V Was for Victory.... (9)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (9). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“Official Russian communiqués regularly devoted half their space to the details of individual exploits.” p. 72.

“I think a Jew is a Jew…because he suffers.”

“…the armed services in the protest novels of the war gave to the cruel and the incompetent power over the lives of the helpless and the sensitive.” p. 83.

Norman Mailer on the war: “Individuality was just a hindrance.” p. 84.

Randall Jarrell: “In bombers named for girls, we burned/ The cities we had learned in school--? Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among/ The people we had killed and never seen.” p. 85.

To be continued.