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It is hot for yet another reason, and that is the peculiar mood that has been hanging over the public for a while now. It is the fretful unease that is often attributed to bruises left by the Viet Nam War, the anxiety over the fragmented and amorphous texture of public esprit, over the conspicuous lack of any binding or driving national unity. This atmosphere has made older Americans homesick for, and younger ones curious about, an epoch of legendary solidarity and singular national purpose. The larger character of the time, its heroic texture, can be evoked by a simple iteration of the names of its outsized leaders and commanders: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, Marshall, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz. It can also be summoned up by the war's slogans and crucial place names: unconditional surrender, Dday, Normandy, the Bulge, Anzio, Guadalcanal, Hiroshima, V-J day. Many a vicarious pilgrimage to that lost time is being made these days, and among those who have noticed the fact is Robert Kane, a West Pointer who founded San Francisco's Presidio Press in 1974 to specialize in military books. Says Kane: "World War I no one cares about. World War II was the last patriotic war. We were attacked. We had a reason to get involved. It was a very, very clean war."
Many Americans, then, have simply found it refreshing, or nourishing, to look back to a time when, as Eric Sevareid puts it, "there were the white hats and the black hats." And surely now is the season for looking back, when most veterans of the war have entered those graying middle years when thoughtful retrospection becomes virtually compulsive. Now, as well, their offspring have matured enough to have some serious curiosity about the days of challenge and sacrifice and blood and glory that the elders keep bragging they went through.
All these amount to millions who, as it was put by Frank Cooling, historian at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., want to find out not only "what I did in the war" but also "what Daddy did in the war." Cooling is familiar with such quests. His institute has been so busy keeping up with groups studying World War II that it worries about falling behind on cataloguing war material it exists to preserve.
No mere handful of explanations can possibly account for all the motives of Americans who feast on World War II lore. Readers quite indifferent to the war might study a monster like Hitler, who could probably appeal to this psychologically conscious age even if he were only a work of fiction. And the countless students of the Holocaust must be drawn to it by an utterly inextricable mix of horror and disgust, wonder and mystification, at what mankind has done to mankind. It is not easy, or really possible, to sort out even the garden-variety sensibilities at play among the public consumers of all the cultural war goods. Surely those who keep shtiky Hogan 's Heroes going as a TV rerun series differ from those who keep such volumes as Hitler's Mein Kampf and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich moving off the paperback shelves.