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Was it really such a “good war”? It was if popular memory is to be trusted. We knew who the enemy was. We knew what we were fighting for. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. It was a war of tanks and airplanes – a cleaner war than World War I. Americans were united. Soldiers were proud. It was a time of prosperity, sound morality, and power. But according to historian Michael Adams, our memory is distorted, and it has left us with a misleading – even dangerous – legacy. Challenging many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues that our experience of World War II was positive but also disturbing, creating problems that continue to plague us today. Combat was so brutal and demanding that 98 percent of men in action continuously for more than thirty days suffered breakdowns. Some American tanks and submarines were inferior to Axis models. Despite heroic fighting by African-American units, officially sanctioned racism kept Army facilities rigorously segregated. At one point in the Italian campaign, VD cases outweighed battlefield wounds. But because Americans at home saw their boys as “pure, ” the military considered sex education a covert operation. Censorship was strict; if journalists didn’t censor themselves, the government did it for them. In short, says Adams, World War II was everything that war is: violent, uncertain, costly, and an arena for the best – and the worst – of human behavior. “When nostalgia drives us to depict war as a golden age in our cultural development, ” Adams writes, “a time of unending cheerful production, team spirit, prosperity, and patriotism, we trivialize the event by slighting the real suffering that took place. An we lose sight of the fact that war is inherently destructive – wasteful of human and natural resources, disruptive of normal social development. We risk initiating human catastrophes in the questionable belief that history shows wars will cure our social problems and make us fee