Susan L. Carruthers is Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark.
A disturbing look at the experiences of the 'after-army': the
American service-people who stayed on active duty after the Second
World War, charged with rebuilding the places they had helped to
destroy. Frank, often harsh voices from letters, diaries and
memoirs serve up 'inconvenient truths': the armed forces' caste
system and racism; casual cruelty and venality trumping conscience;
'fraternisation' (and prostitution and rape) with 'blowsy
frauleins' and 'anxious to please' Japanese maids. * Times Higher
Education *
Based largely on previously unseen diaries and letters, the book
poses the question: was the good war followed by the 'good
occupation' of the book's title? As ever, there is no easy answer
and from Carruthers's lucid and elegantly written account, a
picture emerges of muddled thinking and ill-thought out policies as
often well-meaning men and women struggled with the conundrum that
the people they were trying to help were representatives of
countries they had only recently been attempting to destroy. --
Trevor Royle * The Herald *
With characteristic brilliance, Susan Carruthers has written a
critical history of military victory. Using letters and memoirs,
she illuminates the interior life of American occupiers in Europe
and Asia, showing the way military governance came to be imagined
as a form of altruism. Highly recommended. -- Mary L. Dudziak,
author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its
Consequences
It is a book for the reader who enjoyed the notion of a 'greatest
generation' but may well be ready for a more complicated
understanding of that period. -- Marilyn B. Young, author of The
Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990
Susan Carruthers asks how the legend of the beneficial American
military presence in Europe and Asia after World War II was created
despite contemporaries' observations of 'destruction, confusion,
despair and hopelessness.' Based on impressive and enlightening
archival researches, this lively book urges us to add a permanent
question mark to the phrase, the 'good occupation.' -- Werner
Sollors, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the
1940s
Carruthers brings together the American experiences of occupying
both Germany and Japan as no other historian. In this lively,
superbly researched account, we see not the magnanimous,
square-jawed GIs and officers we recall today, but rather
war-weary, bewildered Americans who confronted bombed-out cities
and millions of hungry displaced people. To these very human
occupiers, the successful rehabilitation of the enemy that we now
celebrate appeared closer to Mission Impossible. -- Sheldon Garon,
author of Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday
Life
The Good Occupation dives directly into those controversies,
mining a wide array of first-hand documents to create a vividly
detailed picture of thousands of U.S. troops denied the neat
conclusion to their wartime service that they dreamed about during
the years of fighting. Carruthers doesn't shy away from the rapes,
the looting, and the black market violence that cropped up in the
Allied occupation as they have in every military occupation in the
history of mankind. The venality of a significant number of U.S.
occupiers (and their commanders-General George Patton is quite
dispassionately raked over the coals) is exposed in chapter after
chapter of meticulous research and austerely lovely prose. -- Steve
Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *
[Carruthers's] book vividly illustrates the tumultuous period
between 1945 and 1948, when Americans raised as isolationists
suddenly found themselves in control of large swathes of the world
and were ill-prepared to handle the mission at hand...Her archival
research into the diaries and letters of the occupiers...lays bare
the rapidly shifting attitudes that members of the Greatest
Generation held toward the occupied, the military and America's new
place in the world. -- Nicholas M. Gallagher * Wall Street Journal
*
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