“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II

“Aaaahh, I feel that if countries are gonna fight a war, find yourself an island with nobody and then just put all your men in there and let them kill each other. Or better, send the politicians, let them fight it out. Yeah, like this stupid race that we’re having of atomic wars. So much money is being devoted to killing people and so little to saving. It’s a crazy world.” 

A recurring point raised by Terkel’s interviewees is the inherent immorality of war. War is especially wrong because it demands harm toward innocent people who are completely divorced from the decision to go to war, which is made by political elites, even in a democracy. In that sense, even a war with a sensible cause cannot be described as a “good war.”

“Unlike Vietnam, it wasn’t just working-class kids doing the fighting. You go to college faculty clubs today and on the walls are long lists of graduates who died in the Second World War. It was the last time that most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualifications.” 

This is one of several instances when an interviewee compares World War II with the Vietnam War. Robert Lekachman makes one important point about how the Vietnam War differed from the American experience of World War II. While the US military during World War II had personnel drawn from various classes, the working class were more likely to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

“People in America do not know what war is. I do, and anybody that was in the service. The Russians know. The Polish know. The Jewish know. But the American people have no idea what all-out war is. We never tasted it. I hope we never do.” 

The American experience of World War II was different from that of other countries on both sides of the conflict. Aside from the Pearl Harbor attack, there was no devastation caused by the war on the home front. This enabled the United States to thrive economically after the war ended, while Europe and East Asia were still recovering. Perhaps more importantly, though, it meant that the American experience of war was fundamentally different from that of the rest of the world, arguably making Americans more willing to tolerate wars in the future.