Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

by Elizabeth D. Samet

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans--all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.

Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation--attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II.

As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century's decades of devastating conflict.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, War, American History, Sociology, Audiobook

354 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2021

About the author

Elizabeth D. Samet received her BA from Harvard and her PhD in English literature from Yale. She is the author of Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898 and Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point. Samet has been an English professor at West Point for ten years.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trump is a danger to every value I hold dear. Trump’s mythologizing of America’s past and longing for a returning to the days of George Wallace and making America great again is tied up in Tom Brokaw’s idiotic cartoon characterization of idealizing the American veterans of WW II as the ‘greatest generation’. The author gets the idiocy that’s inherent in Tom Brokaw’s bromide, and how stupid it really is and she uses mostly a string of related textual intellectual historical anecdotes to make her case by showing through movies, books and thinkers of the war era how we saw ourselves differently from how Brokaw’s nonsense said otherwise, and she makes the case, but, really, who amongst use didn’t realize that Brokaw was full of shit?

The author walks away from her own narrative by focusing on the wrong points while not seeing the bigger picture for what it is, and as the last line in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence’ says, ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. It’s the myth that predominates and the world makes that true even though the legend is garbage. Trump has told multiple times the story about how in the Philippines the Muslim soldiers wouldn’t use bullets made with pig grease, and were deathly afraid of being put into pig carcasses. It’s peak bizarre Trumpism and it’s straight out of the movie ‘Lives of the Bengal Lancers’ (this author never mentioned that movie). For Trump and his moron followers it doesn’t matter if it’s true, what matters is they are in on the game and they can feel superior to the ‘stupid Muslims’ and to them it could just be true.

The author ended the book by quoting the Trump sycophant, Matt Gaetz to the effect that the American First movement is a great thing and Trump is clearly an American Firster. Just in case you are not familiar, the American First movement sprung from the KKK and were Nazi sympathizers before WW II and morphed into the nutty Birchers and anti-communist after the war. The author did spend a lot of time discussing the movie ‘Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946) but did not mention the scene where the guy at the diner asked Homer Parish about his artificial hands and mentioned how America supported the wrong side in WW II. That guy would have been an American Firster in 1946, one who would think Russian communist were worst than German Nazis, and today he would support Matt Gaetz and Trump.

In the very end of the book, the author mentioned how her Russian studies expert colleague asked ‘where was Russia’ in her book, the author replied that her book was about America. That is a part of the problem with this book. America made WW II the ‘last good war’ by forgetting Russia’s significance. Antony Beevor wrote a book that is actually recommend by this author on WW II and our ethno-centric arrogance gets put in its place by the significance that Russia contributed to the war. Beevor will mention that December 6, 1941 is more significant than the following day (Pearl Harbor Day), because Moscow mounted a counter-offensive against the Nazis and that was the beginning of the end of the Wehrmacht.

The author mentioned ‘The Hucksters’ and said that Clark Gable was a pilot. I don’t think most people would have characterized his Army Air Corps career as a pilot, because he wasn’t. She used that movie to illustrate the disillusionment of returning Vets. You could say that, I guess, but I remember the great scene where Sidney Greenstreet spits a big old greenie on to the table and says ‘that’s disgusting, but you’ll remember that and that is what Madison Avenue is about, you remembering the product’. Or, the author used the movie “A Lonely Place’ to illustrate the troubled returning vet, but what I remember is that Humphrey Bogart played against type a psychotic serial killer such that the woman in his life was flummoxed and was in denial until the end.

The author cited 100 or so movies which I’ve seen almost all of as she was making her points to feed into her narrative, but one could just as well as picked other movies and feed into the myth of the last good war, because, after all, the movies help make the myths we believe in as fact. Trump uses the myths as facts and reenforces the exceptionalism his followers feel and tries to manipulate us. He is a danger and that bigger story should have been told in this book, but the author kept walking from the bigger implications of her narrative. BTW, I thought she did a good job on the Myth of the Lost Cause of the Civil War.

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

To those considering reading this book, here’s my advice. Otherwise you’ll find yourself enmired in endless summaries of films, novels, comic books, etc., wondering how you got there. You’ll find yourself in analyses of Frederick Douglass’s use of Shakespearean allusions in his speeches, and you’ll think “isn’t this book about World War II?” Well, it is, and it isn’t. Its own subtitle is such a conceptual mishmash that it exemplifies the huh? aspect for the reader. Still, there is much to learn from Elizabeth Samet who, after all, teaches literature at West Point. Think of Looking for the Good War as an academic literary exploration of how Americans perceive their wars and adjust these perceptions through time, with WWII as its center.

So, my advice:

1. Take a snapshot of p. 4, bottom half. There Samet introduces her motivation for the book, and lists four questions about how US participation in WWII “has been remembered in the wake of wars considerably less galvanizing and unifying.” I’ve copied these four questions at the end of this review.

2. Take a snapshot of p. 21, first full paragraph beginning “This book explores various incarnations.” Here she briefly describes the theme of each chapter. You will need to read each chapter’s theme before you read the chapter, because she utterly fails to help the reader follow the point – “where am I going here?” A better author would pause and let us breathe, and in that pause guide us in following the flow of her ideas, referring back to her core questions

If you decide not to finish the book, let me suggest three valuable sections: (1) unique coverage of the pocket guides prepared by the War Dept. for soldiers during and after WWII — “what the soldier needs to know and how to act in ______,” pp. 130-144; (2) concise section on African Americans in American wars, pp. 237-260; (3) thoughts on “contemporary American concepts of heroes and heroism,” pp. 270-277.

A point I’d like to add: critics failed us here. It seems that most MSM reviewers read the Intro, Ch. 1, and that’s it. All you learn from them is that Samet takes on the recent creators of “Good War” blockbusters — especially Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers), Tom Brokaw (The Greatest Generation), and Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) — and blasts them for their sentimentality in glossing over the harsher realities of men’s experiences in war. Much of her criticism is deserved (although I hold out for Saving Private Ryan, if you forgive the last minute of the film).

Here’s where Samet got me angry. In her raging-bull rhetoric to nullify any “Good War” realities, she goes to the extreme. On page 229, she quotes William Styron in an uncited piece, probably The Quiet Dust: “[my military experience] has also allowed me to take quick offense at any easily expressed contempt for men who dedicate themselves to fighting our battles.”

For me, Samet fell into this extreme, and I took “quick offense.” Her tone, especially in the early chapters, oozes “contempt for men who dedicate themselves to fighting our battles.” Of course men in foxholes fought to save their buddies, to stay alive, to not get sent to the brig, and not for grand notions of preserving democracy. So this is new? This makes them bad men? This makes WWII a “bad war”? No nuance, Prof. Samet?

My father and his two brothers went off to WWII. My uncle Bob saved men from his ship, the USS Rich, after it hit a mine and sank on D-Day+2—June 8, 1944. While on a 30-day “survivor’s leave,” he told a hometown reporter “I’d just as soon go back and do it over again. Only next time I’m going to pick a ship that will stay afloat.” Well, that he did . . . One year later, on June 6, 1945, he was serving on the USS J. William Ditter off Okinawa when it was attacked by kamikaze planes, but didn’t sink. He was sent below decks to help retrieve the injured and the dead. He was 21. My father Gordon had the visual deficiency amblyopia and couldn’t serve in battle; he was a cryptographer in France and voluntarily stayed there as a civilian in the Army Air Corps after his discharge. My uncle Jack, the youngest, served in the Pacific on transport ships delivering supplies to military bases.

Duty -- my father and uncles personified Duty. They went to war and, thank goodness, they came back. They never boasted, they never turned patriotism into self-serving egotism, and like many veterans, they didn’t speak much about their service until their later years. They and so many are allowed no place in Samet’s profile of the “Good War.” You’re either an oversentimentalized comic-book hero or an angry alcoholic lost soul. While Samet quotes occasionally from Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, who saluted with no sentimentality those who did their duty, she does not incorporate that concept in her book. If it's because there's little attention to those men and women in WWII literature, then attention should be given to that fact.
_____

Here are the four questions she lists as among those motivating the book (p. 4): her answer to all four is Yes. I found, however, that she rarely takes up these questions directly. The book suffers from that omission.

(1) Has the prevailing memory of the “Good War,” shaped as it has been by nostalgia, sentimentality, and jingoism, done more harm than good to Americans’ sense of themselves and their country’s place in the world?

(2) Has the meaning of American force been perverted by a strident, self-congratulatory, insistence that a war extraordinary in certain aspects was, in fact, unique in all?

(3) Has the desire to divorce that war from history – to interpret victory as proof of America’s exceptionalism – blinded us to our own tragic contingency?

(4) Has the repeated insistence by so many on the country’s absolute unity behind the war effort effectively exacerbated ongoing social and political divisions?

_________________________________

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A smart, thoughtful examination of how wars are thought of after they are done and memorialized, and the political and cultural consequences of such ideas.

Samet -- who teaches at West Point -- begins the book by observing that "every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it." Thinking back on the language used by politicians to “sell” American military actions over the past 75(!) years, the truth of this statement is hard to refute. The problem, though, is that this "moral justification" is a myth. A dangerous myth in that its imagery and appearance of moral certitude can be put to less than moral purpose. "Looking for the Good War"explores how such ideas are shaped, utilized, and perpetuated.

The context for the main argument of the book is articulated early. Adapting a paradigm elaborated by George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language," Samet fleshes out the "dogma" underlying the public understanding of World War Two that has come to define our thinking:

1. The United States went to war to liberate the world from fascism and tyranny.
2. All Americans were absolutely united in their commitment to the war effort.
3. Everyone on the home front made tremendous sacrifices.
4. World War II was a foreign tragedy with a happy American ending.
6. Everyone has always agreed on points 1 - 5.

The "dogma" is indeed concise but it's wrong from the start. For one thing, the U.S. didn't enter the war in order to "liberate the world from fascism and tyranny," but because it was attacked. Nor was there unity: Until Pearl Harbor, and even after, significant numbers of Americans wanted us out of the war. The moral explanation came later. This explanation -- this characterization of what "The Good War" was about -- became reified into the very Idea of what World War Two was, as if the afterthought was the reality, a 'reality' upon which we've thought and talked about all our military endeavors ever since: World War II left behind the dangerous and seemingly indestructible fantasy that our military intervention will naturally produce (an often underappreciated) good. Each succeeding conflict has led to the reprise and reinvention of the Good War’s mythology in order to justify or otherwise explain uses of American power.

Time and again, the book argues, "The Good War" is invoked to justify a military action. For example, the American invasion of Iraq is characterized as a battle against an "Axis of Evil" who threaten our way of life in the same way the German-Japan Axis did in the early 1940s. Just as Pearl Harbor justified that war, so did 9/11 justify this one. Just as WW2 was a moral battle against Evil, so is this one. The wisdom of invading Iraq can certainly be argued, but dressing it up in the garb of "The Good War" made that debate almost pointless.

To make her point, Samet casts a wide net, exploring such diverse things as war movies (made during and after the war, including "Saving Private Ryan"), the complex depiction of veterans in noir films and Westerns, books, political speeches (FDR through Trump), how the Civil War has been memorialized -- i.e., essentially forgotten and replaced with an ahistorical Lost Cause mythology made of whole cloth) and more. Roughly half the book looks at how differently Americans conceptualized their earlier wars (and even violence in general) and, interestingly (but to my mind less successfully because less fully developed) how Shakespeare depicted war and its remembrance in his plays.

Samet unpacks the weak foundations underlying phrases like "the Good War" (an oxymoron, according to most historians. In a note to his excellent book of that name, Studs Terkel remarked that he put the title in quotes because "the adjective 'good' mated to the noun 'war is so incongruous. Or as Samet wryly comments, "Miraculously, the deadliest conflict in human history became something inherently virtuous") and "the Best Generation" (she's not a fan of Stephen Ambrose works or Tom Brokaw's eponymous book). She shares some revealing statistics: "Approximately sixty percent of World War II servicemen were draftees. Of those, roughly ten percent were engaged in combat ... most of the almost fifty thousand deserters came from that ten percent."

Samet's objective is not to disparage the men and women who fought the war at home and abroad, or to question their bravery, patriotism, or moral standing. Rather, her aim is to explore the myths that we've come to accept about their experiences and how those myths have shaped the country. Drawing on contemporary sources, she takes apart such notions as:

shared sacrifice (John Kenneth Galbraith, the deputy head of the Office of Price Administration and later one of the members of the Strategic Bombing Survey, reflected, “Never in the history of human conflict has there been so much talk of sacrifice and so little sacrifice.”). Marlene Dietrich, Ernie Pyle, and others remarked that “one was hardly aware of the war” stateside. Dietrich was "outraged... that blood donations require 'propaganda … that you’ve had to beg for it … that’s amazing.' ”

unity of purpose (Opinion polls in 1942 revealed a “peace bloc” comprising fully twenty percent of the adult population; these post–Pearl Harbor “divisionists,” [historian Richard W.] Steele notes, “were strikingly similar in numbers and attitudes to the isolationists of 1941.”)

general agreement on why the country was at war (from 1942-1945, Frank Capra, acting under instructions from Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, made Why We Fight, a series of films that "will tell these boys why they are fighting." The series had wide circulation, but the point apparently didn't quite trickle down or convince soldiers on the front. One observation, made by Black civil rights activist Grant Reynolds about his wartime experience training at Camp Lee in Virginia, spoke volumes: “The South was more vigorously engaged in fighting the Civil War than in training soldiers to resist Hitler.”)

I won't attempt to summarize her argument. I will only say that I found it convincing. Rather than continue this review, I will close with three passages I found particularly noteworthy.

"The way we think and talk about force will influence not only the use of American military might abroad but also our response to the violence that has increasingly been used as a tool of insurrection at home."

"To the degree that we allow the undeniable suffering and sacrifice of war somehow to redeem all causes—that we allow our guilt to obscure the realities of devastating, indecisive wars—we increase the likelihood of finding ourselves in a similar predicament once again."

"We have become exhibitionists of sentiment: the more public and histrionic our displays, the better we seem to feel... [But] the slipperiness of sentimentality... is the natural ally of jingoism. So long as we indulge it, we remain incapable of debating the merits of war without being charged with diminishing those who fought it." She adds later: "The soldier as archetypal American hero is apparently here to stay. With President Trump’s 2019 pardoning of military personnel accused of war crimes, adulation turned grotesque."

Grotesque indeed. And appalling.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, and a good reminder that war is bad.

However, the style of the book is very different from what I expected. Be warned that this book is more or less a literary media and film review of war related content from the post-war period. The book itself doesn't really tell a story so much is summarize lots of other people's work.

Again the basic point that people felt ambivalent towards world war II and have since forgotten that they felt that way is valid. But you could get that from just reading slaughterhouse 5 or one of the many other books listed in this book's bibliography. Unless your goal is to sound like you've read post-work content without actually having read it, this book is probably not what you're looking for...

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about which I have mixed feelings. Samet argues that our cultural/political fixation on WWII, especially the "good war" narrative A. radically oversimplifies the incredibly complex history of that conflict, especially its considerable moral ambiguity, even for the winning side B. Encourages a backward-looking culture and politics that constantly holds up a semi-mythic past as an unreachable goal while failing to look forward. She sees the US fixation on WWII as part of our obsession with not self-criticizing as well as preserving our sense of innocence.

In her actual historical analysis, she makes a few big points A. The US was much more ambivalent about WWII, and individual soldiers' motives more complex, than our nostalgic remembrances will allow. Most Americans wanted to stay out of the war, and when they were in it, they wanted it to end. Racism, sexism, and other social problems were not solved by the war, and many soldiers felt alienated from the society they were fighting for. The real point here is to recapture the full humanity of the people of that time period, including the vast spectrum from shirkers to heroes, rather than relying on comic book heroizing. B. The popular culture after WWII also showed a lot of ambivalence about the veterans who were later worshipped. They were often portrayed as dangerous, maladjusted, and bitter, much more like the Vietnam War stereotype. C. A lot of our WWII mythologizing is a product of the needs of the historical context more than a close reading of history. For example, the 1990s surge of honoring and remembering WWII vets was in large part about the fact that they were starting to die off and that they seemed to represent a simpler and more noble time to then-modern Americans. D. The WWII mythos makes us as a culture hold up an exceptional time as the best time ever, which means that the present will always fall short. This lends itself to a politics of nostalgia and myth-making (MAGA, cough cough).

I think this is all well and good even if it didn't revolutionize my understanding of WWII. Historians should poke holes in mythology, and Samet shows that the work of writers like Ambrose is quite selective and biased. The pop culture discussions are good to know about, but a LOT of this book is just descriptions of movies and novels, which gets old fast. I think Samet is a little tough on WWII films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, which give a positive take on Americans in WWII but are still complicated. BoB deals with US war crimes, combat stress, refusal to fight, sarcasm and bitterness, and the sheer horror of that conflict. There were pointless deaths even in a war that very much had a point, and both of these product show that. Samet shows the ways they were selective or unrealistic but I don't think succeeds in fully dismissing them.

I think my larger beef with this book is that historians just seem to have a tendency to call things myths that are actually somewhat true. Was this the greatest generation? Certainly this term is more worshipful than analytical, and it obfuscates a lot of complex stuff. But here's kind of the reality of WWII America: a reluctant nation joined a conflict against 2 monstrous regimes whose victory would have been catastrophic for humanity. It made essential contributions to defeating those regimes and rebuilding them as democracies, all while again resisting the spread of a new form of totalitarianism in Soviet communism. Americans may have been complicated, ambivalent, and just deeply human, but for the most part that generation stepped up, served, and got the job done. 400,000 of them died and more were wounded. For all its flaws, they then helped build a better society and global order than what existed before. If today we have a propensity to lionize or mythologize them for ideals of self-sacrifice, public-mindedness, and pure grit, maybe that's a good thing; maybe that signals that we still want to emulate those values in the present. That doesn't mean we SHOULD mythologize at the expense of history, but I come down on the side of this being one of our less harmful myths (as well as one of the few national narratives that can still unify this divided country).

I had this feeling through this book, and I probably wouldn't have given it 4 stars if not for the brilliant conclusion. Building on Lincoln's Lyceum Address, Samet argues that a mature nation never anchors itself to one moment in the past, no matter how glorious. Lincoln argued that we can no longer define ourselves by the revolutionary fervor of the founding period; instead we must be a nation of laws, moderation, and reason if we are to sustain ourselves. Samet makes a similar case for the WWII mythology: we just refuse to let it go, and that increasingly anchors us in the past instead of the present and future, contributing to all kinds of immature attitudes and political ideas.

I'd recommend this book to people interested in historical memory and culture, but mainly scholars as it's a bit dense at times. Also a good choice if you want a different take on WWII.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 1 - which begins with the insipid epigraph "I think this is the greatest generation any society has ever produced," uttered by author Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press during the 50th anniversary of D-Day, in order to debunk it - was stellar, and much of the remaining chapters couldn't quite live up to it. Largely because the author was examining movies, and I'm not that into movies. A very good book, which I'll keep and reread.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Very engaging. There were so many references to other books (and films) that I started a separate shelf for these books. Then gave up. There were just too many. So I will return the book to the library and purchase it for the references.

The Americans in the war were plenty heroic, many of them. Including my dad, who was in Patton's Army. Though he was an ordnance officer and likely saw no combat. But he was there and I'm still proud of him and his memory.

Having said that, I always knew the heroic story was at least part myth, and the real world was bound to be more complicated... and much more interesting, too. Heroes seem like cardboard characters and I want to know about real people with all their doubts and fears and mistakes. I'm looking forward to learning more about the real WWII and its aftermath.

Highly recommended.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most important ideas in this book is the power of myth-making in how Americans view their wars, especially World War II, often referred to as the “good war.” Americans dislike ambiguity and subtleties when it comes to war, and looking back at World War II means proudly seeing it as a noble and just endeavor. Forgotten is the fact that it was , like all wars, brutal, tragic in all of its deaths, and full of mistakes and miscalculations.

We particularly glorify the exploits of individual soldiers, making them into heroes,and gloss over more controversial policy decisions that led to the firebombing of German cities with their civilian populations, or the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. It’s ironic, then, that we presently condemn Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities at the present time, in light of our own past practices.

Samet emphasizes that every war is seen through the lens of previous wars. In America’s case every war since World War II has had what she calls an element of innocence, a faith in the essential virtues of our society. Even the catastrophic Civil war, the effects of which are still being felt today, has often been reinterpreted, not as a fight to abolish slavery, but rather as praise for southern heroes as well as a romantic portrayal of plantation life and a noble lost cause of valiantmen struggling against a overpowering federal government.

It is always the understanding, at least initially, that America’s wars, whether they were fought in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever, are justified. We were just repeating our remembered triumphant experience of World War II. Of course, when the outcomes didn’t match what happened in the l940’s, disillusionment and cynicism followed.

Much of this letdown can be seen in popular culture, particularly in the movies. After WW II, the idea became prevalent that the war had reshaped the home front in sinister ways. Film noir with its dark shadows and plots that often linked crime and war, became widespread. There were crime and gangster films made during the 30’s, of course, but the background element of war was something new during the 40’s and even into the 50’s. And it was during this period that a new “cold war” developed into the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period.

The events of 9-11 brought on the “war on terror”, conceived as a virtuous crusade to eliminate the evil committed by terrorists, its roots going back again to the memories of good intentions, often fictitious and created only in retrospect, of earlier wars. The reality comes closer to an unchecked military presence around the world.

The virtue of this book is, to use Yeats' phrase, to cast a cold eye on the reality of war and how attitudes toward military conflict have permeated the life of American society, and as the title suggests, led to historical amnesia and the pursuit of happiness through violence.

[Cliff Webster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly erudite and timely analysis of myths surrounding American exceptionalism and how they often serve to distort historically accurate views of wars and the use of force. The book was a bit vexing to me as it sandwiches in somewhat dense critical analysis of film and literature between introductory and epilogue bookends that sometimes more effectively communicate the authors theses then the material in between. Highly informative but I periodically found myself losing the correlative thread between the extensive literary and cinematic analysis and some of the broader themes being explored. This may be my shortcoming vs. the authors. Exhaustively researched, one could build an entire reading list on American military history, Western political thought, and other relevant topics from the author’s cited works and references, truly enjoyable to explore.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2 1/2 stars) The one-line summary of this book that I saw ("A wide-ranging work of cultural history and criticism that reexamines the impact of post-World War II myths of the "good war") got me interested, but ultimately is more a collection of essays and ideas that don't really coalesce. The author's chief strategy is to attack writers like Tom Brokaw and Steven Ambrose for deliberately obscuring the horrors of WWII in order to push a "good war" agenda. But I never felt a thesis come out of this. Instead, she spreads her net far and wide, discussing Joan Didion, Ernie Pyle, movies like 'The Best Years of Our Loves' and (interestingly) the romantic comedy 'Ball of Fire,' and Shakespeare but I never felt all of her threads come together. She mentions superhero movies, and I wish she had examined those in more detail to tie in with the "rah-rah" school of memory that she is critiquing. Some interesting points, but overall not successful.

[Henry Schaller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a four with about 100 pages cut. It rambles a lot and talks way too much about Shakespeare and other things that barely apply to the central thesis.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seemed like the author wanted to write about World War 2's impact on US culture (especially film), the rewriting of WW2 history, Shakespeare in the US and the Civil War. When the book worked, it was brilliant, otherwise it was a lot of essays crammed into 5 very long chapters. I learned a lot and I guess I now need to read Shakespeare's English history plays? I will definitely be listening to more Studs Terkel radio shows.

[Byram · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked in principle this book's objective of reminding us that war is always hell, with the so-called "Great War" being no exception. In meticulous detail, the author outlines the myths and hero-worship that have survived an otherwise brutal ordeal and that have colored our vision of war moving forward while reminding us that in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the war there was plenty of popular media evidence to suggest that it was far from idyllic. The book shines when it discusses the rippling effects from the Civil War into later times of the Vietnam war when our failure to reckon with horrors and instead prop up the mythology has landed us in the militaristic hero worship of today that was not actually a fabric of our society until relatively recently. However, the book is muddled by long discussions of individual film noir and western plots, parallels with Shakespeare, and summaries of books about the war. Not that they don't contribute to the author's underlying thesis, but I found my mind wandering a lot when skipping from movie summary to movie summary and book review to book review. Perhaps if I had come into this with the mindset of a popular culture-driven analysis of The Good War I would have had a different attitude

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

World War II was a heroic, necessary enterprise, but Americans have oversubscribed to the greatest generation image. American culture sanded off the sharp edges and used the war as a template for how future wars should be regarded. Disappointment was inevitable, especially since our culture's treatment of war has remained shallow, no matter how heroic. My parents' generation was swamped by a combination of the Great Depression and the war, and it is hard to underestimate what the experiences meant to them. But wishing doesn't make nostalgia and shared sacrifice a sufficient foundation for understanding the war's ugly choices and grim consequences. Samet's book is a necessary corrective, but it's hard emotional sledding at times.

[Ell, Ess Jaeva · Rating 1 out of 5]

lazy analysis of America's relationship with war... perspective via an analysis of fictional film war depictions, not interviews or journals of soldiers or even civilians

[Rick Elinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Up and down, up and down. That's how it was reading this book. With Chapter 1, I was sure I was going to rate it a 5. Then through the middle, I wondered if I could even manage to give it a 2. Around page 250, it started to justify the title and subtitle ("Looking for the Good War, American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness"), only to sink again, and then to rise again. I skipped and skimmed over much about film noir and Western movies and Shakespeare plays, which seemed irrelevant to the book title, only to be impressed later by some of Samet's conclusions.

Samet begins by wondering how World War II became mythologized by the historian Stephen Ambrose and the journalist Tom Brokaw. Was this really the "greatest generation", fighting in a Jim Crow army with poorly defined ideologies? Samet has many wonderful lines like, "That's the slipperiness of sentimentality, which is the natural ally of jingoism" (p.84). The book then wanders, even in a chapter 4 called, "War, what is it good for?".

Around p.250, Samet returns to her trenchant criticism of the romantic, nostalgic "heroism" of World War II and its use to promote succeeding American military adventures. There are presently so few Americans serving in the military and so many fewer having seen combat; yet the public is constantly assuaging its lack of involvement by thanking these few for their service.

Samet forges a link between the sentimental nostalgia of the Civil War and the promotion of the South's Lost Cause to the "greatest generation" view of the World War II. She worries that these views will lead the United States in the future to wrong places.

I will conclude by giving a few of the lines that rescued Samet's book for me.

"As the headlines testify, the sentimental school of Civil War remembrance, bordering at times on the mystical, endures today" (p.307)

"The so-called greatness of the Greatest Generation is a fiction, a sentimental fiction, suffused with nostalgia and with a need to return to some finest hour" (p.331)

"In the midst of a miserable peace, the pains of war are quickly forgotten while its imagined glories grow. Causes are retrofitted, participants fondly recall heroic gestures." (p.337)

[Scott Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Audiobook) This work looks at how America mythologies World War II. Certainly it is hard to see anything in the American press/literature that, when it mentions the Second World War, that doesn't paint it in a nostalgic/positive light, when Americans all united to focus on a common goal, and how America managed to win the last "good war". However, the reality is far more different. Samet goes into detail, using historical, literary, artistic and personal accounts to describe how American views of WWII shifted over time, and how the war, those that fought in it, and those who saw it from afar all had their takes on it. It was not as great or positive a time.

Yet, Samet's analysis does not stop at just World War II, but looking at a greater portion of American history and how Americans have come to view various wars, especially the Civil War and those conflicts since WWII. She takes significant issue with the work of those like Stephen Ambrose for propagating the current mythology of the war, and will use other resources, especially from those closer to the time of the war and from those involved in it to counter the mythology.

Some will not appreciate the candor or tone of this work. Understandable. We want some good aspects of our history and mythology. However, we can let the myth substitute for the reality. The war was brutal and terrible and it was not all flag-waving rah/rah. That she teaches at West Point gives this author some greater credibility as a critic. Worth the read and consideration. We can mythologize our history nor those who fight. We can respect, but we need to see them as real humans, warts, goodness and all.

[David Partikian · Rating 2 out of 5]

As an early Generation X member (born 1965), I eagerly anticipated Elizabeth Samet’s Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, billed as a dissection of the myth of American greatness through war, particularly World War II. It was strictly taboo during my adolescence to question American military supremacy. My high school American history curriculum (circa. 1981) ended with American supremacy after World War II. By the early 80’s, Rambo movies reigned supreme in American consciousness. Only an uncouth liberal during the Reagan years (like myself) would dare ask uncomfortable questions.

While the premise that America greatness and exceptionalism during WWII can now be questioned from the viewpoint of other nations and without scathing attack from serious minds, Samet’s Looking for the Good War lacks the focus, particularly on World War II, that I anticipated from early reviews. She simply attempts too much and ends up muddling her theme with lengthy chapters on Film Noir and Westerns.

Much of what Samet says is frightfully obvious, yet needs to be stated. Her main thesis is that there is—of course—no “Good War.” However, by spending almost half the book regurgitating the plots of seemingly every American film with a protagonist veteran or combat plot, Samet does her own thesis a disservice. While the idea that WWII is integral to Noir and that the Civil War is integral to Westerns and the mythologizing of American goodness in war is interesting, Samet loses focus, and the facts she presents explicating exactly why WWII wasn’t a “Good War” are lost in the shuffle.

Samet’s pertinent points on American ambiguity towards the war (which are not well known), as well as the racism and anti-Semitism in the US and in the armed forces are largely lost in her diversions to Hollywood and literature representations of —mostly—WWII. Now while Hollywood is rather integral in helping create the myth of American Goodness in WWII, these films have largely faded from American consciousness today. So why does the myth of American Goodness endure when facts—upon specific scrutiny—are a bit more problematic? Why over 100 pages on all the war movies in the 40’s and 50’s with nary a word on the absurdity of Rambo and the rewriting of Viet Nam? To make matters worse, Samet seems to have set out with a thesis addressing World War II specifically, however she gets sidetracked into lengthy diversions addressing other American wars, specifically the Civil War. In short, she is biting off more than she can chew. The Civil War and how it is remembered demands an entirely different book.

Hopscotching between wars, Samet ends her book with a quote from Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump on America First ideology, which is invoking the straw man and reduces what could have been a strong book into another needless blurt about the opprobriousness of the Republican Party, for which there is no coherent response except “Amen.” Really, who needs to read yet another screed about Republicans and their ilk? Their propaganda playbook is as old as War itself.

The end result of this farrago of cinematic and pop culture references of America at war is ultimately dissatisfying because, when she is focused and on, Samet is extremely informative and makes great points. If only the blasts of wisdom were not masked behind all the potboiler plot summaries.

[Katie Eskridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting take on America's relationship with the past, especially when it comes to what our wars are about and how their meanings become subverted with time and the need to make them worthwhile so we can justify new wars. She says the nation of futurity is ironically stuck in the past and there's some truth to that- we like to think of WW2 as our "good war" but the truth was that Americans did not want to be in that war, they were not excited when they were dragged into it, and there was no sense of "saving the world from fascism"-that was a fiction we developed later- we were there because we got attacked, end of story. She does a great job of showing how American ambivalence about our "best" war was rife in the culture throughout, and how it became subverted by the war effort and politicians in the Cold War years. I've always been dubious of the Greatest Generation hyperbole and this book has not only confirmed my distaste for that hype, it's also changed my view of World War II and the way we talk about war in general.

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

File under: Somehow, I expected more. Samet is at her best eviscerating assorted American expressions of toxic sentimentality, such as the notion of the "Greatest Generation" that fought World War II, or the related "Lost Cause" mentality of the defeated Confederacy, because making up fairy tales is so much easier than taking a hard look at the abyss into which your government's bad political decisions led you, or, maybe, contemplating the continuing failures of American society in so many areas. As an instructor of cadets at West Point, Samet takes her role as being an agent of reality very seriously. Less good are the portions of the book dealing with how post-1945 American military adventures get interpreted through the lens of the WWII experience, particularly Korea and Vietnam. Also, Samet's excursion into film history felt like it should be part of another book.

A second thought is that, maybe, if Samet had spent more time on what she thought she was teaching her students, that might have tied everything together in a tighter package. Call it the difference between what the U.S. Army wants its officers to learn, and what Hollywood is selling to the general public.

My actual rating is 3.5.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars? I was both delighted with the subject matter and the passion with which Samet approaches it; and at the same time, grew bored with the stream of movie plot mini-summaries that served to illustrate and justify the cultural points of the book. It was sometimes difficult for me to see the points of connection between the chapters, making me think it was more a portfolio (like more and more nonfiction I've been reading lately). Yet at the end she manages to pull her threads back together.

The premise--that Hollywood, mythmaking, wishful thinking, and history have merged to rewrite the actual history--is not talked about enough. My father, a WWII vet, used to rail against the term "Greatest Generation" and its cheerleader Tom Brokaw, and he would have loved the chapter Samet devoted to undoing that particular myth. But he could have added to it as well. I would say it's worth a read for that and the chapter on the Civil War.

[Clayton]

#read for class!

a fascinating look at how media has shaped our perception of american wars and how most of those perceptions are myths. at the point in this class (history's influence on foreign affairs) that i've come to accept everything i learned in high school was a lie or infused with fabrication. it's honestly depressing! knowledge is a burden in that way.

no war is ever always "good," and the values come later in time. most americans during WWII weren't even sure what we were fighting for, especially how to define fascism. always question the narrative that values have always existed, even for the people within that time period! people alive during WWII did not all think fighting against germany was patriotic!

a large chunk of the book just summarizes different pieces of media, so you'd be well-off just reading the introduction and chapter 1 and then calling it a day.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a weird one. Full of scattershot ideas that don't coalesce in a way that I assume the author wanted them to. Or maybe the author nailed it? It's hard to tell.

What I thought would be an assessment of the major conflicts in United States' history and, perhaps, how we as a people and it as a government are defined by these actions, turns into attempting to view the country's penchant to support violence (notably, they tend to support war afterwards than they do leading up to it) on a large scale through the lens of film and literature, particularly Homer and Shakespeare.

To be fair, the author is an English professor at West Point. And she, her editor and/or publisher did her book no favors with the title. It has the briefest of moments of clarity, but soon swerves into another lane. Many of the reviews I've seen echo this criticism although they are kinder with the rating.

[Gretchen Hohmeyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is fascinating on a number of levels, some good and some bad. On the one hand, I do feel like this is a really unique book for me. The level of cultural analysis, particularly through mostly movies and some plays and books, is not something I usually tackle in the books I've been reading in this vein. This is not your typical history book, and you'll be disappointed if that's what you think it is, I think. Culture creates history in its own way, and paying attention to the way we've represented and shaped our history through media is important as we look through it for the facts. However, the structure of this book felt a bit off-kilter. There were what felt like slogs of movie plot explanation that interrupted what was otherwise good cultural analysis, for example. While I understand those explanations were necessary for the point, there were so many and those sections were so long. Some of the chapters also hopped backward and forwards in time with odd relations so that when Samet wrote "In chapter X I already proved" I was like, what chapter? Where? What time period are we talking about? Had I been reading the physical book I could have looked backward, but I was listening to the audiobook so I didn't have that option. All in all, I would say take a chance on it if you're interested, just understand what you're getting into.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes it feels like the author is just canvassing depictions of war in assorted media. Other times, she's arguing a point and using those media depictions to support her argument. I enjoyed the second approach much more than the first—not only is it more readable, but the arguments made are genuinely interesting when arguments are actually being made. Unfortunately, the first style shows up for a large portion of the book, so I would recommend this more as academic/reference reading than as leisure reading.

[Max D'onofrio · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought the premise of this book was going to review more academic study instead of being more of a cultural it ended up just repeating the plot of movies and books I had already read. Was disappointed.

[Teddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to the audio book via Libby app. I thought the overall perspective was great. I liked the explanation that "no man left behind" was not a thing until more modern times where the overall mission of combat is less clear.

[Mark Karnowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

The summary of this book on GoodRead is accurate, but it should also mention that if you are a lover of old movies and are interested in the full range of reactions to WW2 that are depicted in American cinema, then this is worth a read.
A great study of the ways that the mythology of WW2 affects common American world views, even to this day.

[Brett Milam · Rating 5 out of 5]

When contemplating history, Americans tend to prefer romanticism versus realism, and this has the implication of pining for not only nostalgic pasts, but an unrealistic past, impeding progressing in the present and future. This sensibility and yearning is particularly potent with how Americans view war. On the 80-year anniversary of D-Day, it was appropriate that I listened to Elizabeth Samet’s 2021 book, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, as read by Suzanne Toren.

Samet is a professor of English at West Point, and so, she examines the ways in which literature and film influence our thinking about war — and importantly, offer contemporaneous understandings of war divorced from any amnesia — including those waging it, who evoke the plays of Shakespeare, for example. [Small aside, one of the Goodreads criticisms I saw of the book complained about how many references to literature were in Samet’s book, and I’m thinking, did you not get that she’s a professor of English?!]

Interestingly, myth-building around WWII is relatively new, coming around the 50th-anniversary commemoration, with journalist Tom Brokaw’s christening of that generation as the “Greatest Generation,” with a book of the same name, historian Stephen Ambrose’ series of books about WWII (including one which became HBO’s Band of Brothers), and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Samet in particular rightly spends considerable time taking Ambrose to task for his intentionally rosy depiction of WWII. To the latter, Samet leans on Studs Terkel’s 1997 work, The Good War: An Oral History of WWII, to show how veterans post-WWII had disparate views about the war, experienced a return to domesticity differently, and were treated differently, far from the histrionics we would think.

[By the way, I don’t have a good place to insert this, but can we talk about, as Samet does to show contemporaneous issues with WWII, including after the fact, how wildly impressive 1939 was for film? You had Gone with the Wind (itself a great depiction of revisionist Civil War revisionist narratives), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Of Mice and Men, and so on. I can see why some think 1939 is the greatest singular year in film history.]

What I found particularly intriguing about Samet’s thesis about American amnesia with respect to war, most profoundly and provocatively, with the so-called Good War of WWII, is the parallel she draws between WWII and the American Civil War. The Civil War has been completely whitewashed (a fitting word if ever there was one) by the losers, the Confederacy, the South. They remade the war and its aims in their image, that of so-called state’s rights and this conception of Southern manners and manliness, otherwise known as the Lost Cause. Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution were rebranded as negative, resulting in the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, the institution of the black codes, which then segued into nearly 100 years of Jim Crow. Not to say anything, obviously, of the veneration of those who fought the war, like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and others, whose likeness appears in statues and on buildings, including military bases, throughout the South (and the North!). The Lost Cause won. That’s a comfortable, safe romanticism versus the reality: that the South separated from the United States to form the Confederacy, a government formed for the express purpose of maintaining a slave empire, even if it meant violence.

But what about WWII? The lift seems harder there, right? After all, America, along with our Allies, fought the Nazis and Imperial Japan. We were bombed at Pearl Harbor. Germany declared war on us! Well, first, let’s get what seems like semantics out of the way. There is no such thing as a “good” war. The very notion is obscene. War is awful and violent, and even when it becomes necessary, it’s still awful, violent, and never “good.” At this point, you may be wondering if Samet is arguing against entry into WWII. Not at all. She believes the war was justified and necessary, but again, justified and necessary does not mean good, nor that it was a universally-agreed upon war, nor that it ought to be remembered by Americans as that of American triumphalism erased of all nuance, nor that we should elevate men beyond their foibles at the detriment to the present and future of the country. But beyond that, Samet points out how much propaganda was needed by the federal government to encourage Americans to fight — post-Pearl Harbor! President Roosevelt, Samet tells us, felt Americans were becoming complacent after the Pearl Harbor attack. An astonishing, but forgotten tidbit of history! In fact, something that might be surprising to Americans of today is that more Americans volunteered for the war in Vietnam than WWII. That surprised me. About 38 percent of the force for WWII were volunteers vs. 66 percent in Vietnam. We certainly don’t talk about the number of WWII deserters, either, numbering the thousands, and as Samet quips, there would have been more in the Pacific Theater if they had anywhere to go.

In addition to those facts, amnesia comes into play with WWII in two additional ways. First, Americans were ambivalent about crossing the ocean to fight another European war, and we forget out how robust the isolationist sentiment was among Americans. Last year, I reviewed Lynne Olson’s captivating 2013 book, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over WWII, 1939-1931, which covers the debate about merely assisting Britain with weapons to fight Nazi Germany versus full-blown war. Again, history that is largely forgotten these days. Secondly, but along the same vein as the aforementioned book, is we also forget how potent the fascist message was in America prior to, during, and after WWII. There were Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists, who commanded large audiences, most infamously filling Madison Square Garden in 1939 with a Nazi rally, where they ridiculously claimed George Washington as the father of their movement. [Hint: A Nazi, a fascist, wouldn’t have voluntarily given up power as Washington, famously and rightly, did.]

Samet’s point goes beyond those issues, too, though, and goes back to the issue with nostalgic romanticism versus the reality of war. Again, she contrasts with the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, in the run-up to the Civil War and during the Civil War, “respected the past without being paralyzed by it.” He understood America’s Founders did something extraordinary in founding America, but that they were still men, with all the foibles of men. That distinction was imperative for Lincoln because in order to build America anew after the Civil War, they necessarily needed to be present- and future-focused. Pining for the past stymies the present, and we see that repeatedly with reminesencents about the Good War and the Greatest Generation: a peak of perfect men and of a country, we ought to return to rather than forging ahead in making America anew. Concretely, the implication of venerating the past too much is that it warped American sensibilities about exceptionalism, leading to arrogant and ambitious wars in Korea, Vietnam, and later, the Gulf War, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars post-9/11. The Gulf War (and I believe the second Iraq War, too) also evoked that ready analogy to justify war: We don’t want to be another Neville Chamberlain with Hitler on the march (Saddam Hussein). Obviously, one of the most obvious present iterations of pining for the past is Donald Trump’s campaign slogan to “make America great again.”

In fact, let me put it more succinctly from Samet: WWII was a catastrophe, not a great American triumph story reminiscent of the comic books. Estimates vary, but 75 million people died in WWII, 40 million of them civilians. Six millions Jews were exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps. Which brings me to perhaps the most vital point Samet has to make in her book. Whether applied to WWII or Iraq and Afghanistan, consequence becomes original justification, which becomes original objective. In other words, America did not go to war to liberate the Nazi concentration camps and save Jews. But in the story of American triumphalism during WWII, that has become the “original objective.” It wasn’t until after the attack on Pearl Harbor that it become more widely reported in America that Nazi Germany was planning to murder all the Jews. In other words, when we think of WWII as the “Good War” where all Americans were unified around a singular cause, it just wasn’t the case, and again, the implications of that on the homefront and for more wars, can be dire.

Samet also argues that winning at war does not necessarily qualify somebody to be the “master of peace,” and yet, much to the consternation of non-interventionists (like myself) and isolationists, the United States has been the world’s policemen for more than 80 years now, resulting in various wars due to the jostling around atomic power in the Cold War.

Samet states, “There’s an irony in the fact that a country that has always been predicated on reinvention and looking to the future now seems to draw its greatest strength from an event that happened 80 years in the past.” But what’s also compelling is that 80 years later, the world created by that generation, primarily the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is under fresh, persistent attack from Trump and his acolytes. Indeed, over the last nine years, much has been written about regarding Trump’s rise to the national stage and presidency, and his acolytes. Why him? There are a variety of reasons at play, but if one were to encapsulate it into a singular phrase, Samet offers an apt phrase (which perhaps came from Terkel): “miserable peace.” A certain segment of Americans, primarily white males of a certain age, are miserable under peace and prosperity (and democracy) and thus, seek to have a larger than life, transformative experience they imbue the Greatest Generation with having had. Such is the folly of misguided and misplaced nostalgia coupled with potent amnesia.

Overall, I think as adults, and as citizens within a democracy, it is always of vital importance to understand and assess war without rose-tinted glasses, and moreover, we need to recognize the dangers and limitations of nostalgia for the past. Instead, we ought to take a page from Lincoln’s book, and respect the past while not being paralyzed by it. Arguably, 21st century America is defined by persistent paralysis owing to nostalgia for the past. May the mid-2020s start turning the ship toward the future.