Hunter Thome Professor Laderman HIST 1305 Response Paper #2 World War 2, back in the day, was thought to be a “Happy” or a “Good” war. The popular illusion held that ‘there were no ethnic or gender problems, families were happy and united, and children worked hard in school and read a great number of books’ (115). However, this was not the true story for Americans and families during that time. As the title suggests from Michael C.C Adam’s book, The Best War Ever, America and World War II, Americans came out of the war with a positive outlook on the years beforehand. This happy outlook on the war was mainly due to the fact of the overseas setting, in which it never took place in America, the media and Hollywood’s glamorization of the war, …show more content…
The fact that Americans who didn’t fight in the war and couldn’t see it firsthand, gave the government and the media power to convey any sort of message they wanted to about the war back to the American people. It was a lens in which the government only wanted people to see about the war, and Hollywood put that idea onto the big screen. These things led to the belief of a glorified war by Americans. The other major factor in attributing the Second World War as the “Best War Ever” was booming economic prosperity in America, ‘where the U.S gross domestic product increased 60 percent during the war’ (114). Which, when compared to the depression of 1930s, definitely seemed to be a Golden Age. Michael C.C Adams attempted to dispel the numerous misconceptions about the Second World War with telling the brutal reality of what soldiers actually did, and had to deal with during that time. Soldiers weren’t killed in a clean, fashionable way like it was portrayed in Hollywood films, when in fact, they were blown up in pieces with limbs being flown in every which direction. Also, US soldiers were not as ethical in their behavior and tactics as most people had believed. ‘Soldiers fathered tens of thousands of children and even took advantage