Obsessing Over the ‘Good War’

If you haven’t already seen pearl harbor, make sure to do so when it opens at your local theater. Not because it’s a great film, which (though I’m no movie critic) it isn’t, but because after spending more than two hours watching a sappy love story bracket a burst of high-tech pyrotechnics, you can reflect on the deep grip that World War II continues to have on our imagination.

Especially the American one. Starting with the 50th anniversary of D-day in 1994, the U.S. has been awash with a wave of books, films and remembrances of the “Good War” and those who fought in it. The European theater got its respect first, notably in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan, but the war in the Pacific and its aftermath is getting its own. In addition to Pearl Harbor, we have seen two recent Pulitzer prize-winning historiesHerbert P. Bix’s biography of Hirohito and John W. Dower’s magnificent analysis of Japan’s postwar reconstruction. And in recent weeks, Ghost Soldiers, a reconstruction of a daring 1945 raid to free the last survivors of the Bataan death march from their prisoner-of-war camp, has raced up the best-seller lists. (Ghost Soldiers is a useful corrective to Pearl Harbor. In the film, the Japanese navy appears to have been staffed by the sort of man who writes a regretful haiku on the horrors of war before breakfast; in the book, Japanese soldiers burn prisoners alive for fun.) And after much dithering, ground will shortly be broken on the Mall in Washington for a monument to those who fought in World War II.

In a sense, the fascination with the war is easy to explain. Veterans still alive are growing old; you don’t need to endorse that cloying American conceit that they made up the “greatest generation” to deem them worthy of honor. Moreover, World War II continues to provide a certain pattern to our international arrangements. Consider the Soviet Union. The sacrifices it made and the victories it won during the war gave the Soviets a place at the top table of nations; Moscow’s acquisition of nuclear weapons came later. It was the memory of war that shaped Japan’s 1947 constitution and the strict limits it placed on Tokyo’s exercise of military power. It was the shame of war that convinced two generations of Germans that their political destiny lay in sublimating national ambitions within a wider European project. And of course, it was the war that first established American economic, political and cultural hegemony.

But the war ended 56 years ago, anddespite its continuing cultural resonanceit’s fair to wonder how much longer its shadow will shape our world. Already, the grip is loosening. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi seems more prepared than any of his recent predecessors to assert Japan’s national interests; if, as planned, he visits the Yasukuni shrine, a memorial to Japanese war dead, he would be the first Premier to do so in an official capacity. Gerhard SchrOder’s government is explicitly committed to the idea that Germany can and should be a “normal” country, not one whose every move is dictated by war guilt. German pilots flew missions during NATO’s 1999 war in Kosovo, the first time its armed forces have taken part in offensive actions since 1945. Even in Britain, appeals to the spirit of 1940, which translate into a broad suspicion of Europe, seem to have less power than they once did.

It is, I think, the U.S. that finds letting go of the glorious memory of World War II most difficult. The U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of men in the fighting, but its folk memory of the horror is less hellish than that of other nations. Alone among the combatants, America’s heartland was untouched. So no death camps, no Barbarossa. No Hiroshima, Dresden or Coventry. No postwar period searching for scraps of food and shelter, as the Germans and Japanese had to; no dark years of rationed austerity, like most of Western Europe suffered. The rest of the world, in other words, has more reasons than the U.S. for wishing to consign the war to the history texts. But Americans seem unwilling to do that, and not just when they buy books and go the movies: amid the spat between Europeans and Americans over the death penalty, it has been striking how many American commentators have said, in effect: “We rescued you in the 1940s. How dare you criticize us now?”

American leaders continue to venerate the iconic symbols of World War II; on his European trip last week, George W. Bush visited the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. But symbols get you only so far. And this much is plain: whether the evidence is Russia’s slippage into the third rank of states, Japan’s new nationalism or Germany’s willingness to create its own foreign policy, the shape of the world as it was forged by the most awful cataclysm in human history is changing. One dayeven in AmericaWorld War II will be just another movie.