Remembering wars: the cost of war

One of the effects of the Second World War in the United States was to bring a final end to the lingering effects of the Great Depression. That has left us a deeply ambiguous legacy. Because it created a wide impression that military spending automatically brings prosperity. It doesn't. But it did in the Second World War.

But the experience was a deeply ambiguous one from the start. In "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two (1984), Studs Terkel quotes one of his interview subjects:

For the old Iowa farmer, it was something else. Oh yes, he remembered the Depression and what it did to the farmers: foreclosures the norm; grain burned; corn at minus three cents a bushel; rural despair. Oh yes, it changed with the war. "That's when the real boost came. The war—" There is a catch in his voice. He slumps in his rocker. His wife stares at the wallpaper. It is a long silence, save for the tick-took of the grandfather's clock. "—it does something to your country. It does something to the individual. I had a neighbor just as the war was beginning. We had a boy ready to go to service. This neighbor told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we'd solve our agricultural problems. And I said, 'Yes, but I'd hate to pay with the price of my son.' Which we did." He weeps. "It's too much of a price to pay."

Tags: second world war, the war documentary, world war two