by Studs Terkel
608 pages, The New Press
Review by Dave Loftus
Since that sailor snogged the face off that
woman on Times Square in 1945, it has been universally agreed that the Second
World War was the human race’s finest hour. Even with seventy million deaths and
enough Nazis to suit the most avid fan playing on your mind, you’d be hard-pushed
to actually argue against those glorious six years, when the peoples of the
world – including, almost certainly, some of your older relatives – stood up to
the leviathan of pure evil with technical know-how and humble grit. Eventually,
the good guys won and never again didst
the souls of thine Lord do battle upon the face of the Earth.
Except it wasn’t like that, was it? Nothing
in history is ever that black-and-white. Probe even an inch below the surface
and you’ll find an uncomfortable gaggle of questions gagging for air: Such as, how
did a whole nation succumb to the idea of monumental racism in the first place?
Why did America get so chummy with Nazi scientists in the post-war scrabble for
the bomb? How did the Russians become foes so quickly? Why did Korea happen
only five years after that aforementioned smooch? Was Nagasaki necessary?
These questions – and a whole lot more – are
what struck me most when I made my way through Studs Terkel’s compelling 1984 chronicle
of recorded interviews, “The Good War.”
By the way, those are his semi-sarcastic quotation marks hugging the title, not
mine. This is a man who is fully aware of the other side of the story he is
portraying.
And what a story! Never have I come across
a telling of World War Two so detailed and vibrant. Soldiers and survivors from
all walks of life, from the lowliest grunt to the smarmiest White House
official, had their voices recorded in the sixties, seventies and eighties and
their words leap off the page at you. With history documentaries, there is
always that danger of being too slick
and too edited. Here, the interviewees
– certainly all nearly dead by now – were approached by a microphone and told
to just discuss what they like. Immediacy crackles in their tales as they reel
off what they were doing when they heard about Pearl Harbor or how many girls
they slept with on VE Day. For many Allied participants, the war, with its
sense of righteous purpose and the unrivalled joy of its conclusion, is described
as the highlight of their lives.
Not for all, of course. One motif I found
intriguing was that, roughly speaking and with towering predictability, the
further someone was from combat, the happier their recollections tend to be. For
instance, draft-dodgers, black marketeers and a man who, at one point,
controlled all of D-Day’s toilet paper, gabble more freely than a sombre airman
who watched Nagasaki burn.
It’s not flawless, obviously. This is an
American book after all. As such, the hostilities are bookended by Pearl Harbor
in ’41 and the atomic bombings in ’45. The fact Europe had been slogging away
since 1939 is only briefly mentioned and some other battles and theatres barely
get a look-in. But then again, this is a tapestry of gut feelings and memories –
not a text book and, really, nobody will ever grasp the true scale of those
tumultuous, globe-changing, rollercoaster years. Not every nook and cranny of the
war will ever truly be explored but “The
Good War” comes closer to running the gamut than anything I’ve seen
elsewhere. Is… is that a pang of envy? Am I jealous I wasn’t there? I’m
definitely jealous of that sailor.
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