On a windy Saturday in late October 2002, politicians, Hollywood moguls, television personalities and American second world war veterans gathered in front of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans to pay tribute to historian Stephen Ambrose, who had died of lung cancer a week earlier. Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw all joined the proceedings. Former President George H W Bush was also there and declared that "Stephen Ambrose was one of the greatest historians of his time or any time." Though Ambrose himself never served in the military, the memorial service befitted that of a war hero.
Ambrose was the author of some 36 books, the best known of which chronicled the experiences of soldiers in the US army during the second world war. His 1992 book about a company of soldiers fighting in Europe, Band of Brothers, was made into a television series. His 1994 book, D-Day, inspired Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. And Citizen Soldiers, about Americans fighting in Europe from June 1944 to Germany's surrender, was a bestseller. Former US Senator George McGovern, a veteran himself, noted at the memorial service that Ambrose "probably reached more American readers than any historian in this country's 200 years."
What explains this outpouring of praise? Surely not the quality of Ambrose's writing, nor the novelty of his insights, nor even his scholarship, which came under fire for plagiarism. No, Ambrose's achievement was to have almost single-handedly created a myth about how and why Americans fought and won the second world war.
The basic components of Ambrose's mythology are easily identified. First, America won the war with little help from its allies. The D-Day invasion of Normandy therefore takes pride of place in all his histories. Britain and Russia rarely feature in his accounts of the war. One searches his books in vain for accounts of the battle of Britain or Stalingrad. Second, the war was won not by generals but by courageous young American men who "didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed." Third, the war was a contest between democracy and fascism, and America's victory revealed which system was superior. As Ambrose put it, the story of the war was that "the Boy Scouts from America beat the Nazi youth."
To be sure, the US made an enormous economic contribution to the overall Allied war effort. But Americans did far less actual fighting in Europe than the Russians. America lost 295,000 soldiers in combat (in both major theatres) and suffered very few civilian casualties, while Russia paid the almost unfathomable price of 25m lives. All the other major combatants suffered more overall casualties in the war than the US, from Germany's 7m, to Poland's 6.8m, Yugoslavia's 1.7m, France's 600,000, Britain's 380,000, and half a million each for Austria, Greece, and Italy. As for why they fought, American veterans tend to point out that they fought because, under conscription, they had little choice and because they wanted to show loyalty to their fellow soldiers.
Still, Ambrose's portraits of young American heroes have proven irresistible to the American public, and other authors have joined in this frenzy of glorification. Television journalist Tom Brokaw cashed in with his 1998 book The Greatest Generation: "They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs... They succeeded on every front. They won the war; they saved the world." According to Brokaw, these young Americans were not just great, but constitute "the greatest generation any society has ever produced."
These popular histories leave out awkward facts about the American experience in the second world war, such as the unwillingness of the US to accept Jews seeking refuge from Nazi Germany, the internment of Japanese Americans, or the American firebombing of Japanese and German cities. More importantly, these fuzzy historical accounts provide a false sense of historical consciousness that can be manipulated in times of crisis.
In rallying his country to wage war on Iraq, Bush has frequently dipped into the grab-bag of popular nostrums provided by Ambrose and others. What is America doing in Iraq? Not just disarming a tyrant or containing a dictator. Not for us the small-bore work of arms inspections. Rather, in George Bush's mind, every day is 7th December 1941. We have been attacked; we will respond; and we shall go further, and liberate the oppressed from tyranny, for that is our nature.
On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Bush declared that "this nation has defeated tyrants and liberated death camps, and raised the lamp of liberty to every captive land. We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power." A few months later, in his January 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush again drew a link between Nazism and Saddam, claiming that "the ideology of power and domination has appeared again, and seeks to gain the ultimate weapons of terror." And on 27th February 2003, he declared that America's cause "is right and just: the liberty for an oppressed people." Just as America sought no empire in 1945, so it does not seek one today. In postwar Germany and Japan, said the president, "we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments." That news will surprise the Germans and Japanese, not to mention the South Koreans, who since 1945 have been sharing their countries with large numbers of US soldiers.
In deploying these bland half-truths, Bush wants to place on the defensive the Europeans who oppose war: to block America's righteous purpose is akin to appeasing Hitler. But Bush's eagerness to embrace the legacy of the second world war also betrays his discomfort in referring to other conflicts in which the US has fought since 1945, few of which offer such unambiguous lessons. In Korea, Americans fought a war for which they were woefully unprepared, almost lost, then offered a truce. Today, the stalemate continues. Were the 50,000 Americans killed in Korea less courageous than the "greatest generation"? What of the Vietnam war, when American leaders also hearkened back to Hitler and appeasement to justify the defence of freedom and the liberation of Asia from communist tyranny? Some 58,000 Americans died there, but they have no place in the pantheon of American military glory.
Certainly, the millions of young Americans who fought in the second world war deserve to be honoured by posterity. But those soldiers earned their glory only after great hardship, and it is that genuine sacrifice Bush often fails to recall. Yet sacrifice - the deprivation of comforts and safety, the surrender of self in a larger purpose - was central to the second world war experience. More than 16m Americans served in the military during that war, which was then more than 12 per cent of the population. Everyone knew somebody in the service, and on the home front, rationing and privation were constant reminders of the reality of war. This sense of national sacrifice was notably absent from later wars. In the Korean and Vietnam wars, only about 4 per cent of the US population did time in the military, and during the Gulf war, the figure dropped to 1 per cent. As for casualties, in the second world war, 1.8 per cent of all those Americans enrolled in the services were killed in action. In Vietnam, that figure dropped to 0.6 per cent and in Korea 0.5 per cent. In the Gulf war, 148 soldiers were killed in combat, a mere 0.005 per cent of those on active duty.
Thus, as American leaders invoke the glories of past wars, the actual number of Americans who have served in any branch of the military, or seen combat, or known anyone who was killed in combat, has dropped off sharply. And because so few Americans now have personal knowledge of war, we are that much more vulnerable to the temptations offered by an inflated rhetoric of heroism, guts and glory. It is telling that those Americans who do remember the second world war tend to oppose war with Iraq: a Los Angeles Times poll taken in January showed that, while 58 per cent of Americans supported sending troops to Iraq, only 35 per cent of those over 77 did so. Here is an awkward paradox: despite the president's call to arms, the members of the "greatest generation" are those least willing to fall in line.
