A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

World War II would rank right at the top of the list of subjects most likely to defeat any attempt to fulfill the writer's basic mission: "make it new." The war is too immense (could it b the single most extensive human endeavor in the history of the world?) and too well written about already by everyone from Anne Frank to Winston Churchill. To fit the whole thing into a single volume, even one limited to the United States side of it, means severely compressing dozens of subjects that have themselves filled many long books: Ike and FDR, the atom bomb and D-Day, the end of isolationism and the beginning of the Cold War.

William O'Neil, who specializes in contained histories of entire eras in American history, has not solved the difficult problem he has posed for himself in the most obvious way, which would have been too write a straightforward, textbook-like history of the war. He assumes some degree of familiarity on the part of the reader with his own views on many of the persistent controversies about the war. One chapter, for example, argues that strategic bombing was morally and militarily this country's greatest failure in the war effort, and another excoriates Churchill for insisting on a major Allied thrust through northern Africa, Sicily, and Italy, instead of agreeing to a much earlier invasion of France.

O'Neill does, however, have a stated main purpose to his enterprise that would appear to be unifying and fresh. From the vantage point of today's dispirited America, what seems perhaps most amazing about World War II is that we won: When's the last time this country (and in particular the federal government) seemed both so completely in the right and so competent? The war is impervious to being demythologized: Over the last few years writers of the caliber of Studs Terkel and Paul Fussell have tried to drain it of nobility and succeeded only in reminding us of how bloody the fighting was. Because the country feels itself to be so un-puissant today, the question on how we could have pulled off such a triumph now seems compelling - as it wouldn't have in 1950 or 1960. In effect O'Neill has set for himself the task of explaining what magic secret we as a society possessed then that we no longer have: hence the second word in the title.

What O'Neil does very well is make it clear that conducting the war not as smooth sailing as it now appears to have been. He takes a degree of devilish pleasure in creating a picture of a country that was just about as screwed up then as it is now. Before Pearl Harbor, although preparedness was...