Edward G. Lengel in The Washington Post:
As we observe Memorial Day, a hard truth remains: Americans haven’t forgotten about the doughboys [of WWi or ‘The Great War’]. We just didn’t want to hear about them in the first place. The war’s last and greatest battle involving U.S. soldiers, fought in the Meuse-Argonne region of eastern France during the autumn of 1918, sucked in more than 1 million U.S. troops and hundreds of airplanes and tanks. Artillery batteries commanded by men such as the young Harry S. Truman fired more than 4 million shells — more than the Union Army fired during the entire Civil War. More than 26,000 doughboys were killed and almost 100,000 wounded, making the clash probably the bloodiest single battle in U.S. history. But as far as the American public was concerned, it might as well never have taken place. “Veterans said to me in their speeches and in private that the American people did not know anything about the Meuse-Argonne battle,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Nolan wrote years later. “I have never understood why.”
Back then, civilians justified their indifference by claiming that the veterans refused to share their stories. In reality, the ignorance was self-imposed.
Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin offers some thoughts (see also interesting discussion following the post).
[I]n the long run, the absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.
In Europe by contrast, the Great War and its consequences are still ever-present, and the Second World War is correctly seen as the inevitable product of the First.