History is what happens when the generations are dead that lived events or lived through them or heard about them from their parents. That means history begins two generations after the events in question. The Gospels were written two generations after Jesus was crucified. Writing an account before that would have had to deal too much with the facts of experience and rumor available to everyone rather than the act of reinterpretation that all historians provide, whether in their selection of facts or even in the tone of the times that they impart which may be quite askew from the tone that prevailed when the events took place. Why do we think of Victorians as prudish? They didn’t think themselves so, only circumspect.
Sometimes, though, people are caught on the cusp. I was a baby at the time of Pearl Harbor but I think of World War II as my war, much more so than Vietnam or any other war between World War II and now, even if most of my knowledge is an act of self-education that began early on with the perusal in the late Forties of the photo history of the war that was put out by “Life” magazine. I also read, in the Fifties, a number of World War II memoirs, including “Guadalcanal Diary”, a collection of newspaper dispatches which had become a best seller when it was published not long after the battle was over. More gruesomely, I remember as a six or seven year old attending memorial banquets with my parents for the relatives lost in Europe. The after dinner activity was a viewing of the British newsreels that depicted the mass burials conducted at the concentration camps for those for whom liberation had arrived too late. Some of the banquet attendees rushed up to the movie screen to claim that one of the skeleton-like survivors who looked into the British cameras was a brother or sister. Maybe it was true; maybe not. I still remember those evenings very vividly, and so I am part of that war. World War II as history has not begun for me, nor will it ever.
I was very much taken with “The Pacific”, a series about the Pacific War by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg shown on HBO in 2010, some two or three generations after the events it depicts-- just as Tolstoy published “War and Peace” two to three generations after the events it depicts. “The Pacific” joins the same team’s “Band of Brothers” in being the definitive renderings of the Second World War on land as “Victory at Sea” was a definitive rendering of the naval war in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. (“Victory at Sea” violates my rule. It was based on a library of war footage shot no more than a dozen years before the series aired in 1952.) I was particularly struck by the dead-on historical accuracy of “The Pacific”, at least so far as I am able to tell by comparing it to my own seventy year exploration into World War II. Hanks and Spielberg get the strategy of island hoping right; they get right the tactics of being on the defensive and relying on machine guns; they even get right the Forties faces, maybe by casting people who looked as if they were out of the Forties because it does not seem plausible to me that makeup and some boot camp (apparently the producers put the actors through some of that) would give you the mix of gaunt and what we would today call slightly obese people that gave the population of the time its look.
Even more, though, is what they got so right that an audience not schooled in the war would not find plausible, but instead take for dramatic license to help ease along a plot. My daughter found two things particularly implausible. First, that the soldiers at Guadalcanal did not know they were famous back home. How could news not have gotten to them of what was going on back home, including how their own efforts had become a center of national attention?
The answer to that question is that material culture changes. Material culture, which includes the technology of a time, from its means of transportation to its means of communication, to its housing, is a familiar concept in cultural anthropology. It includes blankets and wheel-less conveyances pulled by horses. Material culture is less appreciated as a way to explain how a society is constrained by its technological level when the society is not all that remote in time from our own. It is difficult to place yourself back in another time’s material culture because the material culture of the present is so taken for granted. The military in the Forties did its logistics without computers, just with pencil and paper flow charts. Today, you have to look very hard to notice that it is now not worth noticing that people are whispering into little wires connected to their ears when twenty years ago it would have been obvious that someone doing that was crazy. In an age of the Internet and global cell communications, and the reception of network news on the battlefield, it is very difficult to imagine that seventy years ago soldiers did not know what was going on beyond the local battle in which they were engaged.
Even more difficult to notice are changes in social usages, those misinterpreted as signs of deviance rather than as the fact that people living in different times may have a different emotional makeup, however much the old time emotions are related to emotions people have today. (And we are talking, remember, about seventy years ago, not about the differences between the emotions people feel now and what they felt, let us say, at the time of King David.) My daughter is not a prudish sort but she did not get how people got it on so hot and heavy so quickly after the American Marines who had fought at Guadalcanal arrived for shore leave in Melbourne. She suggested to me that perhaps the filmmakers had erred in not telling the viewers how long the Americans were there. Maybe then the stories of close relationships would have become plausible because there would have been enough time to form them.
I explained to my daughter that during the War no great amount of time was required. There were many quick, deeply felt, emotional relationships that even resulted in marriage and the post-war shipment of war brides from England and other places back to the United States and that marriages resulted from even a long weekend pass, perhaps to a gold digger who wanted the soldier’s allotment check, a marriage that was followed up, after a while, with a Dear John letter. The episode of “The Pacific” set in Australia shows respectable girls predisposed to love the Yanks who, after all, had saved them from invasion, and would be soon be shipped out again, perhaps to die. What was a girl to do? It was the least she could do for the war effort.
When I pointed all this out to my daughter, she raised an important and difficult question that I am still mulling over. She thought that the Australia episode should have paid more attention to making the sudden romances plausible to someone not versed in the Second World War. She was correct in thinking that clarity would indeed have been served if there had been more overt allusions to the facts of wartime romance. I thought, though, that there was something very aesthetically satisfying about leaving it to the audience to construct for itself a eureka experience whereby quickie romances that are also deep get taken in as plausible because the actors are so convincing and are opening up for the viewers one emotional surprise package after another: the girls so lusty, the parents so acceptant, the men so shattered and shy. It happened in my family, an uncle of mine so emotionally wounded by serving in Burma that he spent a long time after he got back camped out on the couch in the living room of his fiancé’s family, he having met her at a USO dance shortly before shipping out. What “The Pacific” supplies you with is permission to see wartime romance as you never saw it before, it not obeying the commands of what you thought a narrative wartime romance required-- unless, that is, you saw the silent movie masterpiece, “The Big Parade”, which splices romantic and battle scenes in a style to which we have all become accustomed. The final scene, when the heroic soldier walks down a road, using a cane, to claim the French woman he met during the war, is still a tearjerker.
The same sense of a transformative moment took place in 1971 when Peter Finch, in the movie “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, gave his male partner an unselfconscious kiss and so we were in on the fact that this engaging character was also homosexual. I don’t know of a precedent for that kiss. It was done without a leer or a setup to explain it. It just was, and so opened up the possibility for the audience to accept homosexual relations as “normal” to the extent that any sexual relationship is normal. A friend of mine at the time was so shocked by the kiss that he thought an explanation of why this couple was normal-like had to be provided. The image did not speak for itself. This, remember, was at a time when textbooks still referred to homosexuality as a form of deviance and people went to their psychiatrists to be cured of it. It was the matter of factness of the movie kiss, however, that made it a landmark event in the movies, and perhaps a strong indication that the culture was changing. We imagine first; we explain later.
Not turning “The Pacific” into a historical fiction, which is to have fictional characters wander through a real, historical landscape, which is true of most war movies such as the excellent “procedural” “Midway” (the one from 1976 with Charleton Heston as a fictional officer), is, I think, part of why it is a work of art. “The Pacific” has actors play real people and tells real stories, just as happens in “The Longest Day”, where Henry Fonda plays the very real Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Robert Mitchem plays Brigadier General Norman Cota, the officer who actually did lead the troops up Omaha Beach. That makes such movies better than documentaries that splice together whatever actual footage there is available of the battle scene with a voice over, that making the film a record rather than engaging in the way that purely fictional movies are, and that is true of even such a splendid documentary as John Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro”, where the director had his own cameramen film some of the battle as it was happening. I am thinking of the ending of “Band of Brothers”, where two officers who had been buddies since D-Day decide, after the war, to go into business together in the Midwest. That is a letdown from what might have been a more literary ending where one of them makes a career out of the military but it is what really happened and so makes the audience realize in an eureka moment that these boys, like the other eight million under arms, just wanted to get home.
But there is still my daughter’s nagging question. Is she correct in thinking that I can appreciate the aesthetics because I already know the lore of World War II? In that case, explanation precedes imagination. Well, I don’t know much about King David’s world outside of what I read in “Samuel I” and “Samuel II”, and yet I think I understand Uriah’s psychology of not wanting to acknowledge what he knows to be true about the relationship between his wife Bathsheba and the King. Or have I gotten that wrong because I do not understand the Israelite mind? I prefer to think of the story not the scholarship about it as providing me with a window into its age, but that may be my prejudice because most of what I know about the world comes from texts (not textbooks) written in the world during the white heat of events or maybe even long afterwards. And that, of course, is the way it is with most of us, though not for the Marines at Guadalcanal nor for my uncle, who had earned a Bronze Star in Burma, though I didn’t know that until he died as a very old man.
Not all history is made up of wars and demonstrations and protests and politics. Those of us who do not do brave things are also part of history, always making history, even if we are not aware or soon afterwards aware that we had done so. We make history by inserting during the Fifties fresh opinions about race into the circle of people with whom we are acquainted. A woman makes history when she goes to work in the Sixties as a lawyer. We raised our children differently in the Eighties than we might have done a decade earlier and I don’t know, should I be parenting teenagers now, how I would monitor their use of the Internet. Our grandchildren will record us as having done one thing or another, and so as having made history. Only our grandchildren will understanding whether we were taking a new path or stuck in a rut or retrograde. Most history making is, therefore, matter-of-fact rather than self-conscious. It is not heroic except for those people later generations will recall as, among other things, “The Greatest Generation”, which was a status already bestowed by the Aussies on the American Marines, right after their historical battle on Guadalcanal, even if it wasn’t until Tom Brokow, two generations later, that they were generally awarded that name.