In the book, The Best War Ever, Michael Adams states right away his main argument he intends to stress throughout the book. On the first page he states that we as Americans like to twist history so it makes ourselves look better. Adams says on page one, “Sometimes we conjure up the past in such a way that it appears better than it really was. We forget ugly things we did and magnify the good things. This is wishful thinking, the desire to retell our past not as it was but as we would like it to have been.”(1) Throughout the entire book Adams focuses on this topic more than any other and clearly wants this to be the subject of the book. His thesis statement in the Preface states, “The goal of this book is to subject the major aspects of the Good War myth to fresh analysis in the hope of presenting a more realistic picture, one that does not demean the achievement of the United States and of liberal democracy but that at the same time does not diminish the stress, suffering, problems, and failures inevitably face by a society at war.”(xiv) The author’s implication is that history doesn’t need to be told like you wish it would’ve happened or what sounds appealing to the ear. History needs to be told like it occurred. The old saying “don’t let history repeat itself” is pointless if we are being told the wrong history. When we mythologize it too much, misrepresentations appear. The author makes the claim that it is always better to fight than it is to talk and using the 1938 Munich Conference as one example to prove his claim. In furthering his claim that World War II was remembered as a “good” war, he notes that many Vietnam veterans were angry at the fact that they had fought a “bad” war, and lost. In his book, Adams uses history as his strongest evidence and doesn’t try to make it sound good doing it. He mentions the reason why Germany was lead to war only because of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and by the cycle of having to make money to repay World War One’s victors so they could repay America. He attacks the myth that World War Two arose in a vacuum and that “appeasement” and “deterrence” had failed, and only through those policies failing, did the modern democracies realize they needed to go to war. The author seemed to organize the book very well. It had interesting flow and all his chapters had a significant purpose in the book. The book didn’t seem to have a lot of names and dates like most history books do, and I think that had something to do with the movement of the book. Most readers have a tendency to get lost while reading a book with a bunch of statistics thrown at them, but the author did a good job of presenting them. The author seems to imagine his audience as having a working knowledge of World War II history so without previous knowledge of the war some parts of the book would not make sense to the average reader. He assumes that they know the basic background of the War but have acquired some misconceptions about it. He believes that everyone who “thinks” they know about World War II only has heard about the “good” and not the history of the war. He does throw little facts in there like the 1938 Munich conference to help explain to those who don’t have a lot of World War II knowledge.
I personally thought that the book was very well written. He took some of the myths, even some I thought to be true, and deflated them, proving his point with numerous citations and outside references. However, I did feel like he used too many outside sources while writing the book. I felt like he could have talked more about what he thought rather than taking quotes out of student newspapers and other irrelevant sources.