The Cassettes Go Rolling Along

By R.Z. Sheppard

"THE GOOD WAR" by Studs Terkel; Pantheon; 589 pages; $19.95

Studs Terkel is the man who gave us our oral-history fixation.

Working (People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do) and Hard Times (An Oral History of the Great Depression) hooked a national audience with the transcribed experiences of hundreds of Americans. Some scholars dismissed these books as little more than jumped-up man-in-the-street interviews, strong on emotion and weak on critical framework. The public disagreed. Let the eggheads collect cut-glass generalizations from Tocqueville and Toynbee. Folks read Studs to find out what it was really like on the bread lines and assembly lines.

And now in the trenches. Terkel, a tireless 72, has lugged his tape machine cross-country and abroad to record memories of World War II, "the good war." The quotation marks are important. Terkel's army of disparate witnesses generally agrees that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was an unconditional virtue. But the years since 1945 have taken a toll on that good feeling. Korea, Viet Nam and the rat race slowly eclipsed the enthusiasms and certainties of youth. Former enemies became allies; old comrades-in-arms are now adversaries. Robert Lekachman, an economics professor and Army survivor of the Pacific meatgrinder ("I computed my regiment's casualty list. It was 140%"), echoes the book's dominant theme: "It was the last time that most Americans thought they were innocent and good, without qualifications."

Even black servicemen were caught up in the spirit of the white man's crusade. Despite a history of slave labor, Jim Crow laws and racism in the ranks, blacks fought with distinction. Recognition for many was a long time coming. The 761st Tank Battalion, all black except for fewer than a dozen white officers, battled Germans for 183 days without relief. The outfit had to wait 33 years before its veterans could persuade the White House to award them a Presidential Unit Citation.

The war rewarded American women immediately. Defense plants provided them with their first paychecks and a chance to get out of the house. Rosie the Riveter became an overnight symbol of competence and independence, though not all women finished work looking like Goldie Hawn in Swing Shift. Peggy Terry, who loaded shells at a plant in Viola, Ky., recalls that the tetryl in explosives turned skin, hair and eyeballs orange: "The only thing we worried about," she says, "was other women thinking we had dyed our hair." Evelyn Fraser, a former WAC captain in Europe, had more somber preoccupations: "The shocking thing was to walk s among Germans and see them as human beings, and then see Dachau. It was so difficult to put together."

Of the 135 contributors to the i book, some '30 are outright celebrities lor have recognizable names in their "fields. They include Maxine Andrews of the Andrews Sisters ("As we sang Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, all the mothers and sisters and sweethearts sang with us as the ship went off'), Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Actor-Producer John Houseman ("For me, it was a madly exciting time") and Poet John Ciardi ("When you're on a mission and you saw a Japanese plane go down, you cheered. This was a football game"). One might also include Irving Goff, Spanish Civil War veteran, OSS operative and the reputed model for Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Why this big percentage of high achievers and Trivial Pursuit candidates in a book by the U.S.'s leading troubadour of the unsung? Terkel, who knows everybody who is anybody, also knows that Everyman can always use a little help. No matter how moving and personal, back-to-back stories of suffering, death and destruction soon grow undifferentiated and numbing. It is something of a relief when Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker, knocks old American war movies as "grotesque" and "condescending," even though it is doubtful she reacted that way at her neighborhood picture palace 40 years ago.

"The Good War" is a barrage of contrasts and images: descriptions of Los Angeles chicanos lounging on street corners in zoot suits; burn victims without skin; deferred civilians earning $200 a week in safety; infantrymen dying for $40 a month; a sign on Buchenwald's gate that identifies the death camp as zoological gardens; Operation Paper Clip, the innocuous code name for expediting U.S. citizenship for useful ex-Nazis. We are told that millions of dollars in trucks and equipment were dumped into the sea after victory, and we hear a general say that the $811 it cost to process a displaced person was expensive.

A few words about editing. Terkel shapes his interviews into a uniform style: terse sentences that focus attention on what is said rather than how. One could quibble that this is not authentic oral history, but it works. Passion and pride not only survive intact, they are strengthened. Douglas MacArthur may have had it backward: old soldiers do die, but they do not fade away.

--ByR.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"I had to condition myself . . I was never really a soldier. I was caught up in the army, a civilian putting in my service. When it was over, I had a longer view. It's anyone's universe. Anyone has as good a right to it as I have. Who am I to want to go out killing people?

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.

When one of your guys went down, you sighed. It was miserable. One of the saddest things I ever saw, when we were flying wing on a plane that got hit, was the barber's-chair gunner in the big bubble at the very top. He was right there beside us in plain sight, beginning to go down. He just waved his hand goodbye. There was nothing you could do. You couldn't reach out to touch him. Of course, that got you.

--B-29 Gunner John Ciardi"