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The Best War Ever: America and World War II. By Michael C. C. Adams. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Maps. Photographs. Index. Pp. xvii, 189. $12.95.
This brief, interesting, and useful book is about the mythologizing of World War II. The Second World War lives in popular memory as the "good war," when our enemies personified evil, our troops were gallant and brave, we pulled together, sacrificed willingly, and got rich, and were bestowed with leadership by a grateful world, even our defeated foes having been remade in our image. Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Michael Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time; it leads to the belief that "America's future lies in reclaiming its past" (p. 158).
The Best War Ever (a volume in "The American Moment" series) will be welcome to undergraduate teachers. Adams shows us a dark side to World War II, but there is nothing in his pages to raise doubt that the war had to be fought. Considering that revisionist winds have blown today's students onto some unrecognizable terrain, Adams's frequent reminder that his subject is how a necessary war was transformed into a "good war" in the popular imagination is one of...