Why is ww2 referred to as the good war

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There was much outcry over delays in returning the bodies, Bodnar said. A typical letter to the military contrasted the alacrity with which soldiers were drafted and sent to the front with the unconscionable delay in bringing their remains home.

Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, gave a talk on photographer Dorothea Lange and her documentation of the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. Commissioned by the War Relocation Authority, the photographs were suppressed by the government for 60 years.

Lange faced many obstacles in her documentation of the relocation camps. The intensity of public feeling about what those who survived it called the Great War has surprised some, and annoyed others, but it has undoubtedly been a dominant element in the public mood.

Apart from all the books and articles, television and radio programmes, an astonishing 5 million people visited the sea of poppies around the Tower of London. It is a deeply ingrained folk memory.

For all the deep and sincere mourning this past year, there has long been an implied contrast between the first and second world wars. After , Europe seemed to have at last achieved what had been falsely promised in a war to make the world safe for democracy, and a war to end wars.

That was how it felt during the glorious western postwar half-century of peace and prosperity, when no European countries fought each other, and when finally the cold war ended without armies clashing in Europe. But so far from an eternal age of peace, we have not only returned to fighting wars — we have returned to fighting a kind of war grimly prefigured not by the supposedly evil Great War but instead by the seemingly noble Good War. From to as many as 18 million people died, while more than 70 million died from to The immensely important difference was that almost all of those killed in the first world war were soldiers in uniform, while the peculiar — and peculiarly horrible — distinguishing feature of the second world war was that up to 50 million of the dead were civilians.

That would be the true face of the new war. The myth of the Bad War and the Good War has become very dangerous, insofar as it has conditioned our attitude to war as a whole.

The notion that the second world war was finer and nobler than the first is highly dubious in itself, since it sanitises so much, from the slaughter of civilians by Allied bombing to the gang rape of millions of women by our Russian allies at the moment of victory. And it may be that the sanctification of the later war has had more pernicious consequences than the anathematisation of the former. Any argument that the Great War was uniquely wicked and wasteful is plainly false in statistical terms, and the idea that the Good War was uniquely noble is absurd in view of its moral ambiguities.

Worse than that, the glorification of the second world war has had practical and baleful consequences. A t the start of , few seriously expected another European war.

Even in the weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, most political leaders thought that war would be averted. The outbreak of war was therefore an immense shock, one which precipitated a revolution in public opinion — not among jingoists, but liberals and radicals, including this paper.

The Manchester Guardian had been very strongly opposed to war, and frankly isolationist. But when war was declared, he was so appalled by German perfidy that he enlisted, aged 47, dying his grey hair to conceal his age. At the outset, every country thought victory certain, and everyone expected a very short war. But there were four more years to come, on a scale even more vast and terrible, as one country after another — or at least their rulers — grasped not only the human catastrophe but the grim political outcome.

When peace came, there came also a long period of intense and repressed mourning. Remembrance took different forms in different countries, set in stone for posterity. British war memorials are marked by their acute realism, with every detail of buckle, puttee and gun carriage captured as if never to be forgotten, so that they need never be seen again. See the works of the gifted sculptor Charles Jagger, his haggard infantryman at Paddington station, or the huge bas relief of the Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner, gunners dragging their guns through the mud.

Although the British thought that they had suffered an unimaginable loss, France had lost 1. But had the Germans? Their memorials were not so much mournful as defiant. Even so, in Berlin as well as Paris and London, the s were a time of hedonistic oblivion, as if to put the horrors out of mind. But there was also a reaction, beginning again with this paper.