Just read this on the final page of Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers," and for what it's worth I think it's accurate:
"In general, in assessing the motivation of the [World War II] GIs, there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with [being able to do what they did]. The GIs fought because they had to. What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion. It has been my experience through four decades of interviewing ex-GIs, that such generalizations are true enough.
And yet there is something more. Although the GIs were and are embarrassed to talk or write about the cause they fought for, in marked contrast to their great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, they were the children of democracy and did more to help spread democracy around the world than any other generation in history.
At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful."
[Pulls out soapbox.] In our political world, the "unit cohesion" that exists generally doesn't care about the difference between right and wrong, but only about having power. We're much closer to George Orwell's future of "imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever" than these GIs would care to have us be.
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