The widely accepted story of the Greatest Generation confuses “consequences” with “causes,” Samet argues. As a result of the Second World War, the Holocaust was stopped, France was liberated, and fascism was crushed. But none of these outcomes were what motivated the majority of Americans. The United States reluctantly entered the war more than two years after it started, and only after it was attacked. According to Samet, six months into the war, a majority of polled Americans “admitted they did not have a clear idea of what the war was about.”
On the home front, Americans primarily supported the war because it brought good times in the form of jobs and higher wages for people who had been mired in a decade-long Depression. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who oversaw price controls during the war, commented, “Never in the history of human conflict has there been so much talk about sacrifice and so little sacrifice.” Moreover, the vast majority of U.S. civilians were comfortably protected by two oceans, saving them from the terror of German bombs and rockets in the United Kingdom or the catastrophic suffering in Russia.
Uncomfortable facts have been left out of America’s triumphal story. These include the rape of thousands of French women by American soldiers, the anti-Semitism and contempt for Holocaust victims among many troops, the brutal treatment of African Americans in the military, and an astoundingly high toleration for corruption and profiteering.
Americans are taught that the June 1944 U.S.-led invasion of Normandy was the turning point of the war, but the actual turning point came a year and a half earlier, when the Russians defeated Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad and began to drive them back to Berlin. Roughly 85 percent of German casualties in the war occurred on the Eastern Front. An inaccurate view of the past makes it harder for many Americans to understand Russian and European behavior in the present. Why, we ask, aren’t they more grateful for all we’ve done for them?
American elites also offered a scrubbed narrative of the successful mobilization for war. The war effort was a spectacular demonstration of the power of economic planning and coordination. Rising wartime incomes and constricted civilian production created a large pool of pent-up demand. When the shooting stopped, American corporations did not need the government to maintain domestic demand—at least for a while. To help ensure that the warfare state did not turn into a welfare state, business elites needed a story that we won the war because free enterprise made us economically and morally superior.