| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial. By Nicolaus Mills. (New York: Basic, 2004. xxxvi, 268 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-465-04582-0.)

Nicolaus Mills's Their Last Battle is a strongly partisan, almost official history of the new memorial to World War II on the Mall in Washington. Mills presents his narrative of the memorial's authorization, siting, design, funding, and construction as a series of battles or skirmishes, a device that serves to heroize the memorial's proponents—and the veterans, naturally—and, conversely, to present its opponents in a less flattering light. Essentially, the fight has been between those who consider the nation's role in the world war so central to the nation's and the world's history that no site for a memorial could be too prominent and those who wanted the central axis of the Mall left an open greensward. The book includes a useful and compact history of the Mall, which supports Mills's argument that the Mall is not a frozen, iconic form, and several thumbnail building accounts of earlier memorials, showing that those projects in their time were as contentious and divisive as the World War II memorial has been.

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