But how did the Good War become good, and what aspects of it had to be suppressed to qualify it for that title? John Bodnar, a history professor at Indiana University, discussed the ways in which the war dead have been recognized and how those practices reflect attitudes toward the conflict.
Bodnar, who traveled to towns and cities across the country to examine World War II monuments, found a marked contrast between the way the war has been memorialized on the national level and the way local communities recognized the sacrifices of their fellow citizens.
Memorials erected by cities and towns, on the other hand, emphasize the loss of individuals and the disruption to the life of the community. In the aftermath of the war, a national debate took place over how to memorialize the war dead. Among the questions considered was what to do with the bodies of slain soldiers. Even in the weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, most political leaders thought that war would be averted.
The outbreak of war was therefore an immense shock, one which precipitated a revolution in public opinion — not among jingoists, but liberals and radicals, including this paper. The Manchester Guardian had been very strongly opposed to war, and frankly isolationist. But when war was declared, he was so appalled by German perfidy that he enlisted, aged 47, dying his grey hair to conceal his age.
At the outset, every country thought victory certain, and everyone expected a very short war. But there were four more years to come, on a scale even more vast and terrible, as one country after another — or at least their rulers — grasped not only the human catastrophe but the grim political outcome. When peace came, there came also a long period of intense and repressed mourning. Remembrance took different forms in different countries, set in stone for posterity.
British war memorials are marked by their acute realism, with every detail of buckle, puttee and gun carriage captured as if never to be forgotten, so that they need never be seen again. See the works of the gifted sculptor Charles Jagger, his haggard infantryman at Paddington station, or the huge bas relief of the Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner, gunners dragging their guns through the mud.
Although the British thought that they had suffered an unimaginable loss, France had lost 1. But had the Germans? Their memorials were not so much mournful as defiant. Even so, in Berlin as well as Paris and London, the s were a time of hedonistic oblivion, as if to put the horrors out of mind. But there was also a reaction, beginning again with this paper. In , Montague published a book about the war, Disenchantment — whose title conveys its disillusioned dismay at the murderous folly with which the war had been fought, and disappointment at its political consequences.
He was a forerunner. All were published between and , and all told the same story of appalling and fruitless carnage. When the war had begun, it was greeted poetically, but not at all in the way we now think.
Less than a year after the war began, Grenfell and Brooke were both dead, and within three more years — after the carnage of Loos and the Somme and Passchendaele — their lines seemed repugnant. To be told that your menfolk had died bravely in a good cause was one thing.
And those other war poets, Graves, Blunden, Sassoon, who survived to write memoirs, likewise wrote poetry which is savage, bitter, and angry. On 1 August , a month to the day after the opening of the Battle of the Somme, he wrote a savage confidential critique of the offensive, detailing how little had been achieved, and at what enormous cost.
Churchill befriended Siegfried Sassoon, and used one of his poems as an epigraph to one chapter in a book about the war. He later wrote a preface to a harrowing documentary novel about a man unjustly court-martialled and shot for cowardice. In the late s Churchill tried to combat the revulsion from war that gripped England, but he had played his own part in fostering the belief that the Great War had been a bad war, in means if not ends. After those shifts in the perceptions of the Great War — intense grief with some manner of acceptance, and then repugnance — another war began, and reshaped memories of the earlier war all over again.
Churchill was central to this. In the process, the Great War was still further disregarded by implicit contrast. Besides, there were the war books and movies, heroic and defiant if not actually cheerful, in contrast with the sombre mood of the first world war memoirs. Part of the reason was simple: the British had suffered in the second world war about half the casualties of the Great War, and nothing like the massacres of the western front.
In other words, immediately following the war, people long under the control of powerful colonial governments claimed their independence and the right to rule themselves.
And the United States emerged from the war as one of, if not the , most powerful nations on the globe. Industry boomed to supply the Allies with weapons and transportation, and ended the Great Depression for good. Everybody, including women, immigrants, and African Americans, had more economic opportunity than ever before.
Back to WWII. America had some pretty arcane immigration policies on the books, barring Jewish immigration to America from the countries where Jews were the victims of an ongoing genocide. At first we didn't really know what was going on for Jews in Europe, but slowly we found out. And still, we did nothing to help. Wait, there's more: African-American soldiers could totes die for their country, but didn't have equal rights back at home, and Japanese Americans who'd built their lives here were forcibly incarcerated because they might be Japanese spies for the enemy.
America's always been solid at Jekyll and Hyde -ing it, and we wouldn't count on that changing any time soon. It's okay, facepalms are the first step to acceptance. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War Provocative and disturbing chapters describe the ways in which Americans dehumanized and demonized the Japanese in popular culture. Dower also explains how Japanese defined themselves with respect to their American foes.
This fascinating book includes several pages of illustrations including American political cartoons and Japanese propaganda posters. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl just 11 years old when Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands, where she'd been living with her family since Nazi rule meant increasing persecution of Holland's Jews, and in , Anne's family went into hiding in the "secret annex"—a hidden attic—of an Amsterdam row house.
For two years the family hid there, before they were betrayed and arrested by the Germans, then deported to the death camps of Poland, where Anne died in Only her diary survived to tell her tragic story.
In his humorous, vulgar, and heart-breaking descriptions of what American and British soldiers experienced in what has been called "The Good War," Fussell dissects euphemisms, demystifies common assumptions, and offers you a gripping image of one of history's most violent wars. Disney's creative contribution to Great War Literature. World War I In War Motivation of German Soldiers in How can Neoclassical Realism and Libe Effects of the two World Wars on the To what extent was the failure of app The decision to employ Nuclear Weapon Himmler's Third Reich.
His involv
0コメント