The Good War

What It Is

An oral history of the Second World War, published by Pantheon in 1984 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Studs Terkel was a Chicago radio broadcaster who spent decades with a tape recorder and an unusual gift for getting people to talk. Division Street, Hard Times and Working came before it; this is the largest of them.

The book is a collection of voices with almost nothing between them. Infantrymen, bomber crews, a nurse, women who built aircraft and were sent home afterwards, black servicemen who fought a segregated war, Japanese Americans interned by their own country, conscientious objectors, businessmen who did well out of it, Germans, Russians, Japanese. Terkel writes a few lines of introduction to each and then gets out of the way.

The quotation marks in the title are the argument. He thought the phrase obscene and used it anyway, which is the most honest thing in the book.

Why It Matters

It is the counter-memory of the war, gathered before the official memory hardened. This was published a decade before the greatest generation became a marketing category, and it catches Americans in the act of not yet having decided what the war meant.

What it does that no history can is put contradiction on the page and refuse to resolve it. The same event is described by two people who cannot both be right, and Terkel lets them stand next to each other. The book has no thesis. It has a hundred and twenty-one of them.

It also changed the form. Modern oral history, from the Shoah Foundation to the documentary interview as we now know it, works in the shape Terkel gave it: the long silence of the interviewer, the ordinary person given the length of a chapter, the assumption that what a factory worker remembers is evidence.

Be clear about the limits. These are memories recorded forty years after the fact, and memory shapes itself around the story a person has learned to tell. Terkel chose whom to include, cut what he cut, and had a politics he never hid. This is testimony, and testimony is not the record. It is something the record cannot give you.

Before You Read

Six hundred pages, and among the easiest six hundred pages you will ever read. There is no argument to follow and no chronology to hold, and it does not have to be read in order.

Two or three voices a sitting is the right dose. Read too many at once and they blur; read a few, and you will find yourself thinking about a stranger's evening for the rest of the day.

Do not skip the sections that seem far from the fighting. The home front, the internment camps and the profiteers are where Terkel is doing his most uncomfortable work.

Which Edition to Read

• The New Press paperback — recommended. The complete text, in print, with Terkel's own introduction, and the edition that has kept the book alive since Pantheon let it go. It is a fat, plain paperback built for reading rather than display, which suits it. The cost: no scholarly apparatus of any kind. No notes, no chronology, no map, no index of who these people are, so if you want to know how a particular campaign fitted together you will need a history alongside it. View on Amazon →
• The Pantheon first edition (1984). The same text between hard covers, findable secondhand. Buy it as an object or because you want the first printing of a Pulitzer winner. The cost: you are paying for the binding, not for anything Terkel wrote.
• The ebook. Genuinely useful here in a way it usually is not. A book of a hundred and twenty-one testimonies with no index is a book you cannot search, and the ebook fixes that. The cost: this is a volume people underline and hand to their fathers. It wants to be paper.

Take the New Press paperback and keep a decent one-volume history of the war within reach.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it slowly and out of order. It is built to be entered anywhere, and the accumulation matters more than the sequence.

Listen to Terkel himself. The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive has put thousands of hours of his interviews online for nothing, and hearing how he asks a question, and how long he is willing to wait for the answer, will change how you read the transcripts.

Notice what people apologise for. The most revealing moments in this book are the ones where a speaker hesitates before finishing a sentence.

The mistake is to read it for information. Read it for what the information cost.