Book Review: ’1942,’ by Peter Fritzsche; ‘The Wounded Generation,’ by David Nasaw

1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe, by Peter Fritzsche

THE WOUNDED GENERATION: Coming Home After World War II, by David Nasaw

When the battered Trojan refugee Aeneas arrives at Carthage near the beginning of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” he beholds the story of his people’s destruction already emblazoned on the new city’s temple walls, more than a thousand miles from home. “What country on earth,” Aeneas marvels, “is not full of our suffering?”

Today’s world dwarfs that of antiquity, but news and war travel ever faster. Technology ensures that no conflict can be truly “limited” in space or time, and as the competition to dominate expands beyond the battlefield, war works ceaseless global change both explicit and insidious. Two books on World War II, Peter Fritzsche’s “1942,” about one year in the global conflict, and David Nasaw’s “The Wounded Generation,” about the Americans who survived it, reveal that the spillage of modern war into various aspects of civil life is one of the Second World War’s chief legacies. Confine it how you will — to a theater of operations, a particular national effort or a span of years — the war defies the boundaries we invent for it.

In telling the story of a year, Fritzsche, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about life under the Third Reich, argues that the war’s salient bequest is less the cataclysmic terminus of the atomic bomb than a tragic, ongoing global “unraveling.” Nineteen forty-two unfolded “war without end, and a world that became more decomposed and protean.”

It was the year that saw the start of the Bengal famine, during which an estimated three million people died, and in which an initial paroxysm of murder against Jews signaled “the systematic nature of Germany’s ‘Final Solution’” to the world. “Dead civilians,” Fritzsche insists, “stand out as the singular accomplishment of the war.” And for those who lived? It was, he declares, “the year of the refugee,” as millions were displaced by totalitarian aggression and imperial implosion.

Even as it brought economic prosperity to the United States, Fritzsche notes, the war caused profound domestic upheaval with long-term political reverberations: the unprecedented migration of those seeking work after the Great Depression, the entry of large numbers of women into the work force, the internment of Japanese Americans and the backlash against the Double Victory campaign in which Black Americans understood themselves to be fighting for freedom abroad and full civil rights at home.

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