My History 34 Honors Seminar blog

Sections from "The Good War" by Studs Terkel - week 6::

World War II is the topic for week 6.

This was a really good reading. I checked out the book (my History prof had chosen parts of the book) from the Los Altos library so I can read the whole thing if I want. There were some really neat and thought-provoking points brought up in all of the interviews. Here are some...

The first inteviewee is a man named John Garcia. He's a Hawaiian and was involved in the WWII (obviously, since "The Good War" is about WWII). Towards the end of his interviewer he said this:

Aaaahh, I feel that if countries are gonna fight a war, find yourself an island with nobody and then just put all your men in there and let them kill each other. Or better, send the politicians, let them fight it out. Yeah, like this stupid race that we're having of atomic wars. So much money is being devoted to killing people and so little to saving. It's a crazy war. (22)

And this..

He was working on the island.. everything was very tight "If you failed to be there [at work] or were goofing off, you went to jail. All civil liberties were suspended." (19)

"There was no act of treason by anyone I know of. There were spies, but they were all employed by the Japanese embassy. If they had arrested the ordinary Japanese, there would be no work force at Pearl Harbor. There were 130,000 Japanese on the islands." (19)

When he got into the military (after writing a letter to Roosevelt because he wasn't at first allowed into the military) they asked him what race he was. "I had no idea what they were talking about because in Hawaii we don't question a man's race. They said, 'Where are your parents from?' I said they were born in Hawaii. 'Your grandparents?' They were born in Hawaii. 'How about your great-grandparents?' I said they're from Europe, some from Spain, some from Wales. They said, 'You're Caucasian.' I said, 'What's that?' They said, 'You're white.' I looked at my skin. I was pretty dark, tanned by the sun. I said, 'You're kidding.' (Laughs) They put me down as Caucasian and separated me from the rest of the Hawaiians.

Some of my new buddies asked me not to talk to three of the men. I asked why. They said, 'They're Jews,' I said, 'What's a Jew?' They said, 'don't you know? They killed Jesus Christ.' I says, 'You mean them guys? They don't look old enough.' They said, 'You're trying to get smart?' I said, 'No. It's my understanding that he was killed about nineteen hundred years ago.' " (19)

I love this (long) quote because it just shows the pretty much just stupid reasoning that many people have around the world. I think this is totally true during this time period too, just during WWII. People hate other people just because of what religion they are or what they did to "their" people hundreds of years ago. I think this quote also brings up how sometimes people's reasoning is so stupid that it's funny.

Another quote I really liked:

"I was drinking about a fifth and a half of whiskey every day. Sometimes homemade, sometimes what I could buy. It was the only way I could kill. I had friends who were Japanese and I kept thinking every time I pulled the trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole: What is this person's family gonna say when he doesn't come back? He's got a wife, he's got children, somebody." (21)

Another interviewee, Betty Basye Hutchinson, said this:

It's only the glamour of war that appeals to people. They don't know real war. Well, those wars are gone forever. We've got a nuclear bomb and we'll destroy ourselves and everybody else." (130)

I wrote at the end of her interview:

people didn't want the bad parts of war, the soldiers coming back with burns and everything. The bad thoughts of war had been pushed into the backs of people's minds.


John H. Abbott:

First paragraph of his interview:

"We were ready for a war. We'd had a long depression. people needed a change, and a war promised to make things different. Get off those bread lines. Build another bomber for peace. They just changed the slogans. (Laughs.) That was the most popular war we ever have had. People sang, danced, drank--whooppee, the war." (163)

"These gasoline stickers for rationing that you had on your windshield had a little note on it: Is this trip really necessary? We'd scratch out 'trip' and write 'war': Is this war really necessary?" (164)

"My older brother tried mightily to get into the military. He tried every way he could. They wouldn't accept him because he was too short and too underweight. He was very gung ho. While I was sitting in solitary at the reformatory, my brother wrote me from Los Alamos. He was working on a device which would shorten the war and save lives. Later on, I heard there was an explosion at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That's what my brother was working on to shorten the war and save lives. (Laughs.)" (166)

He went to jail numerous times for not wanting to be drafted... "I felt like I was some sort of criminal. All I was doing is saying I refuse to murder people. Hey, everybody else wants to murder, but I refuse to." (168)

"I told the warden at El Reno as soon as I got there, 'If you're interested in reforming me or rehabilitating or changing me, you must explain to me why you got these guys in here who have been convicted of murder and why you've got me in here, too, because I refused to murder people.' " (169)

"All prisons are the same. All wars are the same. In war, both sides are trying to kill each other over a 'principle.' And the principle Thou shalt not kill got lost in the shuffle.

What about Hitler [asks Terkel]?

What about Hitler? He was one person. They were all doing what Hitler said. What do all prisoners do? They do what the warden says. The only power Hitler had was the power the people gave him. I felt the whole world had gone absolutely mad, crazy. They were in love with war... It didn't make any sense. To me, neither did World War One or World War Two or any other war." (170)

Admiral Gene LaRocque:

RACE

"We'd thought they were little brown men and we were the great big white men. They were of a lesser species. The Germans were well known as tremendous fighters and builders, whereas the Japanese would be a pushover. We used nuclear weapons on these little brown men. We talked about using them in Vietnam. We talked about using our military force to get our oil in the Middle East from a sort of dark-skinned people. I never hear about us using the military to get out oil from Canada. We still think we're a great super-race." (186)

"After the war, we were the most powerful nation in the world. Our breadbasket was full. We enjoyed being the big shots. We were running the world. We were the only major country that wasn't devastated." (186)

John Houseman, "Actor-producer. During World War Two, he had worked for the Office of War Information (OWI). It was the overseas branch, known as The Voice of America.":

"Little by little, as we began to win victories, just before the invasion of France, the Voice of America became, quite rightly, the voice of the military. The invasion was a very delicate operation, and the army wanted certain things said to the civilian population." (350)


Telford Taylor "He was chief American prosecutor a twelve of the thirteen Nuremberg trials.":

"Why did they [the men being tried] do these things? Because it had become the thing to do. People most of them were followers. Moral standards are easily obliterated... The safe way to be comfortable in life is that way: following orders." (465)

"Most of our heros have been ordinary people. The ordinary man is capable of enormous heroism and enormous bestiality. That's the hard lesson of Nuremberg. It's very easy to blame Nazism on the bestiality of these people. If a thousand people are killed by an earthquake, it's a terrible thing, but it's not tragic. There's no tragedy because there's no human element in it. It doesn't teach you any lesson except to watch out for earthquakes. the hard lesson of the tragedy is that ordinary people can be brought into a condition to do these things. That's much more dangerous." (466)

I agree with him and I don't... hmm I'll think about this one.

Philip Morrison, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project:

"We heard the news of Hiroshima from the airplane itself, a coded message. When they returned, we didn't see them. The generals had them. but then the people came back with photographs. I remember looking at them with awe and terror. We knew a terrible thing had been unleashed. The men had a great party that night to celebrate, but we didn't go. Almost no physicists went to it. We obviously killed a hundred thousand people and that was nothing to have a party about. The reality confronts you with things you could never anticipate." (514)

"This is the legacy of World War Two, a direct legacy of Hitler. When we beat the Nazis, we emulated them. I include myself. I became callous to death. I became willing to risk everything on war and peace. I followed my leaders enthusiastically and rather blindly." (516)

"We fought the war to stop fascism. But it transformed the societies that opposed fascism. They look on some of its attributes. All these cliches, all these slogans: Total War. No Appeasement. No More Pearl Harbor." (516)

"It took me only one lesson to learn the mistake. I don't know what the future holds. But I do know we're beginning to understand the climate, beginning to understand the oceans, beginning to understand the cell and the nucleus of the cell. We're beginning to understand things we didn't understand before. It is simple not possible to have war and nation states in the old way, with this kind of knowledge and this kind of technology. It cannot work into the next century." (517)


Marnie Seymour, wife of Harry Seymour who worked at Oak Ridge (Manhattan Project):

"They all seemed to know what they were doing, but what they couldn't figure out was how they were going to defuse this blockbuster bomb. Nobody knew the damage it was going to do. Even Oppenheimer had no idea. I don't think they ever thought about it being used against anybody." (519)

"These postwar babies feel that they will not live out their lifetime to expectation. I have one boy who's become a master carpenter. He's not making any provisions, even at thirty-four. He takes off and wanders at leisure. As for getting married or buying a home, he doesn't think there's any future. He's just one of the thousands of young people who grew up ducking under their desks in atomic-bomb drills at school. Why would they think there's a future? All their lives they've heard about the bomb being dropped. That's a sad way to live." (522)

My note below this quote: their parents were the ones who CREATED the bomb! I don't really understand this.

posted by Cassie @ 3:31 PM