By Studs Terkel
WWII oral history from many voices
Subject
Themes
Forty years after the Second World War, the people who lived through it speak. Their voices form a collective testimony that is neither triumphant nor defeated but profoundly complicated, revealing a conflict that reshaped individuals and an entire nation in ways that remain unresolved.
Forty years after the Second World War, the people who lived through it speak. Their voices form a collective testimony that is neither triumphant nor defeated but profoundly complicated, revealing a conflict that reshaped individuals and an entire nation in ways that remain unresolved. The war…
Published in 1984, this oral history arrives at a moment when the generation that fought the Second World War is entering old age and the cold war remains the dominant framework for American foreign policy. Ronald Reagan's presidency, with its muscular anti-communism and military buildup, draws…
The quotation marks around "good" are deliberate. The Second World War holds a singular place in American consciousness as the last conflict that most people can call just without qualification. Hitler had to be stopped; the Holocaust demanded response; fascism threatened civilisation itself. Yet…
Forty years after the war, the act of remembering is itself a form of combat. Veterans do not simply recall events; they wrestle with them, reshape them, and are reshaped by them in return. The oral history format makes this visible in ways that conventional historical writing cannot. A graying…
Sacrifice in wartime is almost never the clean, heroic act that monuments commemorate. The testimonies reveal it as something far messier: reluctant, unequal, and often imposed on those who have the least power to refuse. An Iowa farmer who suffered through the Depression watches the war revive his…
The testimonies do not present a unified picture of human nature; they present a contradictory one. The same species that builds concentration camps also produces the folk singer who loves army life because it is the first place free from phony competition. The same individual who pours gasoline…
Suffering in the testimonies does not end when the fighting stops. It persists across decades, changing form but never disappearing, passed from those who experienced the war directly to those who inherit its consequences. The oral history is as much about the long aftermath as it is about the…
Pearl Harbor marks the moment when millions of ordinary Americans are thrust into a conflict they barely understand. John Garcia, a sixteen-year-old pipe fitter apprentice in Hawaii, rides his motorcycle to the navy yard on December 7, 1941, and spends the day pulling sailors from burning water,…
Gene LaRocque, a small-town Illinois boy who won three Eagle Scout medals, joins the navy during the Depression after an advertisement promises a free cruise to Panama and Cuba. On the old battleship Arkansas, the regular crew tells local women that the college recruits' blue hat bands indicate…
Ray Wax, drafted in 1940, once hawked long-stemmed roses at New York subway stations. Before D-Day, he runs a PX empire in southern England, controlling all the Zippo lighters in the region and processing $125,000 a month in supplies. Uncounted cash arrives in cigar boxes. He decides not to steal,…
Tommy Bridges, a Michigan man who joined the army in February 1942 "to get somethin' to eat," is assigned as a military policeman with no real training. His officers, he says, are dumber than the enlisted men. Sent to London and then Paris, he polices GIs who sell truckloads of supplies to starving…
By Studs Terkel
Subject
Themes
Forty years after the Second World War, the people who lived through it speak. Their voices form a collective testimony that is neither triumphant nor defeated but profoundly complicated, revealing a conflict that reshaped individuals and an entire nation in ways that remain unresolved.