Introduction

Summary

FAITH IN GOD was not a casual part of the lives of the World War II generation. The men and women who went off to war, or stayed home, volunteer that their spiritual beliefs helped them cope with the constant presence of possible death, serious injury, or the other anxieties attendant to the disruptions brought on by war.… On the front lines, chaplains were not incidental to the war effort. Some jumped with the Airborne troops on D-Day and others risked their own lives to administer last rites or other comforting words to dying and grievously wounded young men wherever the battle took them. The very nature of war prompted many who participated in it to think more deeply about God and their relationship to a higher being once they returned home.

So wrote Tom Brokaw, NBC journalist and broadcaster, in the first of three hugely successful paeans of praise to ‘the greatest generation’. Appealing to the ‘simple, shining legend of the Good War’, and to its sense of national unity and purpose undimmed by the doubts and traumas of Vietnam and even Korea, here Brokaw firmly identified a strong religious faith as one of the four distinguishing virtues of the peerless generation born around 1920, namely ‘personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith’. Captured – with a touch of irony – in the title of Studs Terkel's pioneering oral history The Good War (1984) and celebrated by Stephen E. Ambrose in books such as Band of Brothers (1992) and Citizen Soldiers (1997); by Steven Spielberg in films and television productions such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010); and by the acclaimed documentary-maker Ken Burns in The War (2007) – the comfortable assumptions and abiding myths of ‘the good war’ and ‘the greatest generation’ have inevitably triggered a chorus of conflicting narratives and a lengthening list of gainsayers. Impelled by the deception and duplicity inherent in such myth-making, among its most notable and authoritative critics was the late Paul Fussell, an American infantry officer in North-West Europe in 1944–45 and a distinguished literary scholar and public intellectual in later life.