I wrote at the end of my review of World War Z “my main takeaway from the book is that I should really read [Studs] Terkel and perhaps General Sir John Hackett”. I have now read the former’s most famous work, while The Third World War remains for the future. As I read it I recalled an amateur WW2 historian in Youtube saying one of the worst historical sources is a memoir written long after the events (and interviews conducted at that time are only slightly better, although in this case there’s no apparent challenging of claims made by the interviewees), and since this book from the 80s was put together from interviews conducted decades after WW2, it’s subject to that critique. What elevates the book above that is the wide breadth of interview subjects, aggregating together lots of different sources just as an historian would with written records (although in this case there’s no attempt made to reconcile conflicting information).

I have included quotation marks in the title because that’s a deliberate choice which Terkel points out in the beginning. You will not find the perspective that “War keeps us sane” or that cultural group selection via things such as war is required to avoid drifting off into maladaptive culture. There are laments at the decline of asabiyah (though they don’t call it that) since the war years, and even some fond recollections of how it boosted the economy for people like farmers back home, but nobody thinks we could use a good war (a belief that was more common in the run-up to WW1, and could be found among fascists in the interwar period). The general view is instead that war is horrible even if basically every veteran would be willing to fight this particular war again.

I mention veterans, and there are a lot of them, but not all the interviews subjects are veterans. There are people on the homefront of the US who had some of those fond recollections I mentioned, as well as civilians in other countries who typically remembered it being much worse (usually involving bombs dropping on their towns). The United States (and inhabitants of Chicago specifically) are disproportionately represented (particularly relative to where deaths were concentrated), but an attempt is made to sample all around. There are veterans of other militaries, people imprisoned in camps of various belligerents, a conscientious objector who refused to do any kind of alternate service or participate in what he saw as a coercive system, the unofficial leader of a mutiny amidst a segregated unit loading ammunition onto ships until some of it accidentally exploded, merchant marines, clergy, a Red Cross administrator, scientists & engineers who worked on the Manhattan Project, doctors, nurses, MPs, high-ranking officers of multiple branches (the perspective broad accounts of the war are usually built on) as well as the grunts on the bottom. While I mentioned Max Brooks lumping together the New Deal & WW2, here the actual New Dealers interviewed (Galbraith is the one person who have two interviews) are all quite clear that “Dr. New Deal” was displaced by “Dr. Win the War” (in FDR’s words), often lamenting that the government gave in too much to the demands of businessmen to get things done (while interviewees are more sympathetic to the demands of laborers who threatened to go on strike). Also, unlike Brooks, while one can get a sense of what Terkel’s political preferences based on commonly expressed opinions and who he tends to interview, it’s not completely uniform. There is some anti-Russian pro-Cold War sentiment expressed alongside the larger number of people complaining about the shift toward that at the end of the war. There’s even an interview with former Representative Hamilton Fish, who expresses pride that he kept the US out of the war back when Russia was aligned with Germany, only endorsing intervention after Pearl Harbor (though there are more interviews with Lincoln Brigade turned OSS veterans complaining the US didn’t intervene even earlier), although he’s not one of the people that gets to talk about civil rights despite his relevant efforts toward policies discussed in other interviews.

Most interviews don’t indicate any obvious questions or interjection from the interviewer, though there are some indicated with italics, along with thoughts not voiced to the interviewee. I got the impression there must be some questions that were standard and didn’t appear because most subjects (not just those near the end section focused on it) comment on the atomic bombing of Japan (most approve of it for ending the war). The book was published in the 80s, when Mutually Assured Destruction was still the fear, and nobody anticipates that the USSR could simply collapse (instead the more common assumption is that we have to find a way to get rid of nukes or we all eventually die). The section I really could have done without are the much shorter bits at the end interviewing people who hadn’t even been born when the war began (similar to how I found Postwar less interesting). People born during it at least have some earlier memories, but the latest ones typically just have ignorant thoughts about potential nuclear war. I call people ignorant, but years ago I would have assumed the first Galbraith interview was correct about the ineffectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, whereas I know the latest research reflected in books like How the War Was Won completely contradicts that. I don’t think it’s just a matter of the book being written too early, I suspect instead that Terkel was sympathetic enough to the civilian victims of that bombing to not want to push that narrative. Arthur Harris died the same year the book was published (while a number of interviewees died years earlier) and isn’t interviewed, nor is Curtis LeMay who survived even later.

I know Terkel wrote lots of other “oral histories” on different subjects, but despite vindicating the general concept I don’t plan on checking out more any time soon. Instead Hackett is next in the hopper, fitting my alternation between fiction & non-fiction, and I don’t currently have a non-fiction work planned to come after that.