War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II

305 Pages·1995·15.22 MB·English

by  Gabor Boritt

WAR COMES AGAIN
GETTYSBURG CIVIL WAR INSTITUTE BOOKS
published by Oxford University Press
Edited by Gabor Boritt
Why the Confederacy Lost
Lincoln, the War President:
The Gettysburg Lectures
Lincoln's Generals
War Comes Again:
Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II
Other books by Gabor Boritt
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream
The Lincoln Image
(with Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Jr.)
The Confederate Image
(with Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Harold Holzer)
The Historian's Lincoln
The Historian's Lincoln, Rebuttals:
What the University Press Would Not Print
By late June it is usually warm,
even hot in Gettysburg.
In the night at our farm,
the fireflies glow in the dark,
fleeting specks illuminating the woods and
turning Marsh Creek into a pageant.
In the daytime along the side of the road,
orange tiger lilies proclaim their eternal message.
My heart overflows;
it is time to see old friends again,
time to make new ones.
It is the time for
the Gettysburg Civil War Institute.
Gabor S. Boritt
WAR
Comparative Vistas on the
Edited by
GABOR BORITT
Preface by
DAVID EISENHOWER
COMES AGAIN
Civil War and World War II
Essays by
Stephen E. Ambrose
Michael C. C. Adams
Ira Berlin
Robert V. Bruce
D'Ann Campbell and Richard Jensen
Don E. Fehrenbacher
Howard Jones
Gerald F. Linderman
Peter Maslowski
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Russell F. Weigley
New York • Oxford
Oxford University Press • 1995
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1995 by Gabor S. Boritt
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
War comes again : comparative vistas on the Civil War and World War II/
edited by Gabor Boritt; preface by David Eisenhower ;
essays by Stephen £. Ambrose . . . [et al.].
p. cm.
"Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books
published by Oxford University Press"—P. ii.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-508845-X
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865.
2. World War, 1939-1945—United States.
I. Boritt, G. S., 1940- .
II. Ambrose, Stephen E.
HI. Tide: Gettysburg lectures published by Oxford University Press.
E649.W23 1995 973.7—dc20 94-36511
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Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
DEDICATED TO THE
AMERICANS OLDIER
OF
WORLD WAR TWO
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Preface
It is very good to return to Gettysburg and the Civil War Institute that has
grown to national fame since its founding barely more than a decade ago. I
have spoken in some forty-two states over the last few years, and the happy
news about the CWI and its director, Gabor Boritt, is everywhere. I last
spoke here on the 125th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1988,
on "Dwight D. Eisenhower's Civil War." A good deal has changed since
then. Most important for our purposes, World War II has become a true
historical subject. The war's sad continuation symbolized by the Berlin
Wall is gone, and the war's memory reached the mature age of fifty, the
span of two generations. We can now look at the Second World War
dispassionately, and so we can, at last, compare it with authority to that
other earth-shattering American experience, the Civil War.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the subjects of this book, the Supreme
Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, began to make such
comparisons soon after moving to Gettysburg in the 1950s, if not sooner.
Indeed as I look back upon my teenage years in Gettysburg, I feel that
perhaps my grandfather spoke to me continuously about the Civil War and
World War II—though rarely about the later war directly. I think that
when he talked about the Civil War, he was in fact often reflecting on his