A Democracy at War
O'Neill, William L.
T o many, perhaps most, Americans, it is still simply "the war." Just as the Revolution and the Civil War shaped the United States for generations, so World War II made the nation in which most of...
...even as they were wondering whether they would live out that day or the week...
...And good to be reminded of what a fearsome task they had...
...It was prosperous largely because the war taught Americans to work in large orgaThe American Spectator February 1994 89 reminded of what that World War II generation accomplished...
...The economy grew vastly during the war years, and millions of Americans were moved around to the new war industry zones—the West Coast and California especially, but also the East Coast ports and Detroit, away from the center of the country and the impoverished Deep South...
...He censures the segregation of blacks and the internment of Japanese-Americans...
...O'Neill, a social historian, occasionally writes with an eye on the academy...
...nizations in adaptive and creative ways...
...But it is good to be T he war was also a learning experience, and the most endearing thing about A Democracy at War is that it shows again and again how Americans did things better and better as the war went on...
...But polls almost always show that voters want all good things and are willing to pay no price...
...The calmness of the beaches today contrasts withwhat we sense from films and museum exhibits—the thousands of ships, the overwhelming noise and smoke from artillery fire in every direction, the churning seas and stinging bullets...
...He is harsh on MacArthur's faults but cheerfully celebrates his strengths...
...But O'Neill doesn't spotlight one of Roosevelt's great strengths, his knack for picking the right person for almost every job he considered important—which was combined with a Reagan-like indifference to appointees for tasks he thought unimportant...
...But it did serve a useful purpose in Japan, where civilians seemed determined to resist the expected American invasion, and O'Neill never addresses George Orwell's argument that enemy civilians have no moral entitlement to better treatment than the 18-year-old soldiers who had no part in determining their nation's course...
...Americans were able to pay 45 percent of the cost of the war as it was being fought, even when it took half the gross national product, borrowing the rest from what turned out to be a prosperous postwar nation...
...He is angry that Americans before Pearl Harbor wanted to help Britain defeat the Nazis but didn't want to take any risk of war...
...It was supplied by big business...
...He hates the undeniably unpleasant but undeniably able Admiral Ernest King...
...For a long generation after that war, Americans were happy "organization men," producing impressive economic growth despite high marginal tax rates, within the confines of what critics thought were stifling organizations...
...it is their leaders' job to resolve those contradictions...
...They learned to ship goods in convoys and to have planes lay mines...
...One thing that might help this war," Dwight Eisenhower confided to his diary in March 1942, "is to get someone to shoot King...
...President Roosevelt does not win his affections, though O'Neill concedes that most of FDR's big decisions were right: The war in the Pacific should have been subordinated to the War in Europe...
...As O'Neill writes, "The great thing about democracy is that it self-corrects...
...The young men who went to Normandy must have thought, Why me...
...But such preoccupations are driven more by a desire for completeness than by an obsession with political correctness...
...Michael Barone is a senior writer at U.S...
...And after indicating some sympathy with critics of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, he argues convincingly that decision saved on balance many lives and was morally justified, since Japan surely would not have surrendered otherwise...
...71 90 The American Spectator February 1994...
...Last summer I visited the Normandy beaches, saw the graves near Omaha Beach, where the invasion was nearly beaten back that first day, saw the church at Ste...
...Roosevelt had not nationalized the railroads and big war industries, as Wilson had, but built factories for contractors like Henry Kaiser, who had the shrewdness to hire Tommy Corcoran as his lobbyist...
...North Africa should have been invaded in November 1942, since the U.S...
...The Normandy invasion should have been insisted on in 1944„ if not 1943...
...Generals like Eisenhower and enlisted men in artillery units performed vastly better in 1944 and 1945 than they had in 1942 and 1943, and American officers and troops learned how to execute supple and complex maneuvers...
...He shows a wonderful appreciation of Eisenhower and Patton...
...Localism, the curse of effective national government, was at the same time not only intrinsic to American democracy, but a superb maker of men...
...News & World Report...
...Those with no affection for the American character will not like this book...
...But he concedes handsomely that our Tocquevillean nature was our strength: "The very same democratic forces that kept the country from preparing for this war had shaped its youth in such a way as to enable them to win it...
...He notes how few "people of color" lived in most American cities...
...We know now that they were the men who began the fifty-year task of rolling the tide of totalitarianism back across the entire continent of Europe...
...the Yalta agreements were a game attempt at making the best of a weak American hand in Eastern Europe...
...This was no accident...
...And it was manned by big labor, whose membership swelled thanks to agreements secured by a sympathetic administration despite an unfriendly Congress...
...Or, as he quotes Truman aide George Elsey: "It is well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing...
...He cites the interesting recent books on sex and homosexuality in the war...
...O'Neill's affection is flecked with bits—sometimes rather large bits—of irritation and anger...
...Over time, Americans lost their gift for working in big units: by the 1970s, big government was clumsy and bureaucratic, big business was producing shoddy goods, and big labor had lost touch with new workers...
...Mere Eglise where the paratrooper's parachute was impaled on the steeple, saw the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc which the Rangers climbed under fire...
...O'Neill has his personal favorites...
...How Americans fought that war and how it changed the country are the subjects of William O'Neill's lively historical narrative, A Democracy at War...
...He strongly condemns the saturation bombing of German and Japanese cities, arguing that in Germany it served no useful military purpose and mentioning that some of those bombs could well have been targeted at the death camps...
...The whole goddam war was a horrible thing...
...It should be a comfort to know that Bill Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg does not ask questions about foreign affairs...
...Why were there so many bottlenecks, labor shortages, dumb decisions, so much high-level bickering...
...O'Neill, like almost everyone at the time and most historians since, is harshly critical of early efforts at mobilization...
...He is angry that the election year of 1940 was lost to mobilization...
...What is amazing is that these Americans of fifty years ago did so much—built so many planes and ships, assembled such talented armed forces—so well...
...He makes a good case that many more women should have been in the armed services, to take over non-combat jobs from men...
...He loves Bernard Baruch, the would-be mobilizer, who previous readings had convinced me was a blowhard...
...But Franklin Roosevelt took grave political risks when he gave destroyers to Britain and signed a draft law just before the election—although he saw to it that a Republican, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, drew the first draft numbers out of a fishbowl...
...This is a book told from the civilian perspective, with admiring glances at the G.I.s, the "homesick, wisecracking skeptics who were at the same time soft touches for a hungry child or a pretty face...
...Just as the Revolution and the Civil War shaped the United States for generations, so World War II made the nation in which most of us grew up: "postwar America...
...command economies should explain that a mobilization run largely by commands could not have worked smoothly...
...They learned to treat battle fatigue ("neuropsychiatric cases") and to fight effectively in units...
...World War II was fought by big government...
...The war effort also built a new America...
...O'Neill usefully engages the moral issues of the time that are still contested A DEMOCRACY AT WAR: AMERICA'S FIGHT AT HOME AND ABROAD William L. O'Neill Free Press/480 pages / $24.95 reviewed by MICHAEL BARONE He is angry that Americans did not ration more goods, did not pay more taxes, left the operations of the draft up to local- boards, and ultimately drafted too few men—and, he interestingly adds, women...
...needed politically to move somewhere in the European Theater that year...
...What we now know about 88 The American Spectator February 1994 today...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
