Harbor focused us on Japan - and the cry was to avenge, not to liberate - but we still didn’t declare war on Germany. Several months after Pearl Harbor, members of the Roosevelt administration were worried that the country was growing complacent again. Pearl Harbor changed a lot of minds, but the idea that everybody changed overnight is overstated. The isolationist sentiment was very strong after World War I. senators, and a national hero, Charles Lindbergh - all were isolationists, and some were alarmingly sympathetic to European fascism. Before Pearl Harbor, there were many Americans who had no desire to intervene in the war: the America First committee - among whose members were public figures, U.S. SAMET: When we think back to World War II, we say, “Everybody was united, everybody was behind the war,” and certainly in comparison to subsequent wars, that’s true. GAZETTE: As a result of that mythology, you write, there is a “sentimental narrative” about World War II that obscures the historical reality of the conflict. It’s not a history of the war per se, but rather of how it entered our national imagination and was transformed into something else. It’s not an attempt to diminish in any way the cruelty or crimes of the regimes that we defeated or the significance of Allied victory.
I believe it was both justified and necessary. But my book is not an argument that our participation was either unjustified or unnecessary. This concatenation of events crystallized the mythology and effectively wiped away the traces of the deep ambivalence - and differences of opinion - about World War II that existed while it was being fought and in its aftermath. In addition, the 50th anniversary came close on the heels of the First Gulf War, which was an overwhelming spectacle of American power and was viewed by the first President Bush, who was a World War II veteran, as the war that would once and for all cure what he and others called the “Vietnam syndrome.” It seized the imagination because it came in the wake of wars that could not have been described as victories, chiefly Vietnam. It’s an immensely flattering and seductive narrative. In terms of popular culture, several films that came out around that period, but particularly Steven Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan” cemented this mythology in our imagination. Tom Brokaw labeled them the “The Greatest Generation” in his book of the same name.
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One of the people most closely identified with this version is the historian Stephen Ambrose, whose series of books about World War II were wildly popular they’re fast-paced narratives that tell a particular story of the “Good War” and portray American service members as decent, boyish liberators who come to seem larger than life. SAMET: The most robust version of the mythology surrounding World War II is that of the 50th-anniversary commemoration, which took place in the 1990s. GAZETTE: What are the roots of the mythology about World War II being the “Good War”? How did it take hold in the American imagination?
He was a man who valued the pursuit of truth, and it’s my persistent sadness that he was not able read it. I’m sure we would have agreed about certain points and disagreed about others in the book, and I think we would have had some great conversations. He was very young at the time, and I think he saw a lot of things that he never expected to see. My father was an air traffic controller in the Army Air Corps and served in a series of stateside bases and overseas in India. The whole project has its deepest roots in something we used to do together: I grew up watching World War II movies with him, and that was my first exposure to depictions of war in popular culture. He was, in large measure, the reason I wrote it. SAMET: My father died in December of 2020 while I was working on the last revisions to the book. GAZETTE: You dedicate this book to your father, a World War II veteran who died in 2020. (Editor’s note: The views expressed by Samet do not reflect the policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. This interview was edited for clarity and length
The Gazette spoke with Samet about how a “sentimental narrative” about World War II took hold in the American imagination after the losses of the Vietnam War and how it shaped, for better or worse, a false sense of national destiny. Samet ’91, professor of English at West Point, makes the case for demystifying World War II. In her new book, “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness,” Elizabeth D.
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