Reading Eve’s poster post in the Armed Forces thread got me thinking…World War One (oh, heck, let’s just go ahead and call it The Great War) had MUCH cooler posters than World War Two.
Eve cited the classic “I Wish I Were a Man…I’d Join the Navy!” There was also the original Flagg “Uncle Sam Wants YOU” poster, “Who Can Beat this Plucky Four?”, several classics from France and England decrying the Infernal Hun, and my personal fave: “What Did YOU DO in the War, Daddy?” featuring cherubic little children sitting on Daddy’s lap while Daddy gulps and sweats and stares forlornly out at the viewer, knowing that he stayed in London and sold kumquats whilst Little Eddie Down the Street’s Pop gallantly had his legs machine-gunned off by the Boche.
And poets! Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Rosenberg, Seeger…the Great War had real poets, by God! And artists! Those Beckmann or Dix depictions of soldiers up to their asses in trench-mud, or crawling over no-man’s-land with a greasy gas-mask clenched to their sweating faces!
And don’t even get me started on monuments. In France, Germany, Canada, England, the U.S., everywhere, Great War monuments are huge weepy melodramatic constructions, grandiose and lachrymose, big hulking bathetic lumps on the landscape. I LOVE them…they leave you with no illusions about how awful the War was and how grateful you should be to the Fallen. World War II monuments often lean toward the abstract: “See, the harsh angles represent the suffering of the German prisoners of war…” Horseshit! Give me a twice-lifesize sorrowing angel leading a legless man into the kingdom of heaven! THAT’s what a damn monument should be!
The Great War. For cultural artifacts, you can’t beat it. Any arguments?
Well, you’ve left out some categories where World War II matches or beats World War I.
Songs: Sure, World War I gave us the great “Over There”, but does that really match up with “Der Fuhrer’s Face”? Or the dirty version of Colonel Bogey’s March?
Movies: World War I had a few great films- “Wings” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”. But World War II inspired such great films in such quantity- “Bridge over the River Kwai”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “The Great Escape”, “Casablanca” etc., that even considering all of the drek B-movies that got churned out, World War II towers high above World War I in terms of movie culture.
As for monuments- I’ve actually found the Korean War monument the most inspiring of all of the monuments in D.C.
I have to go with Ike, at least from the UK standpoint. WWI is still referred to over here as “The Great War.”
Of course, there was really nothing great or even good here. When I was doing archival work for Jesus College here in Oxford I found that over one-third of its 1914 student population were dead by 1919.
John C: I have to concede on the movie front. Of course, WWII gave us The Ultimate Evil Adversary. If Hitler hadn’t occurred naturally, Hollywood would have had to create him. As for songs, I’ll still take “Whispering Jack” Smith over the Andrews Sisters any day.
Duke: This is purely from the pop culture perspective. It’s no use arguing that the Great War frontline wasn’t a sausage grinder for young men.
World War II gave us that great Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” poster, classic pinups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, “I’ll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places” and the 1944 St. Louis Browns.
World War I gave us “victory cabbage” – which cancels out a lot of the stuff mentioned earlier.
Uke, just when I thought I couldn’t like you any more than I already did, you go and open this thread! I love The Great War – at least as much as one can love an event that killed and maimed tens of thousands of people.
Just FYI, on November 22 the movie “The Trench” will open; it’s about the Battle of the Somme – the bloodiest day in English history. Jolly good fun, that!
Okay, now everyone, all at once…
Mademoiselle from Orleans, Parlez-vous,
Mademoiselle from Orleans, Parlez-vous,
Mademoiselle from Orleans made me sell my Liberty Bonds.
Hinky-dinky parlez-vous…
Wow. I was just about to strike up “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
stuyguy: Yes, it’s obvious that we share DNA. Did you recognize my description of a typical US Great War memorial as that little gem in Prospect Park, just off the big pond on the skating-rink side? When’s the next NYC gathering of the Tribe? We have GOT to get together.
Or maybe we should just take in this flick together. We can wear puttees and swap quotes from John Keegan’s books!
I think this is the most remarkable and moving work of art to come out of the Great War…when you see the original in the Imperial War Museum, it makes the hair on your neck stand on end…John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed”
War sucks. Can we forgo this romantic clap trap about which war was better based on popular culture?
I think glorifying war in any way is wrong. Yes we fought. Yes, maybe it was even for the best we fought. It doesn’t change that people died and otherwise paid huge prices.
We know, although I’m not sure some of the guys I knew in Cross and Cockade knew. The vets seem to have put it out of their minds. Those who never saw combat glorified it. After listening the crap these guys would spout I wanted to paint a picture of a pilot at several thousand feet, with his plane ablaze, putting his pistol to his head to make the end quicker and less painful.
And most of the poets mentioned died in action, including Joyce Kilmer, a relative of our own Iampunha.
But that does not take away the magnificent BS of propaganda art–it makes the contrast sharper. And strong emotions–and you can’t beat fear of death for that–has produced some wonderful anti-war art.
Plus, the personalities were better. Nicholas II-my all time hero. Much more trustworthy than ol’ Uncle Joe Stalin.
Honorable, humble, decent, and a great family man to boot!
Kaiser Wilhelm II-I’d rather fight a cowardly spoiled bully than an evil bastard like Hitler any day.
Lee et al, you are of course right; war is nothing to glorify. But do not take me and my ilk too seriously. I assure you we have no intention of offending anyone.
And don’t forget, it is blowhards like us who know what happened at the battle of the Somme… and Verdun, and Galipoli, and Belleau Wood. We know about the Battle of Brooklyn, and Antietam and Iwo Jima. Ask most people about these fate-turning events and you’ll get blank stares. At least we care enough to remember.