Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T03:50:09.974Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2024

Michael Snape
Affiliation:
Durham University
Get access

Summary

FAITH IN GOD was not a casual part of the lives of the World War II generation. The men and women who went off to war, or stayed home, volunteer that their spiritual beliefs helped them cope with the constant presence of possible death, serious injury, or the other anxieties attendant to the disruptions brought on by war.… On the front lines, chaplains were not incidental to the war effort. Some jumped with the Airborne troops on D-Day and others risked their own lives to administer last rites or other comforting words to dying and grievously wounded young men wherever the battle took them. The very nature of war prompted many who participated in it to think more deeply about God and their relationship to a higher being once they returned home.

So wrote Tom Brokaw, NBC journalist and broadcaster, in the first of three hugely successful paeans of praise to ‘the greatest generation’. Appealing to the ‘simple, shining legend of the Good War’, and to its sense of national unity and purpose undimmed by the doubts and traumas of Vietnam and even Korea, here Brokaw firmly identified a strong religious faith as one of the four distinguishing virtues of the peerless generation born around 1920, namely ‘personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith’. Captured – with a touch of irony – in the title of Studs Terkel's pioneering oral history The Good War (1984) and celebrated by Stephen E. Ambrose in books such as Band of Brothers (1992) and Citizen Soldiers (1997); by Steven Spielberg in films and television productions such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010); and by the acclaimed documentary-maker Ken Burns in The War (2007) – the comfortable assumptions and abiding myths of ‘the good war’ and ‘the greatest generation’ have inevitably triggered a chorus of conflicting narratives and a lengthening list of gainsayers. Impelled by the deception and duplicity inherent in such myth-making, among its most notable and authoritative critics was the late Paul Fussell, an American infantry officer in North-West Europe in 1944–45 and a distinguished literary scholar and public intellectual in later life.

Type
Chapter
Information
God and Uncle Sam
Religion and America's Armed Forces in World War II
, pp. 1 - 46
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Michael Snape, Durham University
  • Book: God and Uncle Sam
  • Online publication: 02 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781782044857.002
Available formats
×