The best war ever : America and World War II /
Michael C.C. Adams.
- Second edition.
- Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, (c)2015.
- 1 online resource
- The American moment .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations and Maps -- Preface to the Second Edition -- Preface -- 1 No Easy Answers -- 2 The Patterns of War, 1939-1945 -- 3 The American War Machine -- 4 Overseas -- 5 Home Front Change -- 6 The World Created by War -- 7 The Life Cycle of a Myth -- Afterword -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y
Was World War II really such a "good war"? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, "the best war ever." After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. A battle of tanks and airplanes, it was a "cleaner" war than World War I. Although we did not seek the conflict--or so we believed--Americans nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation's soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight. But according to historian Michael C.C. Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age is distorted. It has left us with a misleading--even dangerous--legacy, one enhanced by the nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E. Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities