The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
A writer, reporter, and above all, a good listener, Studs Turkel has spent a career posing provocative questions and actively listening to the answers. In "The Good War", Terkel talks to Americans, both famous and obscure, about their contrasting, not always golden, memories of the war that shaped their lives, World War II. This first trade paperback edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book features a new Preface by the author.Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Studs Terkel, the noted Chicago-based journalist, gathers the reminiscences of 121 participants in World War II (called "the good war" because, in the words of one soldier, "to see fascism defeated, nothing better could have happened to a human being"). These participants, men and women, famous and ordinary, tell stories that add immeasurably to our understanding of that cataclysmic time. One Soviet soldier recounts that, surrounded by the Germans, his comrades tapped the powder from their last cartridges and inserted notes to their families inside the casings; Russian children, he goes on, still turn these up every now and again and deliver the notes to the soldiers' families. Terkel touches on many themes along the way, including institutionalized racism in the United States military, the birth of the military-industrial complex, and the origins of the Cold War.
Review
As in Hard Times and Working, this master interviewer again creates a turbulent epic of human experience by quoting the words of those who lived it. . . . A vivid resurrection of a lost time. -- Newsday
Deeply moving and profoundly important. -- Boston Globe
I promise you will remember your war years, if you were alive then, with extraordinary vividness as you go through Studs Terkel's book. Or, if you are too young to remember, this is the best place to get a sense of what people were feeling. -- Garry Wills, Chicago Tribune Book World
In World War II memories, Terkel has found a great, untold story - with fore-shadowings of Vietnam and aftershocks of atomic warfare. Terkel explains the title, matter-of-factly, as the Vietnam, nuclear-war contrast; the testimony - even from those whose lives peaked in WW II - exposes the irony of the phrase. First witness is "Hawaiian"-Californian John Garcia: in December 1941, as a pipefitter apprentice at Pearl Harbor, he retrieved live and dead bodies from the water and hulls; his girlfriend was killed by misfired American shells, he petitioned FDR to get into service, then was asked his race (great-grandparents?) and, as "Caucasian," separated from "the other Hawaiians"; on Okinawa, "I'd get up each day and start drinking. . . . They would show us movies. Japanese women didn't cry. They accepted the ashes stoically. I knew different. They went home and cried." In that same lead-off section appear the Nisei, uprooted and interned; a child-witness to, and a-participant in, the hysteria; an American-born Japanese, trapped in Japan on a visit. One of the last sections has to do with the Bomb. In an Indiana farm kitchen, Terkel talks with Bill Harney, radar operator on the plane that bombed Nagasaki. In a New York hotel lobby, he talks to Marnie Seymour who, with her husband, worked at Oak Ridge. "Out of the eighteen couples at the motel we lived in, most have never been able to have children. We are rather fortunate. We have four children. Two have birth defects." (Later, living in "very swish" New Canaan, she'd see the Hiroshima Maidens, brought over by Norman Cousins, at the supermarket.) There are several things to be said about Terkel, and his material. He has sought out people with real, unpredictable, history-brushing (sometimes history-revising) stories - but also persons whose experiences could be called typical, who become archetypal (like Chicago business executive Robert Ramos, "the skinny nineteen-year-old kid who's gonna prove that he can measure up"). He has a light intermix, too, of onlookers and leaders - yielding comments from both Pauline Kael and a retired admiral on the vacuousness of WW II films (but contrast, as well, between Kael's approval of The Clock and a war bride's contempt). He doesn't, however, construct his groupings mechanically, to make obvious points: blacks, for instance, turn up everywhere; under the rubric "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" we hear only from Marine Andrews; pronouncements on Vietnam differ, one after another Pacific veteran attests to gratitude for the Bomb. What is inescapable, though, is the recognition of war as brutal, and brutalizing; the reservations about "the Good War" utterable only in Vietnam-and-after retrospect. (Kirkus Reviews)
Incontestably one of the great human documents of all time. It has the essence and cumulative force of a hundred powerful war novels, without drawing on a single word of fiction. Among major historians Terkel is now in orbit all by himself, world class. -- Norman Corwin
Read this important book. -- Philadelphia Inquirer
Tremendously compelling, somehow dramatic and intimate at the same time, as if one has stumbled on private accounts in letters long locked in attic trunks...Mr. Terkel's book gives the American experience in World War Two great immediacy...In terms of plain human interest, Mr. Terkel may well have put together the most vivid collection of World War Two sketches ever gathered between covers. -- Loudon Wainwright, The New York Times Book Review
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Customer Reviews
The Rank and File Of WWII Get To Speak 
Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. A little comment is thus in order here before I do so. The obvious one that comes to mind is that with his passing he joins many of the icons of my youth who have now passed from the scene. Saul Bellows, Arthur Miller, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Utah Phillips to name a few. Terkel was certainly one of them, not for his rather bland old New Deal political perspective as much as a working class partisan as he might have been, but for his reportage about ordinary working people. These are my kind of people. This where I come from. He heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject, especially that melody of his adopted Chicago home (Musically, Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home, Chicago" fits the bill here, right?).
One thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book is that, as is true of the majority of Terkel's interview books, he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else's story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn't to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. I would have been surprised, for example, if the central leadership of the Allied military efforts, like General Eisenhower, got a lot of ink here but I was not surprised that, for example, the late "premature anti-fascist" Milton Wolff, the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, got a full airing on his interesting World War II exploits.
What were Stud's preoccupations in this book? Obviously from the quotation marks around the title "The Good War" there is some question in his mind and in that of at least some of his interviewees that this now storied period was all that it was cracked up to be. One, however, gets the distinct impression that, notwithstanding that assumption, those who participated in this period, called the "greatest generation" at least in America basically saw it as a necessary war to fight, whatever else happened afterward.
I have my disagreements with the premise that was this was the greatest American generation (the Northern side in the Civil War gets my vote) and what one should have done in response to the Axis threat to the world and the defense of the Soviet Union but I too will defer political judgment and let the participants tell their stories.
And what stories are being told here? Well, certainly this book is filled with interviews of the lives, struggles and fate of the rank and file servicemen (and a few women) that fought that war. Those include the stories of soldiers from the Axis powers and the Soviet Union as well. Of course we have the trials and tribulations of those who were left behind on the home fronts, including those "Rosie The Riveters" women who went to work in the factories of America (and were later kicked out on the return of the men).
Moreover, and this marks this book as different from earlier efforts to tell the war story, we have stories of the plight and successes of blacks, including the now famous Tuskegee Airmen, in this transitional racial period that in many ways is the catalyst for the later black civil rights movement of the 1950's. It is no accident that many of the early rank and file cadres of that movement were veterans of this war. As importantly we also have stories here of the effects the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war as told by those affected.
Of course, no modern account of World War II can be complete without mention of the Holocaust (Shoah), the fates of the survivors and those who didn't as well as the impact that it had on the liberators on entering the death camps. Also necessary are the interviews concerning the grizzly fates of POW on all sides. As is, additionally, the general sense that many participants sincerely thought that this war was to be something like a war to end all wars (sound familiar?), especially in light of Hiroshima.
I was somewhat surprised by the overwhelming distinction that was drawn between the "civilized" nature of the European war and the "savagery" of the Pacific war by the participants. However, I was not surprised by the general support for the dropping of the atomic bomb expressed by the bulk of the interviewees questioned nor was I surprised by the little tidbits of information about events that occurred during the war that presaged the buildup to the anti-Soviet Cold War.
For those of us who are sons and daughters of this generation that fought the war, and who came of political age in the 1960's, this little book provides more personal information in one spot than I ever learned from my taciturn and reticent parents or from the high school history books. That, my friends, makes this any extremely necessary book for your lists if you came from an even later generation and are personally farther removed from this period. Read this book! Kudos and adieu Studs.
This is the best book on WWII
"The Good War" - Studs Turkel's 5th oral history - was published in 1984. Like most of his other books, this too was a "best seller". Turkel has put together excerpts from some 124 interviews with people who lived during the war years - ex-military officers and enlisted men, defense industry workers, atomic bomb scientists, celebrities, politicians, Jews, Japanese, Germans, Russians, men, women, blacks, native Americans, rich, poor, younger, older. I've missed some, but you get the idea.
The war, notes Turkel, was good for most Americans, ergo - the title. After a long, lean depression throughout the country, there were again plenty of jobs, plenty of money, and plenty of hell-raising. Also, Americans were happy to work hard and to lend their support to the war effort - in whatever way they could - because they thought they knew why the country was at war. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Most active participants in the war survived the experience: there were 129 million Americans at that time, 5 million served on active military duty, 1 million of those were killed, wounded, or injured in the war. Most Americans interviewed considered the war years generally happy ones. Many of those who served in the military considered their war-time experiences the most exciting times of their lives.
When people spoke to the tape recorder about their lives during the war years, they automatically came up with the most exciting, most memorable, most tragic, most funny, most whatever - because these are stories that they've been thinking about, telling and retelling for over 30 years. That's what makes this book so readable. It's definitely not boring and it's definitely informative. Many people recalled a specific moment in their lives, when they were unbelievably lucky, and because they were lucky, they survived with their life.
In my view, if you are going to read just one book about WWII, this should be the book!
Fascinating Look at a Bygone Era
Studs Terkel's The Good War is a very entertaining set of oral histories about World War II. By allowing people to tell their own stories in their own words, Terkel sweeps his readers along on a fascinating trip back in time. Even at roughly 600 pages, The Good War is difficult to put down.
The Good War definitely will encourage you to think. Terkel wants his readers to ponder whether war can ever be justified. Another poignant aspect of The Good War is the fact that the vast majority of the interview subjects must be deceased by now; in fact, several died before the book's original 1984 publication. The Good War is the sort of book that will force you to reflect, even long after you have finished reading it.
While I would recommend The Good War, it is possible to offer a few criticisms.
As several reviewers have noted, Terkel is devoted to debunking the notion that WWII was, in any way, good. If there was a problem in those years, Terkel doesn't just cover it, he covers it at length. The fact that Terkel wants to take away our rose-colored glasses does not bother me. But I have been lucky enough to meet many World War II veterans; most of them are much less critical of WWII than are Terkel's interviewees. So, I wonder whether we hear from a disproportionate number of malcontents.
Another criticism is that Terkel tries to take on too much - even for 600 pages. The book meanders onto a number of topics that (while interesting) stray a bit far from WWII. For instance, Terkel has strong interests in the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War. These sections may be too far from the "main" story for some readers' tastes.
On the whole, however, The Good War is a fascinating look at a lost era. You will be entertained and you will also be left with much to think about after you finish.
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