W.W. II: Present and Much Accounted For

By Frank Trippett

War, as Jonathan Swift put it, is that "mad game the world so loves to play." If the game is even madder these days because of the threat of nuclear annihilation, the world has learned to keep alive humanity's fascination with it by doing what both Homer and the Bible did so well: replaying the big wars at a safe distance. Almost 40 years after it began, just 34 years last week after it ended with the surrender of Japan, World War II, the biggest war in history, is thriving today with remarkable vigor in the minds and imaginations of Americans.

It is the subject of more and more solemn study and the focus of boundless popular curiosity. It has become a truly prodigal fountainhead of entertainment, inspiring everything from sappy comedy to high tragedy, engendering chillers, thrillers and even fantasies that have been coming forth in salvos of histories, novels, movies and television shows. Furthermore, say experts who keep an eye on such trends, although it has not yet given birth to a Gone With the Wind, World War II is at last supplanting the Civil War as the country's favorite conflict for probing, pondering and--to be honest--enjoying.

The U.S., to be sure, has always shown a lively interest in World War II, but in the past few years the American appetite for war lore has begun to seem downright voracious--and is being fed as though it might be insatiable. Bantam Books, for instance, has put out 31 nonfiction books about the war in the past 18 months, 15 of them at a single pop last March, and all as part of an ambitious plan to put both new and old accounts of the war on the racks continually and indefinitely. Reflecting the same market mood, subscriptions to TIME-LIFE Books' series of 20 World War II volumes have passed 780,000 and are still coming in. Meanwhile, a mere list of already available books on the war fills up a dozen type-crammed pages of Books in Print. In light of it all, it is no surprise that Herman Wouk's latest fiction, War and Remembrance, has occupied the bestseller list for 44 weeks, nor that this year's big novel, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, is haunted by echoes of the Holocaust.

But the world of print provides only part of the evidence of sharpening interest in the war. Novels such as The Boys from Brazil, The Eagle Has Landed and Soldier of Orange have found their way into the movies, and Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle is about to--even as he puts together yet another World War II saga. If World War II films have naturally been less numerous than books, they have also--ever since George C. Scott swaggered across the screen in Patton in 1970--tended to be more spectacular and ambitious. TV is cluttered with World War II documentaries and dramas, ranging from the recent six-hour reprise of Ike's war years to perennial showings of The Commanders. The popular real-life espionage book A Man Called Intrepid is only one that has been translated into a television series. Last September, 80 stations all over the country began regularly feeding out a 25-episode presentation of World War II: G.I. Diary, a journal of obscure heroism. Undoubtedly, however, TV's varied World War II material was highlighted by 1978's blockbusting 9 1/2-hour series Holocaust. Now all networks, in the words of CBS Special Projects Director Mae Helms, are "trying to come up with their own Holocaust. "

It is impossible not to wonder why the nation has got caught up in such a welter of war lore. True, some keen public curiosity needs no special explanation. After all, most Americans now over age 34 experienced the war in civvies if not in uniform: the war is their own story. There are, however, some other specific reasons for the new intensity of interest.

Partly, it is because an abundance of fresh information has become available lately through the disclosure of previously secret documents. Britain took the wraps off its secrets in 1972, and the U.S. did the same in stages completed in 1975. Authors promptly went lurching after never-told-before stories. A notable example came out last month with a most unwieldy title: Ultra Goes to War: The First Account of World War II's Greatest Secret Based on Official Documents. The secret: how the Allies did and did not use intercepted German coded information.

The U.S. shift away from confrontation with Russia to its present policy of detente has also impelled many scholars to take a fresh look at the cold war, that byproduct of World War II. Many of the origins of the cold war sprang from decisions made during hostilities. The Allied decision to halt Patton on his dash toward Berlin, for example, isolated the German capital and made it a focal point of confrontation in the postwar era. Says History Professor Robert Dallek of U.C.L.A.: "We have to go back. Where we are now is a direct result of what evolved during that time." To his own surprise, Dallek's newly published F.D.R. and American Foreign Policy, 1932-45, has sold, instead of a few volumes to scholars as might have been expected, 10,000 copies in three months. Says the author: "It's a hot topic."

It is hot for yet another reason, and that is the peculiar mood that has been hanging over the public for a while now. It is the fretful unease that is often attributed to bruises left by the Viet Nam War, the anxiety over the fragmented and amorphous texture of public esprit, over the conspicuous lack of any binding or driving national unity. This atmosphere has made older Americans homesick for, and younger ones curious about, an epoch of legendary solidarity and singular national purpose. The larger character of the time, its heroic texture, can be evoked by a simple iteration of the names of its outsized leaders and commanders: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, Marshall, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz. It can also be summoned up by the war's slogans and crucial place names: unconditional surrender, Dday, Normandy, the Bulge, Anzio, Guadalcanal, Hiroshima, V-J day. Many a vicarious pilgrimage to that lost time is being made these days, and among those who have noticed the fact is Robert Kane, a West Pointer who founded San Francisco's Presidio Press in 1974 to specialize in military books. Says Kane: "World War I no one cares about. World War II was the last patriotic war. We were attacked. We had a reason to get involved. It was a very, very clean war."

Many Americans, then, have simply found it refreshing, or nourishing, to look back to a time when, as Eric Sevareid puts it, "there were the white hats and the black hats." And surely now is the season for looking back, when most veterans of the war have entered those graying middle years when thoughtful retrospection becomes virtually compulsive. Now, as well, their offspring have matured enough to have some serious curiosity about the days of challenge and sacrifice and blood and glory that the elders keep bragging they went through.

All these amount to millions who, as it was put by Frank Cooling, historian at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., want to find out not only "what I did in the war" but also "what Daddy did in the war." Cooling is familiar with such quests. His institute has been so busy keeping up with groups studying World War II that it worries about falling behind on cataloguing war material it exists to preserve.

No mere handful of explanations can possibly account for all the motives of Americans who feast on World War II lore. Readers quite indifferent to the war might study a monster like Hitler, who could probably appeal to this psychologically conscious age even if he were only a work of fiction. And the countless students of the Holocaust must be drawn to it by an utterly inextricable mix of horror and disgust, wonder and mystification, at what mankind has done to mankind. It is not easy, or really possible, to sort out even the garden-variety sensibilities at play among the public consumers of all the cultural war goods. Surely those who keep shtiky Hogan 's Heroes going as a TV rerun series differ from those who keep such volumes as Hitler's Mein Kampf and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich moving off the paperback shelves.

A mere wish to be distracted and entertained would be enough to draw people to the vast multimedia tide of factual and fictional material. There is something there for every yen: battles on land and sea, adventures in the air and underground, home-front drama, tactics, strategy, diplomacy, ideology. In The Fuehrer Seed, a new political thriller by Gus Weill, there is even a dash of genetic fancy. Espionage is a staple, naturally, and even equipment is getting immortality: one new $45 book offers the definitive biography of the Sherman tank, specs included. Nor has there been any shortage, in all this, of what Military Analyst Drew Middleton once wryly called the Fifi-Dupont-was-washing-her-drawers-when-the-American-tanks-arrived style of military history."

The flood of material must seem familiar in more ways than one to Americans who lived through the period between 1939 and 1945. The war invaded U.S. culture in books, plays, movies and songs long before the country got into the fighting. By 1945 Critic Burns Mantle complained of "a sort of war-play weariness" around Broadway, and moviegoers must have suffered a similar feeling. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood -- so Richard Lingeman records in Don't You Know There's a War On? -- rushed to register titles for prospective war movies. Not many of the era's flicks -- The Fighting Seabees, The Fleet's In, Wake Island -- are memorable except as museum pieces, but one endured as such a standard favorite that nobody tends to think of it any more as a World War II movie: Casablanca.

The war was well ended before material of the quality of The Best Years of Our Lives and The Naked and the Dead began to appear. A movie like The Bridge Over the River Kwai, reeking of war's futility, could not have been screened during the conflict, any more than the cynical existential slapstick of Catch-22 could have been published. Detachment required distance in time, and even more time was needed for the development of the best war material that was to come, those meticulous historical narratives, say, in which the late Cornelius Ryan, beginning in 1959, captivated a huge American audience. Indeed in print and on film, Ryan's tale telling in The Longest Day, The Final Battle and A Bridge Too Far might be credited with warming the public up for the heightened interest that is maturing today. Ryan's stories became part of the accumulating national memory of the war.

The U.S. fascination with World War II is no more or les a riddle than mankind's with war generally. It is at once easy to understand and yet as perversely puzzling as human nature itself. On its bloody face, war might seem a thing any sensible person would wish to put out of mind. Yet people have always clung to war, remembering it, exalting it and habitually mining it for human truths. War, after all, cannot be surpassed as revealing drama: it intensifies, exposes and amplifies all emotion and yearning, bad and good.

Oscar Wilde professed to believe that war is fascinating because it is thought to be wicked. His theory: "When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." Obviously, war's vulgarity has not yet vanquished its wickedness or the sense of adventure it engenders, even if vicariously. That aside, World War II is likely to remain a popular subject in the U.S. for a long time to come, if only because, for millions, it is still viewed as the nation's most splendid hour.

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