Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

Franklin (War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination), a cultural historian, veteran, and antiwar activist, serves up a combination memoir and revisionist history of American war culture during the “more than half a century [that he has] been involved in struggles to stop the wars being waged by our nation or to keep it from starting new ones.” He begins with a characteristic analysis of military rhetoric: despite the widespread belief that dropping atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 was an evil necessary to prevent the need for a bloody invasion, he says, in fact “it was clear to Truman and his advisers that there would be no need for an American invasion” because an impending Soviet attack on Japanese forces would effectively end the war. Instead, the bombs were deployed as a show of overwhelming force to intimidate the Soviets as WWII morphed into the Cold War. He continues in this vein, challenging the cultural myths surrounding Vietnam and the Gulf Wars. The concurrent memoir threads chart Franklin’s experiences growing up in New York City and serving in the military starting in 1956; disillusionment with the military’s actions spawned his campus antiwar activism. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to readers seeking to understand America’s 20th-century history and its ongoing war culture. (Sept.)