Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
Oh What a Lovely War!
By Noel Annan
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
by Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press, 330 pp., $19.95
Living Through the Blitz
by Tom Harrisson
Schocken, 372 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Battle of Britain: The Greatest Air Battle of World War II
by Richard Hough, by Denis Richards
Norton, 397 pp., $29.95
In 1963 Joan Littlewood staged in London's East End her antimilitarist musical Oh What a Lovely War! In the approved style of Robert Graves and the First World War poets, the generals guzzled and swilled as they sent the troops in the trenches to their deaths. But to make the invective work against the upper classes, politicians, profiteers, and arms manufacturers she set the scene in the first, and not the second, world war. Most people on the left considered the Second World War a just war—at any rate after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union—a war against German and Japanese fascism and militarism.
Review, 5041 words
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