World War II, despite the fact that it left over four hundred thousand Americans dead and hundreds of thousands of other veterans maimed in body or mind, has until recently persisted in the American imagination as a “good war,” one that was fought for a necessary and noble cause, and one in which American fighting men did their duty overseas and then came home to appreciative civilians and jubilant parades, which eased their reentry into civilian life. However, in the wake of the Vietnam War, we have become acutely aware of the physical and psychological travails of American veterans, and historians have begun to take a closer look at the life of the common soldier and have thereby reexamined the idea of World War II as the classic “good war.” Stephen E. Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers and Gerald F. Linderman's The World within War are part of this reevaluative process.

In Citizen Soldiers, Ambrose takes a broad look at the American campaign in western Europe by considering every level of the war effort, from the strategy discussions of generals to the tactics employed by junior officers and the life of the combat soldiers “on the ground.” The dominant theme is that the “citizen soldiers” of the United States were called from the peaceful pursuits of civilian life and were matched up against the fanaticism of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich; America's men met this test successfully, and through a mixture of effective leadership, courage, and innovation, primarily by junior officers and NCOs (noncommissioned officers), saw the cause through to victory.

America's fighting men were unprepared for much that they encountered, but reacting with resourcefulness and persistence, they devised methods to deal with each problem as it emerged, such as converting tanks to bulldozers to plow through the hedgerows of Normandy or coordinating infantry, tanks, and tank-busting aircraft into a highly effective machine of destruction and doom, which was then deployed against German defenders. Ambrose's thesis that it was the junior officers (“middle management”) who should be credited with victory finds an analogue in John Kenneth Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1978). Indeed, it is Ambrose's assertion that American World War II veterans, all too often dismissed as “men in gray suits,” went on in the 1950s to make this country into an industrial giant and success story and to spread democracy throughout the world.

While Ambrose presents an abundance of evidence for the grisly and awful nature of combat—the noise, shock, and feelings of total helplessness and bewilderment that it could induce (“I dreaded going into combat again”)—his read on the American war effort is that it was heroic, spectacular, and magnificent. In that sense, his narrative sometimes seems to drift into a form of cheerleading that disconnects from the evidence. For instance, he recounts an incident when infuriated American infantrymen took German tankers prisoner and proceeded to execute them by shooting them in the back of the head. The last German was a young man who was sobbing and rocking back and forth on his knees, pleading for mercy with pictures of his family on the ground in front of him. The unmoved GIs shot and killed the German. That is not heroic or magnificent. That is the cruel and ugly face of war.