On Saturday May 29, thousands of veterans, dignitaries, and tourists will gather in Washington for the dedication of the National World War II Memorial. Nicolaus Mills, author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial, explains what the fuss is about.
You're one the first historians to write extensively on the National World War II Memorial. What did you hope to accomplish?
What the historian -- or someone who believes that journalism is history on the run -- can do is get the mood at the time. I could get what the architect, the sculptor, and the critics felt all at the same time. Twenty or 50 years from now, we'll certainly have their words, but it won't be so easy to capture their passions.
You wrote the history of this memorial as it was actually being built. What kind of challenges did that present?
Well, it presented the obvious challenge of judging it prematurely. It was essential to keep an open mind and to follow the debate, rather than to sort through and to predict which side would win and which side would lose.
You dedicate almost a third of your book to the contentious histories of other national memorials. What can we learn from them?
Memorials never get built easily, and the battles we have over the memorial tell us as much about the memorial as its stone and bronze.
You were able to look through all of the designs that were submitted for this memorial. Do you think the right one was chosen?
It was the strongest and the most accessible of the submissions. It not only adapts a neoclassical style (and so is in symmetry with the two memorials that bracket it); it is also a memorial that the troops coming back in 1945 would have recognized as something that spoke in an architectural vocabulary that they knew all their lives.
And that's important?
I think so. It really asks us to imagine the values and the ideals of that generation. It has modern elements, but it deliberately nods to the past.
How about those who say the memorial is overly militaristic?
It seems to me that the reverse is true. When you go past the pillars, which represent the men and women who were missing from the home front, you will notice they are hollowed out. Then you go into the arch, which does sort of celebrate victory, as all arches do. But this is a tiny arch, not an arch that a victorious army could go through. When you look up through the laurel in the arch, you do not see the image of a victorious general but the sky. And finally, when you come to the end of the memorial, what you see is a wall of stars, one star for every 4,000 American deaths in the war. The stars resemble the gold stars that gold-star mothers put on banners in their windows, and they remind you of the tragedy of the war. This memorial does not celebrate militarism at all. It does celebrate a triumph in the effort of the war, but it reminds the viewer what the war cost in human lives. That's exactly the opposite of a Roman arch like the Arch of Constantine -- or, for that matter, Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe.
Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial seems to have set the standard for war memorials. How would you compare Lin's simple black wall to [Friedrich] St. Florian's fountain colonnade?
First, Maya Lin's memorial is not on the centerline of the mall. Like the Korean [War Veterans] Memorial, it's off to the side, indicating its importance in American history. In other words, it's not “mainstream important.”
Second, the memorials on the main line of the [National] Mall, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the [National World War II] memorial, all owe an allegiance to a neoclassical style. We also see the neoclassical style used in the [U.S.] Capitol building, which is on the main line of the Mall as well. Maya Lin, on the other hand, uses minimalism and abstraction to get at her memorial.
Finally, Maya Lin deals with a war in which the purposes and the results were very dubious. Her memorial is not a war memorial but a memorial to the veterans of Vietnam. And it's a mournful memorial. [The National World War II Memorial] memorializes a war we regard as our good war. The purposes of the two memorials are absolutely antithetical.
In your book, you debunk the notion that the National Mall is untouchable, that it's hallowed ground. How are we supposed to view this space?
In our lifetime, the Mall has had a remarkably settled quality to it. But the process of getting it to the quality that we see now has been a very slow and difficult one. In the 19th century, the Mall had an awful and smelly canal down one side of it. Later, it had railroad tracks crossing it. And until the 1970s, it had the temporary buildings from World War II still on it. While the Mall is sacred territory, it is sacred territory which we have continually revised over time. To think of the Mall as frozen in time is a very big mistake.
Washington congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton argues that the memorial sits smack-dab in the middle of the civil-rights movement's hallowed ground. The Mall isn't, as she puts it, the “urban equivalent of the Grand Canyon.”
Norton was confusing the memorial's location with an assault on the Lincoln Memorial. [The National World War II] Memorial is 765 yards, or seven football fields, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The idea that it intrudes on the Lincoln Memorial is something to be taken seriously, but it's a real exaggeration.
How do current events shape the way we view the memorial as we come to it for the first time?
What really shapes how we come to this memorial is [September 11]. The sense is that we are in a period of time where our existence is threatened -- or at least in jeopardy -- in a way it hasn't been since the end of World War II.
What should a visitor to the Mall think about before visiting the World War II memorial?
All of our memorials depend on coming to them with a sense of history. If you look at the Washington Monument, which is an Egyptian obelisk, there is nothing self-evident about the connection between the obelisk and the American Revolution. You have to bring a sense of our democracy and our decision for the memorial to emphasize the idea that Washington stood for, not the person himself.
With [the National World War II Memorial], you have to recall, first, that it was a war that engaged the entire country on the home front as well as the war front. Second, like the Civil War and the Revolution, it was a period in time when America's very survival was at stake. A loss or a draw in the Vietnam [War] or the Korean War did not change who we were and how we survived. We clearly could not be the same nation if we had lost the Revolution, if the South had won the Civil War, or if Germany and Japan had won World War II.
Have you had a chance to visit the memorial since it has been open to the public?
Yes, and what is startling -- particularly on the part of veterans -- is the deep emotional response to this memorial.
Has it destroyed the Mall like some of the critics predicted it would?
Many people sort of move through it and then down the Mall as if this memorial had always been there.
Rob Anderson is a Prospect editorial intern.
