"The War: An Intimate History, 1941-45" A Book Review by Randy Shiner

The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945
Knopf, 480pp $50.00 ($29.99 at Amazon.com)

"The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945" is the companion to the Ken Burns documentary of the same name shown on PBS.

The book seamlessly weaves the experiences at home with the blood and gore of the battlefield. It is a book that could stand on its own without the film. The book is built around poeple from four towns in America and the experiences of individuals in them: Mobile, Alabama, Sacramento, California, Waterbury, Connecticut and Luverne, Minnesota, some of whom went to war and some of whom stayed. It studies the war from the perspective of those who stayed behind as assiduously as those who were in combat, whether on the ground, air or sea.

What is most noticeable, assuming that I have you convinced that this book is a monumental achievement in World War II history, is the gnawing sense, made ever clear by the telling, that the book's purpose is beyond a history lesson, although it is excellent as that.

It is a crystal-perfect mirror of ourselves on a very macro level. It shows a country that was, despite glaring faults, united after Pearl Harbor, in the joint effort to win against Hitler and Tojo. The book gives sends us back to a time when the entire country was affected by the fighting of the war. Every family was connected with the death, and the uncertainty of brothers, sons, husbands wounded or missing in action or wasting away in brutal Japanese prison camps.

Ward is not afraid to show us the general unity against well-defined enemies throughout the country despite florid racism that caused 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent to be packed off to internment camps because of the notion that they were security risks after Pearl Harbor. And then, when the latter became evident, were told that they were good enough to enter the military and then fed into the meat grinder of combat in the Italian campaign in 1942-43, slogging up and down the hills of Italy, decimated under constant German attack and then sent to impossible places, a meat grinder, like the Hurtgen Forest in the Vosges Mountains between France and Germany the battle for which brought out the best -- and the worst -- in everyone involved.

Ward shows the country united despite institutionalized racism in the armed forces that made black soldiers acceptable for the military, but only as support crews for white combat personnel, except in very unusual circumstances like the Tuskeegee Airmen who, as bomber escorts for the 8th Air Force, never lost a bomber while they were in escort positions or segregated units that toward the latter half of the war, were allowed to gain a little glory for themselves on the battlefield, even in death, for a country that relegated them to second-class status. Ward describes the racial tension in the country which resulted in race riots all over the country, in places like Mobile, Alabama where blood was shed when blacks tried to advance to supervisory positons, a shocking proposition for the Jim Crow south.

He shows us auto industries which were converted en masse from manufacturing cars to tanks and military aircraft. There was rationing. There was sacrifice. And it is exactly sacrifice which is lacking in the America of 2007, when I write this: President Bush calls the "War on Terror" World War III, and an existential battle against the forces of Islamic Fundamentalism. But where is the sense of urgency here? If it were truly important, truly an existential battle, wouldn't the American public mobilize against it? Wouldn't President Bush be able to tell GM to stop making Cadillacs and start producing Armored Humvees so that our boys aren't blown up by IEDs? It would not have been an issue for President Roosevelt, the Congress and the American public: for all would be convinced of "our righteous wrath" against Islamic fundamentalists -- those who supported, planned and committed the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and who killed the brave people on United Flight 93, which crashed in Shankstown, PA. And most of all, there would be a draft. And the children of our members of Congress and the Bush twins would face the prospect of going to fight. This is not the case now, for the caluclus of exactly what is worth going to shed blood and spend money over -- the national interests of the United States -- would be so much more carefully weighed and wars of choice or ego or whatever would be lessened accordingly.

"The War" was called a "good war" a "just war" and a "necessary war". Whatever you want to call it, it was war: and this book shows it for the hell it was on the battlefield as well as here at home during the years of World War II and exactly why the decision to go to war in the first place needs to be made not as a first or a second option, but the last option. This is a book which belongs in the hands of every thoughtful American and every kid able to understand it.