AT THE BEGINNING of World War II my father, a small-town doctor in central Illinois, joined the Navy. My mother, brothers, and I followed him to the Great Lakes, then to Pensacola. When he shipped out to the Pacific in 1943, we moved to Whitewater, Wisconsin, to live with my grandmother. Consequently, I didn’t see many GIs during the war. But in 1946, when Dad got out of the Navy and began to set up a practice in Whitewater, we had what amounted to a squad of ex-GIs for neighbors. They lived in a boardinghouse while attending the local college (today the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) on the GI Bill.
Dad put up a basketball backboard and goal over our garage. The GIs taught me and my brothers to play the game. We were shirts and skins. I don’t know that I ever knew their last names—they were Bill and Harry, Joe and Stan, Fred and Ducky—but I’ve never forgotten their scars. Stan had three, one on his arm, another on his shoulder, a third on his hand. Fred and Ducky had two, the others had one.
We didn’t play all that often, because these guys were taking eighteen or twenty-one credits per semester. “Making up for lost time,” they told us. Their chief recreation came in the fall, when they would drive up to northern Wisconsin for the opening weekend of deer season. Beginning in 1947, when I was twelve years old, I was allowed to go with them.
We slept in the living room of a small farmhouse, side by side in sleeping bags on the floor. There was some drinking, not much, as we would get up at 4 A.M. (“0400” to the ex-GIs, which mystified me), but enough to loosen their tongues. In addition, their rifles came from around the world—Czech, British, Russian, American, Japanese, French—and each man had a story about how he acquired his rifle. It was there that I heard my first war stories. I’ve been listening ever since. I thought then that these guys were giants. I still do.
Stan was the senior NCO in the bunch. He took charge. No one voted, there was no discussion, it was just taken for granted that he was our leader. In the morning, he got us organized. This was cultivated land, hilly, interspersed with woods of twenty or so acres each. Stan would study a wood with his binoculars, then bark out the assignments. Two men would go to the far end of the wood, two others would post up along the sides, two more would stand on the edge of the near end. The other six would march through the wood, shouting to drive the deer out so the posted men could get a clear shot. After they got their deer, they became the drivers and the others were put on post. We all got our deer.
They don’t hunt that way in northern Wisconsin today. Hunters go out as individuals, most often building a platform in a tree for their stand (deer never look up for danger). A couple of weeks before opening day, they set out bait—apples or cabbages—around the tree. They too usually get their deer, but that kind of hunting has no appeal for me and I no longer participate.
By the time I went to Madison for my own college education, the ex-GIs had graduated and were off making their livings. Over the next four years I developed my fair share of academic snobbery, encouraged by my professors. They put me to reading such books as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1951), and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). These books, like the professors, deplored the conformity of the 1950s. They charged that the young executives and corporate men of the 1950s marched in step, dressed alike, seldom questioned authority, did as they were told, worked always, were frighteningly materialistic, devoid of culture and individualism. By the time I became a graduate student, I was full of scorn for them and, I must confess, for their leader, President Eisenhower—the bland leading the bland.
But in fact these were the men who built modern America. They had learned to work together in the armed services in World War II. They had seen enough destruction; they wanted to construct. They built the Interstate Highway system, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the suburbs (so scorned by the sociologists, so successful with the people), and more. They had seen enough killing; they wanted to save lives. They licked polio and made other revolutionary advances in medicine. They had learned in the army the virtues of a solid organization and teamwork, and the value of individual initiative, inventiveness, and responsibility. They developed the modern corporation while inaugurating revolutionary advances in science and technology, education and public policy.
The ex-GIs had seen enough war; they wanted peace. But they had also seen the evil of dictatorship; they wanted freedom. They had learned in their youth that the way to prevent war was to deter through military strength, and to reject isolationism for full involvement in the world. So they supported NATO and the United Nations and the Department of Defense. They had stopped Hitler and Tojo; in the 1950s they stopped Stalin and Khrushchev.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy described the men and women of his generation: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”
The “we” generation of World War II (as in “We are all in this together”) was a special breed of men and women who did great things for America and the world. When the GIs sailed for Europe, they were coming to the continent not as conquerors but liberators. In his Order of the Day on June 6, 1944, Eisenhower had told them their mission was: “The destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” They accomplished that mission.
In the process they liberated the Germans (or at least the Germans living west of the Elbe River). In Normandy, in July 1944, Wehrmacht Pvt. Walter Zittats was guarding some American prisoners. One of them spoke German. Zittats asked him, “ ‘Why are you making war against us?’ I’ll always remember his exact words: ‘We are fighting to free you from the fantastic idea that you are a master race.’ ”1 In June 1945 Eisenhower told his staff, “The success of this occupation can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, then we shall have succeeded.” That mission, too, was accomplished.
In the fall semester of 1996 I was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I taught a course on World War II to some 350 students. They were dumbstruck by descriptions of what it was like to be on the front lines. They were even more amazed by the responsibilities carried by junior officers and NCOs who were as young as they. Like all of us who have never been in combat, they wondered if they could have done it—and even more, they wondered how anyone could have done it.
There is a vast literature on the latter question. In general, in assessing the motivation of the GIs, there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with it. The GIs fought because they had to. What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion. It has been my experience, through four decades of interviewing ex-GIs, that such generalizations are true enough.
And yet there is something more. Although the GIs were and are embarrassed to talk or write about the cause they fought for, in marked contrast to their great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, they were the children of democracy and they did more to help spread democracy around the world than any other generation in history.
At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.