Communications

ARTICLES

To the Editor:

As to the AHR debate (106, June 2001) between John Bodnar ("Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America "/journals/ahr/106.3/ah000805.html) and Jay Winter ("Film and the Matrix of Memory "/journals/ahr/106.3/ah000857.html), the palm of victory goes to Winter, who very correctly points out the oversimplifications found in Bodnar's use of the concept "collective memory."

     And I would add that several of Bodnar's exaggerated conclusions further weaken his essay. For example, he flatly asserts (p. 809) that the violence and trauma of World War II "showed Americans that their fellow citizens were as capable of inflicting brutality as citizens of other nations." Oh? How many Buchenwalds were operated by Americans? How many civilians suffered at the hands of American soldiers, as Chinese civilians were murdered by the invading Japanese? How many Bataan death marches were engineered by Americans? How many civilians were hanged from telephone poles as Russians were by the invading Germans? While the post–World War II films correctly poked holes in the patriotic veneer of the Office of War Information films, revealing instances where some Americans violated "the rules," never was there the systematic brutality that too often characterized the German and Japanese campaigns. And the current scholarly debates over Hiroshima/Nagasaki, while intense, are hardly equally divided between the contending interpretations.

     Bodnar follows this with his thesis, "after 1945, recognizing the war's incredible scale of brutality caused ordinary Americans and probably [emphasis added] people elsewhere to connect the cruelty of warfare with other forms of malevolence in their lives and society. Once war exposed how savage men could be, it did not take much of a cultural leap to see that everyone [!] was threatened by warlike behavior wherever it was manifested" (p. 810). Such connective leaps by Bodnar are astounding and deserve more detailed analysis than would be permitted in a short letter to the editor. But he might just consider such post–World War II factors as the expanding drug culture, the long and seemingly directionless Vietnam War, the explosive civil rights movement, and the worldwide struggle between the democratic West and Soviet authoritarianism as each being significantly more important in Americans focusing on various forms of post–World War II "malevolence" than any memories of World War II violence, even when that violence was temporarily heightened by certain films. "Public anxiety over victimization," to use Bodnar's phrase, in the postwar era can more easily be explained by events of that era rather than by some cinematic and possible psychological connection to World War II itself.

James G. Newbill

Yakima Valley Community College Yakima, Washington

John Bodnar does not wish to reply.

The Editors

ERRATUM

In the October 2001 issue, p. 1328, the review of Aaron Forsberg's book gave the title incorrectly: the book is America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan's Postwar Economic Revival, 1950–1960, not Americans. Our reviewer, Roger Buckley, regrets the error.

LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.