1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe, by Peter Fritzsche
THE WOUNDED GENERATION: Coming Home After World War II, by David Nasaw
When the battered Trojan refugee Aeneas arrives at Carthage near the beginning of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” he beholds the story of his people’s destruction already emblazoned on the new city’s temple walls, more than a thousand miles from home. “What country on earth,” Aeneas marvels, “is not full of our suffering?”
Today’s world dwarfs that of antiquity, but news and war travel ever faster. Technology ensures that no conflict can be truly “limited” in space or time, and as the competition to dominate expands beyond the battlefield, war works ceaseless global change both explicit and insidious. Two books on World War II, Peter Fritzsche’s “1942,” about one year in the global conflict, and David Nasaw’s “The Wounded Generation,” about the Americans who survived it, reveal that the spillage of modern war into various aspects of civil life is one of the Second World War’s chief legacies. Confine it how you will — to a theater of operations, a particular national effort or a span of years — the war defies the boundaries we invent for it.
In telling the story of a year, Fritzsche, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about life under the Third Reich, argues that the war’s salient bequest is less the cataclysmic terminus of the atomic bomb than a tragic, ongoing global “unraveling.” Nineteen forty-two unfolded “war without end, and a world that became more decomposed and protean.”
It was the year that saw the start of the Bengal famine, during which an estimated three million people died, and in which an initial paroxysm of murder against Jews signaled “the systematic nature of Germany’s ‘Final Solution’” to the world. “Dead civilians,” Fritzsche insists, “stand out as the singular accomplishment of the war.” And for those who lived? It was, he declares, “the year of the refugee,” as millions were displaced by totalitarian aggression and imperial implosion.
Even as it brought economic prosperity to the United States, Fritzsche notes, the war caused profound domestic upheaval with long-term political reverberations: the unprecedented migration of those seeking work after the Great Depression, the entry of large numbers of women into the work force, the internment of Japanese Americans and the backlash against the Double Victory campaign in which Black Americans understood themselves to be fighting for freedom abroad and full civil rights at home.
Perhaps inevitably, given the book’s detailed attention to so many different episodes, the prose sometimes takes on the vertiginous quality of the events chronicled: sentences drift, phrases and clauses pile up, metaphors run wild. “1942” is nevertheless a notable achievement, for Fritzsche restores the humanity of diverse multitudes subjected to the war’s erasure and fascism’s effort to obliterate the very “idea of individuality.”
Like Fritzsche, Nasaw challenges us to rethink World War II’s domestic impact in “The Wounded Generation.” Bestowing a new name on the “greatest generation,” he excavates the war’s consequences for “the bodies, hearts and minds of those who fought, those who awaited their return and the nation that had won the war but had now to readjust to peace.” Nasaw deftly explores the ambivalent legacy of a war that Americans have been taught to think of as the good one.
A prizewinning biographer of powerful Americans like Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst as well as a historian whose numerous books confront the complexities of the 20th century, Nasaw picks up the story toward the end of the war. He describes the repatriation of the wounded and the maddeningly slow demobilization of troops stranded overseas, a process that provoked “near-mutinous protests, marches and demonstrations almost everywhere American troops were stationed.”
The book documents the long-term “aftereffects” of wartime behaviors, including addictions to cigarettes and alcohol begun during the war as a “palliative” for both numbing boredom and unspeakable terror. Nasaw also addresses the uncontrolled and sometimes brutal aggression displayed by G.I.s in their “sexual rampage through Europe.” He places particular emphasis on the epidemic of lifelong undiagnosed trauma among veterans who often “disguised their symptoms or stayed clear of military doctors” to avoid the stigma of a “psych” discharge.
Stateside, the immediate postwar period was characterized by dislocation and civilian fears about the millions of returning G.I.s: Would the flood of veterans destabilize an economy the war had rescued from the Depression? Would these violent strangers initiate a crime wave? As it happens, some of the most notable acts of violence, including the blinding of the Army sergeant Isaac Woodard as well as shootings and lynchings, were committed against Black veterans by white Americans fighting to preserve Jim Crow.
The heart of the book is Nasaw’s nuanced consideration of the incremental yet monumental construction of the “veterans’ welfare state” throughout the 1940s. It was fear, he contends, together with generosity and a sense of “obligation,” that drove the passage of the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, an “elaborate and generous social welfare program” popularly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, which redirected so many lives.
In a compromise ensuring the support of Southern Democrats wishing to preserve “the racial status quo,” this federal program would be administered largely at state and local levels. This arrangement made it more difficult for African Americans and women who served in uniform to access benefits. In addition, merchant mariners, WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots), war industry workers and other contributors to the effort were excluded altogether from these programs.
The G.I. Bill gave a great many Americans a lifeline, but this socioeconomic refashioning was limited by demographic realities: Veterans were 98 percent male and 90 percent white. “The bestowing of benefits on the veterans, but not on other citizens, had the effect of widening the gender and racial inequalities in education, assets, income and opportunities that had begun to narrow during the war years,” Nasaw writes.
Yet the provisions of the G.I. Bill were extraordinary: “free tuition, books and fees to attend college, vocational school or a job-training program.” By 1955, nearly eight million had taken advantage, over two million at colleges and universities. Veterans transformed higher education and were transformed in turn. One of the trends that surprised administrators was the number of G.I.s taking general education courses in the social sciences and humanities. These warriors clearly hungered for a liberal education.
They also flocked to the integrated spaces of art, theater, music and dance schools saved from extinction by the G.I. Bill. The unintended outcome was “a postwar renaissance in the American arts,” Nasaw observes. Those who took advantage of these programs included the Army privates Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein as well as less celebrated contributors to postwar culture such as the naval veteran Robert Barnett, who found his way to an obscure dance school in West Los Angeles run by the sister of the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and ended up dancing in New York City Ballet before becoming the artistic director of Atlanta Ballet. (Barnett, who turned 100 in May, still teaches today.) Through lives like Barnett’s, Nasaw eloquently humanizes the story of an entire generation.
In a lovely touch, Nasaw illustrates his book with Bill Mauldin cartoons, which are far more trenchant and provocative than most readers will remember. Like Aeneas gazing at the walls of Carthage, G.I.s could look at Mauldin’s work to find their own story. They saw their suffering certainly, but they could also discern the resilience, humor and democratic dignity with which they responded to the internal and external forces threatening to unmake them.
1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe | By Peter Fritzsche | Basic Books | 567 pp. | $35
THE WOUNDED GENERATION: Coming Home After World War II | By David Nasaw | Penguin Press | 478 pp. | $35
The post How World War II Transformed America and the Globe, for Better and Worse appeared first on New York Times.
