Even “good” wars have messy endings:
The Second World War, which has largely formed Western attitudes to war termination, ended neatly for simple reasons: both the Germans and Japanese had had the stuffing knocked out of them. Their cities had been burnt out or bombed flat, millions of their young men had been killed in battle, so had hundreds of thousands of their women and children by strategic bombing. The Japanese were actually starving, while the Germans looked to their Western occupiers both to feed them and to save them from the spectre of Soviet rule. Two highly disciplined and law-abiding populations meekly submitted to defeat.
Because we in the Atlantic region remember 1945 as the year of victory over our deadliest enemies, we usually forget that the Second World War did not end neatly in other parts of the world. In Greece, the guerrilla war against the Germans became a civil war which lasted until 1949 and killed 150,000 people. Peace never really came to Japanese-occupied Asia. In China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Burma, the Second World War became several wars of national liberation, lasting years and killing hundreds of thousands. In Burma, the civil war persists.
There’s a lesson there for both anti- and pro-war folks alike: don’t react to messy endings as a sign of particular incompetence — and don’t assume you can cleverly manage a war without messy endings.
Of course lessons from World War II seem to be a dying breed, at least among youth, who are being taught less about battles and leaders than about the social history of the conflict.
Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.
Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. “We talked a lot about those concentration camps,” she said.
[…] Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.
Worthy aspects of the history, to be sure, but I’m not sure they’re the most important aspects. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned that way.
Hmmm…
A huge shift from the “John Wayne” history of WWII that I had to sleep through in High School.
The “why’s” of the war were never discussed. The internment of the Japanese was given a cursory overview (Except in context to Camp Granada and Governor Carr’s decision to except the internees). None of the Eugenics laws, or of Breckenridge’s, and Fr. Coughlin’s stupidity was ever discussed.
My guess is that you only have a week, tops, to go over that chunk of history, and then you teach to what the test has on it. I see it as a good thing that the topic of the civil rights movement being birthed in the upheaval that was WWII, but it would be nice to have some discussion about the war itself and an overview of what happened and those involved.
Lessee, in my hs history classes womens’ rights/sufferage/WW2 women at work etc. got maybe a page (total), the internment camps maybe half a page and the civil rights movement two or three, mostly MLK.
WW1 was all about the secret alliances leading to war when the archduke got killed, and the Lusitania. Nothing about trench warfare and, for instance, British criminal incompetence in the high command.
Nothing whatsoever about how wars work. Ever.
There was a fair amount of WW2 stuff but so badly done that very little of it made any impression at all. Yalta. A couple of pages on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t remember any material on any particular general.
Practically zip on the Korean War, despite the fact that some of my classmates’ fathers had been in it.
Damned little on Vietnam.
And all of this was at a good school: Cherry Creek HS.
We blew through WWII in my school in about two days; fortunately, I was an avid military history reader, even then, and was fascinated by it (and still am).
Most folks don’t even know that Japan went to war with the US in 1941 already at famine levels; only sheer luck and incompetence by the US at the beginning allowed them to advance as far as they did. They were never going to be able to invade, say, Hawaii, Australia, or, as everyone thought, the continental US. They just didn’t have the sealift capabilities.
There’s an author — David Glantz — who has been writing the definitive accounts of the Soviet aspect of the war. Truly amazing stuff, with the Soviet archives finally accessible.
Oh, vis a vis Good Wars having good endings: a war needs to be Good, first. Iraq was anything but.
The question was not whether was have Good endings or Bad endings, but Messy endings vs Neat endings — and that the Neat endings are much more rare than our World War-centric perspective would imply.
I was an avid military history reader as a kid as well, which may betray a bias I have on the subject of education about wars.