The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers Kristine Dennehy (bio) The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace. By Susan L. Carruthers. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 400. $29.95 cloth) For many Americans, bestsellers like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation (1998) resonate with their desire to embrace a heroic narrative of Depression-era sacrifice, wartime honor, and postwar triumphalism, despite challenges to this mythological arc by historians like Kenneth D. Rose (Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II [2008]). In The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace, Susan L. Carruthers shines light on the years following the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 and fills a gap in the American historiography of this period, which features less prominently in our national discourse. In contrast to the deconstruction of "the 'good war' mythos," Carruthers argues that the "virtuous aura around the post-1945 occupations remains undimmed, and has been if anything enhanced by comparison with the recent U.S. enterprise in Iraq, a project intended to mimic and reprise earlier reconstructive triumphs" (p. 10). Carruthers reveals the less-than-virtuous side of the continued American military presence in Europe and Asia in several ways. Most compelling is her use of the heretofore untapped memoirs, diaries, and private correspondence from ordinary soldiers who were part of the "after-armies" in Occupied Germany and Japan. Oftentimes, these sources expose an ambiguity in the minds of the conquerors, as in this excerpt from a letter home penned by Leo Bogart who struggled with the postwar task of requisitioning German homes: "Undoubtedly in the last half year my work has helped to break up many homes, to kill young men and bring agony to their women, but it has always worked through devious abstracted channels. Now I am personally an agent of woe, and this is no source of joy to me" (p. 69). Interspersed among this grassroots perspective are quotes from higher-ranking officers like Brigadier General Jack Whitelaw who invoked the Yankee carpetbagger, "the lowest form of American life" in his description of "two slimey looking Jewish bastards" hawking cigarettes from the post [End Page 279] exchange (PX) in postwar Berlin. For this black-market infraction, Whitelaw proposed to his wife, "They ought to be horsewhipped and then strung up by their thumbs" (pp. 258–59). In her discussion of postwar Japan, Carruthers relies heavily on comprehensive secondary sources such as John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999) and the English-language translation by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann of Takemae Eiji's work on this period, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (2002). Here, too, she orchestrates a combination of voices of lower-ranking soldiers with elite accounts of the occupation, including extensive references to the papers and publications of General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army. As with the post-Holocaust demonization of Jews, Eichelberger showed an affinity for the Japanese racialized oppression of Koreans by singling them out as "black market people" who "intimidated the police in many areas" (p. 187). Although Carruthers does not cite works by ethnic Korean authors, readers might be interested to know that the animosity toward Eichelberger was mutual on the part of Korean residents in Japan who lived through his suppression of ethnic Korean schools in 1948. Many decades later, as this reviewer learned through personal communication, Koreans in Kobe still referred to Eichelberger (pronounced in Japanese as Ei-kel-ba-ga) as "Ei-kelba-ka," making the final two syllables a pun on the Japanese word "idiot" (baka). The insights Carruthers does provide will appeal to a wide readership who may be surprised to encounter the daily life of occupation as it unfolded on the ground. As Bob Titus wrote to his "Pop" from Okinawa two weeks after Hirohito's surrender, "Our aimless piddling in the mud is becoming disgusting to me as well as to most others" (p. 208). [End Page 280] Kristine Dennehy KRISTINE DENNEHY served as the historical adviser for the U...