(4 of 5)
A mere wish to be distracted and entertained would be enough to draw people to the vast multimedia tide of factual and fictional material. There is something there for every yen: battles on land and sea, adventures in the air and underground, home-front drama, tactics, strategy, diplomacy, ideology. In The Führer Seed, a new political thriller by Gus Weill, there is even a dash of genetic fancy. Espionage is a staple, naturally, and even equipment is getting immortality: one new $45 book offers the definitive biography of the Sherman tank, specs included. Nor has there been any shortage, in all this, of what Military Analyst Drew Middleton once wryly called the Fifi-Dupont-was-washing-her-drawers-when-the-American-tanks-arrived style of military history."
The flood of material must seem familiar in more ways than one to Americans who lived through the period between 1939 and 1945. The war invaded U.S. culture in books, plays, movies and songs long before the country got into the fighting. By 1945 Critic Burns Mantle complained of "a sort of war-play weariness" around Broadway, and moviegoers must have suffered a similar feeling. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood — so Richard Lingeman records in Don't You Know There's a War On? — rushed to register titles for prospective war movies. Not many of the era's flicks — The Fighting Seabees, The Fleet's In, Wake Island — are memorable except as museum pieces, but one endured as such a standard favorite that nobody tends to think of it any more as a World War II movie: Casablanca.
The war was well ended before material of the quality of The Best Years of Our Lives and The Naked and the Dead began to appear. A movie like The Bridge Over the River Kwai, reeking of war's futility, could not have been screened during the conflict, any more than the cynical existential slapstick of Catch-22 could have been published. Detachment required distance in time, and even more time was needed for the development of the best war material that was to come, those meticulous historical narratives, say, in which the late Cornelius Ryan, beginning in 1959, captivated a huge American audience. Indeed in print and on film, Ryan's tale telling in The Longest Day, The Final Battle and A Bridge Too Far might be credited with warming the public up for the heightened interest that is maturing today. Ryan's stories became part of the accumulating national memory of the war.
The U.S. fascination with World War II is no more or les a riddle than mankind's with war generally. It is at once easy to understand and yet as perversely puzzling as human nature itself. On its bloody face, war might seem a thing any sensible person would wish to put out of mind. Yet people have always clung to war, remembering it, exalting it and habitually mining it for human truths. War, after all, cannot be surpassed as revealing drama: it intensifies, exposes and amplifies all emotion and yearning, bad and good.