The Good War: An Oral History of World War II

by Studs Terkel

“You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We were in a tribal sort of situation, where we could help each other without fear. I realized it was the absence of phony standards that created the thing I loved about the army.”

In 1945, the United States inherited the earth.... at the end of World War II, what was left of Western civilization passed into the American account. The war had also prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.

We are still living with this belief of having been “anointed by god” today, to the detriment of our nation.

“World War Two changed everything,” says the retired admiral. “Our military runs our foreign policy. The State Department has become the lackey of the Pentagon. Before World War Two, this never happened. Only if there was a war did they step up front. The ultimate control was civilian. World War Two changed all this.”

I was drinking about a fifth and a half of whiskey every day. Sometimes homemade, sometimes what I could buy. It was the only way I could kill. I had friends who were Japanese and I kept thinking every time I pulled a trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole: What is this person’s family gonna say when he doesn’t come back? He’s got a wife, he’s got children, somebody.

I haven’t touched a drop since. I wasn’t a drinking man before. I started in the Philippines when I saw the bodies of men, women, and children, especially babies, that were hit by bombs. They were by the side of the road, and we would run over them with our tanks. Oh, I still lose nights of sleep because of that woman I shot. I still lose a lot of sleep. I still dream about her.

Or better, send the politicians, let them fight it out. Yeah, like this stupid race that we’re having of atomic wars. So much money is being devoted to killing people and so little to saving. It’s a crazy world.

I had turned draft age, so I had to register. It’s ironic. Here I am being drafted into the army, and my father and sister are in a concentration camp waiting for the war to end.

In business, there’ll be times when I say, This really worries the heck out of me, but it’s really minor compared to having to do a river crossing under fire.

The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery. It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. Having to leave that group when I had the flu may have saved my life. Yet to me, that kid, it was a disaster.

But I was also enormously affected by the beauty of the countryside. We were in rolling hills and great forests. It stretched out for mile after mile. I could almost hear this Wagnerian music. I was pulled in two directions : Gee, I don’t wanna get killed. And, Boy, this is gorgeous country.

The whole thing might have been avoided had we been more experienced and called down in German for them to surrender. They probably would have been only too glad. Instead, out of fear, there was this needless slaughter.

We were aware that the Russians had taken enormous losses on the eastern front, that they really had broken the back of the German army. We would have been in for infinitely worse casualties and misery had it not been for them. We were well disposed toward them.

The thing that turned me against the Vietnam War was an issue of Life magazine in ’68. It had a cover picture of the hundred men that died in Vietnam that week. I said, Enough. I don’t want to stand here as a veteran of World War Two saying that we somehow took a stand that was admirable. We are bad as the rest if we don’t think independently and make up our own minds. We were willing to go along as long as it seemed an easy victory. When it really got tough, we started re-examining.

It has affected me in many ways ever since. I think my judgment of people is more circumspect. I know it’s made me less ready to fall into the trap of judging people by their style or appearance. In a short period of time, I had the most tremendous experiences of all of life: of fear, of jubilance, of misery, of hope, of comradeship, and of the endless excitement, the theatrics of it. I honestly feel grateful for having been a witness to an event as monumental as anything in history and, in a very small way, a participant.

There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job.

What was worse than death was the indignation of your buddies. You couldn’t let ’em down. It was stronger than flag and country.

The war I knew was totally savage.

The young man on the front line develops this insensitivity because it is the only way he can cope.

After a while, the veneer of civilization wore pretty thin. This hatred toward the Japanese was just a natural feeling that developed elementally. Our attitude toward the Japanese was different than the one we had toward the Germans.

And then bad things happened. That great camaraderie of savin’ tinfoil, toothpaste tubes, or tin cans, all that stuff that made people part of somethin’, that disappeared. Everybody was out for what they could get from then on. Everything changed.

I still think we’re all part of somethin’ , call it the history of the human race, if you want to. I feel that if some guy ten years from now has got some halfway decent conditions, I wanna feel that I helped in some small way to make it possible for him to enjoy them conditions. I mean, that’s the name of the game. I just want somebody to say, Them poor son-of-a-bitches, they musta taken a beating back in the old days. We don’t know all the names, but glory to them, or somethin’ like that.

The good war? That infuriates me. Yeah, the idea of World War Two being called a good war is a horrible thing. I think of all the atrocities. I think of a madman who had all this power. I think of the destruction of the Jews, the misery, the horrendous suffering in the concentration camps. In 1971, I visited Dachau. I could not believe what I saw. There’s one barracks left, a model barracks.

What a hell of a waste of a man’s life. I lost a lot of friends. I had the task of telling my roommate’s parents about our last days together. You lose limbs, sight, part of your life—for what? Old men send young men to war. Flags, banners, and patriotic sayings.

Such a powerful statement on the futility of war coming from a retired Rear Admiral!

We’re the only country in the world that’s been fighting a war since 1940. Count the wars—Korea, Vietnam—count the years. We have built up in our body politic a group of old men who look upon military service as a noble adventure.

We’ve always gone somewhere else to fight our wars, so we’ve not really learned about its horror. Seventy percent of our military budget is to fight somewhere else.

We’ve institutionalized militarism.

In 1947, we passed the National Security Act. You can’t find that term—national security—in any literature before that year. I...

Now it’s for the Department of Defense. Everybody’s for defense. Otherwise you’re considered unpatriotic. So there’s absolutely no limit to the money you must give to it.

For the first time in the history of man, a country has divided up the world into military districts. No nation in the world has done that before or has done it since. They have a military solution for everything that happens in their area. They write up contingency plans—a euphemism for war plans.

Our military runs our foreign policy. The State Department simply goes around and tidies up the messes the military makes. The State Department has become the lackey of the Pentagon.

Since World War Two, we began to use military force to get what we wanted in the world.

Not long ago, the Pentagon proudly announced that the U.S. had used military force 215 times to achieve its international goals since World War Two.

I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.

We’ve made war a religious act. Somewhere in the Bible it says, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God those that are God’s. What happened to that?

I think the Germans of that era were guilty. On the other hand, I think any people subjected to a propaganda barrage, with their patriotic feelings worked on, could become savage.

WERNER BURCKHARDT

I said to him, “But, Danny, what are you doing here? This isn’t your war.” He looked at me for the longest time. There was a dead silence. Then this dead-serious young man said, “Señorita, it’s strange to tell a Spaniard he has no need to fight fascism.” That brought me up. I grew up a lot that moment.

LEE OREMONT

These damn Republicans win elections these days because the New Deal picked up the working man and gave him a chance. He’s now conservative.

Never in the history of human conflict has there been so much talk of sacrifice and so little sacrifice.

No matter how just a war it was, it was war. It never was a solution to anything. Fuck war.

You’re a participant and an eyewitness. To see fascism defeated, nothing better could have happened to a human being. You felt you were doing something worthwhile. You felt you were an actor in a tremendous drama that was unfolding. It was the most important moment in my life. I always felt very lucky to have been part of it.

Every man, especially the youth, can be manipulated. The more you say to him, that’s the way of life, the American way of life, the German way of life, they believe it. Without being more bad than the other is. That was why a lot of German people were running behind Hitler. There’s a great danger all the time.

Relevant in 2024

I guess if the same would happen in the United States, a lot of people would run behind Adolf Hitler, too. They don’t care about what that man will do after they got work. That’s the great danger in the future, too. If people don’t think more than they do now, someday perhaps there will be one or two other Adolf Hitlers in another name.

CHARLIE MILLER

“I was among the first to read Mein Kampf. When I read its text to the council, they laughed. Later, they were surprised these terrible things happened. Why? He announced it from the first day. ” The conversation took place in 1967.

If our general population were subjected to the same trends and pressures that the Germans were, a great many of us would do the same. Maybe not as many, because we’re not quite as authoritarian as the Germans. But a lot of us would.

Most of our heroes have been ordinary people. The ordinary man is capable of enormous heroism and enormous bestiality. That’s the hard lesson of Nuremberg.

When we finish with the Germans and the Japs, we’ll come back and kill the Jews and the blacks.

A lot of people went into government, worked at developing these weapons, and came away saying it was the wrong thing to do. The people who made the H-bomb say it was a mistake. I made only the A-bomb. It took me only one lesson to learn the mistake. I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know we’re beginning to understand the climate, beginning to understand the oceans, beginning to understand the cell and the nucleus of the cell. We’re beginning to understand things we didn’t understand before. It is simply not possible to have war and nation states in the old way, with this kind of knowledge and this kind of technology. It cannot work into the next century.