John Steinbeck’s Once There Was a War, Essay Example

Often hailed as “The Good War,” World War II has achieved mythological status in various public discourses and lore in American society. Indeed, this seemingly paradoxical cultural assumption that many Americans across the political spectrum remain tethered to the notion that World War II represents one of the greatest moral accomplishments in U.S. history. John Steinbeck takes to task this affirmation of the goodness of World War II in his collection of articles Once There was a War in which he examines the human-scale impact of the war. Steinbeck depicts various actors in the war including the soldiers who belonged to a bomber crew and soldiers fighting behind enemy lines, which spawned an indelible and realistic portrayal of what life was like during World War II. Steinbeck eschews such national necromancy, discursively framing the so-called Good War as a fairy tale. Indeed, he begins this work as most fairy tales do: “Once there was a war” (Steinbeck 1). Steinbeck underscores that Americans are ignorant to the truth about World War II because the American government censored and suppressed the reality of horror and mass murder that was taking place abroad. As a result of the suppression of any unflattering narratives or images from the war in the United States, World War II was able to achieve mythic status. Steinbeck thwarts this sanitized narrative of World War II by recording the experiences of civilians and soldiers as he saw them as a novice journalist, and he did so from various bomber stations, army bases, and training grounds in order to provide an accurate, unsanitized account of the so-called Great War.

Steinbeck asserts that World War II would be “the last of its kind,” and no other global war would ever manifest within the context of modernity. He is cognizant and worried about the possibility of global annihilation as a result of nuclear warfare, which he asserts germinated as a result of World War II and the geopolitical ramifications it spawned.  He writes: “Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror” (Steinback 9). Steinbeck’s perception of the war shifted over time because of his exposure to the front lines in Europe and in Africa, although the articles he penned were clearly tinged with bias rather than providing objective accounts. The Allied powers took great efforts to ensure that journalists disseminated censored material that enhanced the narrative of World War II as the Great War in which the Americans would ultimately emerged as the world superpower. As a journalist, Steinbeck’s articles penned while traveling with the Allied army reflected journalistic self-censorship as well as state-sponsored censorship, which undermined the objectivity of his work. Nonetheless, it is evident that the compendium of articles is both disparate and uneven, suggesting that the collection was not a unified one and reflects Steinbeck’s criticism of wartime journalism in the war’s aftermath for the elision of realistic portrayals of life during World War II.

The articles penned by Steinbeck to a degree lacked objectivity and were steeped in romantic notions propagated by the Allied forces due to state-sponsored censorship. Despite the fact that Steinbeck discursively frames this collection of articles as a fairy tale, the content of the articles could be categorized as non-fictional on the surface. In order to add nuance to the grand narrative about World War II that had been sanitized by the American government vis-a-vis strict censorship, Steinbeck penned articles about the lived experiences of ordinary people on the Front and Home Lines rather than covering the various battles or interviewing military leaders. The articles are thus filled with oral histories of fighters who fought on the battlefields as well others on the Home Front who were crucial for the war effort to take place and be sustained for a protracted period of time. The articles are not extensive but rather composed of small snippets in order to include the experiences of a vast array of civilians and soldiers alike. Although the subject matter seems mundane and monotonous, Steinbeck nonetheless as a journalist given permission to cover the war abroad believed it was vital to approach news coverage of the war from a grassroots, bottom-up approach rather than a top-down, institutional one in which official discourses would be rearticulated rather than shedding light on the actual experience of being a part of this global war, a war  that was touted as the last truly global war.

Although John Steinbeck as a war correspondent during World War II was privy to penning articles that resembled government propaganda due to the strict censorship mechanisms in place, his narratives penned post-war were softened. Indeed, while he lauded his fellow journalists for being good at their craft, he eschewed the myth of World War II as the Great War, one that was perpetuated by the suppression and censorship of any defaming or unflattering accounts of what the realities of war at the grassroots level was like. Images of dead bodies, vicious murders and rapes, and the bombing of civilian cities were prohibited from being disseminated. As a result, Americans and the British public bought into a sanitized narrative that touted World War II as the Good War, the highest moral good attained by the Allied nations. After the war, Steinbeck decried such subjectivity as a result of censorship at the persona and state levels. Nonetheless, Steinbeck provided a social history of the Great War through his articles in an attempt to capture and convey the experiences of ordinary people. The war was not a Great one, and great suffering and toiling demarked the reality of  World War II.

Works Cited

Steinbeck, John. Once There was a War. United States: Viking Press, 2007. Print.