Was World War II really such a "good war"? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, "the Best war ever." After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for.
The revised book also incorporates s.
In preparing this must-read new edition, Adams has consulted some seventy additional sources on topics as varied as the origins of Social Security and a national health system, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, and the relationship of traumatic brain injuries to the adjustment problems of veterans.
Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, shell-shocked soldiers grappled with emotional and physical trauma, rigorously enforced segregation, and rampant venereal disease.
Adams also exposes the myth that the home front was fully united behind the war effort, demonstrating how class, race, gender, and age divisions split Americans.
The Best War Ever charts the complex diplomatic problems of the 1930s and reveals the realities of ground combat: no moral triumph, it was in truth a brutal slog across a blasted landscape.
In the book, originally published in 1994, Adams challenges stereotypes to present a view of World War II that avoids the simplistic extremes of both glorification and vilification.
Disputing many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues in The Best War Ever that our celebratory experience of World War II is marred by darker and more sordid realities.
Ambrose and Tom Brokaw.
It has left us with a misleading--even dangerous--legacy, one enhanced by the nostalgia-tinged retrospectives of Stephen E.
Adams, our memory of the war era as a golden age is distorted.
C.
But according to historian Michael C.
Although we did not seek the conflict--or so we believed--Americans nevertheless rallied in support of the war effort, and the nation\'s soldiers, all twelve million of them, were proud to fight.
A battle of tanks and airplanes, it was a "cleaner" war than World War I.
It was liberating for women.
The war was good for the economy.
Was World War II really such a "good war"? Popular memory insists that it was, in fact, "the Best war ever." After all, we knew who the enemy was, and we understood what we were fighting for
