Re: "Lofty cant" about WWII

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>The Good Fight is littered with lofty cant. To say, for instance, that the
purpose of Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion) "was to free France
from Nazi tyranny" is to transform history writing (albeit "for kids") into
rhetoric. That statement places the accents on all the wrong syllables.
Overlord's goal was to establish a literal and figurative beachhead in
Western Europe in order to help destroy German military power and hence end
the war. To characterize it as Ambrose does is to confuse incidental
results with fundamental purpose.<<

Not quite. The purpose of  "Overlord" was to promote the interests of
Anglo-American imperialism.
Those interests lay in preventing a Soviet sweep all the way to the Alps and
the Pyrennes, because, by mid 1944, Germany was already doomed to defeat.
The Red Army had broken the back of the German army at Stalingrad and the
subsequent battle of the Kursk Salient. By mid-1943, the Germans had been
mawled, and were badly outnumbered and outgunned. This much soon became
clear to the anglo-american imperialist axis, and that's when the
preparations for Overlord began in earnest.

Before the allies had been piddling around in North Africa and places as
"strategic" as sicily, which, because of its limited significance, was not
that heavily defended (and in the event, the anglo-american forces did not
succeed in preventing the the evacuation of much of the defending force).
They were happy to let the Soviet Union do all the heavy lifting against
Germany, while the Americans and the Brits limited themselves to picking off
targets of opportunity on the periphery of the great war and all in the vain
hope that Britain might retain her empire.

The real history of WWII is the story of how the Soviet working people
overcame tremendous difficulties to defeat German imperialism.

José



----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2001 12:54 PM
Subject: "Lofty cant" about WWII


The Atlantic Monthly | June 2001

BOOKS

The Real War

Stephen Ambrose's GIs are plaster saints engaged in a sanctified crusade

by Benjamin Schwarz

In his best-selling books Band of Brothers (1992), D-Day: June 6, 1944
(1994), and Citizen Soldiers (1997), the gruff historian Stephen E. Ambrose
has advanced a pious interpretation of America's role in World War II.
According to this view, America waged a "crusade" to rid the world of the
tyrannical and racist regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. America's
fighting men "didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed,"
Ambrose declares. "So they fought," and thereby "stopped Hitler and Tojo."

Buttressed by the NBC news anchorman Tom Brokaw, whose enormously popular
The Greatest Generation (1998) and The Greatest Generation Speaks (1999)
are largely inspired by Ambrose's work, Ambrose has come to define the war
in the American mind. His previous books examined only the U.S. military's
participation in the European theater of operations. But in The Good Fight,
written "for young readers," he promises to present a chronicle of the
entire global struggle. His extraordinarily widespread appeal almost
certainly ensures that Ambrose will mold another American generation's
understanding of the war. (This book will likely become, as the publisher
predicts, "THE book on World War II for kids.") Because this is a book for
young adults, the arguments and point of view are somewhat simplified. But
Ambrose's interpretation in The Good Fight is similar in language, tone,
and substance to that in his books for adults, and in fact several passages
are taken verbatim from Citizen Soldiers.

Ambrose's version of events retroactively imposes an elevated meaning on
the American side of the war. Although The Good Fight neglects a host of
relevant events and subjects that did not directly involve the United
States (the V-weapon attacks on Britain; Operation Bagration; the
resistance movements in Yugoslavia, Italy, and France, to name a few),
Ambrose does discuss-and in greater detail than any other event save
D-Day-the Holocaust. Young readers could be forgiven for inferring that the
plight of the Jews and others in the death camps in part motivated
America's involvement in the war. Ambrose quotes a former U.S. Army major
who "voiced the emotions of so many of his fellow soldiers" when, many
decades after the event, he maintained that when he saw Dachau, he said to
himself, "Now I know why I am here." In truth, stopping the mass murder of
Jews figured in no way in either American war aims or American conduct. In
fact, U.S. political and military leaders, along with the press, played
down the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews, and the Army's own propaganda
film series "Why We Fight" didn't even mention the Holocaust.

As the critic and literary historian (and World War II combat veteran) Paul
Fussell reminded us in Wartime (1989), his study of the psychology and
emotion of the United States at war,

"For most Americans, the war was about revenge against the Japanese, and
the reason the European part had to be finished first was so that maximum
attention could be devoted to the real business, the absolute torment and
destruction of the Japanese. The slogan was conspicuously Remember Pearl
Harbor. No one ever shouted or sang Remember Poland."

(This understandable American passion for vengeance against Japan easily
metastasized into what Britain's ambassador in Washington called a
"universal 'exterminationist' anti-Japanese feeling" in the United States
and among its armed forces overseas.)

The Good Fight is littered with lofty cant. To say, for instance, that the
purpose of Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion) "was to free France
from Nazi tyranny" is to transform history writing (albeit "for kids") into
rhetoric. That statement places the accents on all the wrong syllables.
Overlord's goal was to establish a literal and figurative beachhead in
Western Europe in order to help destroy German military power and hence end
the war. To characterize it as Ambrose does is to confuse incidental
results with fundamental purpose.

Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/schwarz.htm


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org