War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-Century War Reenactors - Hardcover

Thompson J; Thompson, Jenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1588341283 ISBN 13: 9781588341280

Publisher: Smithsonian, 2004

Synopsis

D-Day with beach umbrellas in the distance? Troops ordering ice cream? American and German forces celebrating Christmas together in the barracks? This could only be the curious world of 20th-century war reenactors. A relatively recent and rapidly expanding phenomenon, reenactments in the United States of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War now draw more than 8,000 participants a year. Mostly men, these reenactors celebrate, remember, and re-create the tiniest details of the Battle of the Bulge in the Maryland Woods, D-Day on a beach in Virginia, and WWI trench warfare in Pennsylvania.

Jenny Thompson draws on seven years of fieldwork, personal interviews, and surveys to look into this growing subculture. She looks at how the reenactors' near obsession with owning “authentic” military clothing, guns, paraphernalia, and vehicles often explodes into heated debates. War Games sheds light on the ways people actually make use of history in their daily lives and looks intensely into the meaning of war itself and how wars have become the heart of American history. The author's photographs provide incredible evidence of how “real” these battles can become.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

About the Author

Jenny Thompson spent seven years attending war reenactments and getting to know their participants. She has taught American studies and history at the University of Maryland and Roosevelt University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

The patriotic pageantry of the Civil War is one thing, but who would want to reenact the bloody stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front? Actually, a lot of people. There are at least 8,000 would-be warriors intent on honoring the sacrifice-and, above all, the look-of the unsung soldiers of modern conflicts, be they Americans, British, Russians, Vietnamese or Germans. Historian Thompson surveyed hundreds of reenactors, observed their public living history displays and did her part by attending private reenactments, posing variously as a Red Cross driver, a war correspondent and a Soviet infantrywoman. By day participants march, attack, fire blanks and commit atrocities (reenactors seem to delight in being captured and summarily executed and having their corpses looted), the dead returning to life after a few minutes to rejoin the fray. By night they feast, drink, tell war stories and dirty jokes, and generally bask in campsite and barracks room camaraderie. Most of all, they critique the period authenticity of the tiniest details of other reenactors’ uniforms, accessories, haircut, lingo and body type. What do these weekend Valhallas mean? Not terribly acutely, Thompson figures it’s all about her subjects’ conflicted feelings about war and masculinity, the ownership of history and "the failure of modern society to provide social relationships on a human scale." Or maybe the martial atmosphere just gives men license to indulge their feminine side by obsessing over appearance and excluding others for their fashion faux pas. Anyway, it’s a subculture hell-bent on making a spectacle of itself, so there’s plenty of surface entertainment in Thompson’s engaging and sympathetic study. Photos.
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*Starred Review* Thompson's wholly admirable study of the reenactors of twentieth-century wars focuses on the World War II contingent, which is numerically larger than the rest put together (second largest is that for World War I, while other reenactors concentrate on Korea, Vietnam, and the Spanish Civil War). Thompson studied reenactor groups on the East Coast for seven years, especially the reenactors representing the U.S. Fourth Armored Division and the Grossdeutschland, an equally elite German tank division whose kit, for reenactment purposes, carefully omits the swastika. Thompson doesn't elide the faults of the reenactors, which include short tempers, quarrels over historical accuracy, and, occasionally, far-out politics, but she emphasizes that, in a sometimes roundabout way, they are studying history from the individual participant's point of view and seeking both wartime and contemporary camaraderie, a convincing illusion of being in the moment, and a way of identifying with the common soldier's experience. She doesn't give them a clean bill of health, so to speak, but does pronounce them eminently worthy of civilized consideration and only informed criticism, which she supplies in abundance. Approachable even by readers not interested in reenactment, this is a splendid example of a PC sympathizer fair-mindedly studying a largely non-PC phenomenon. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Smithsonian
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1588341283
• ISBN 13: 9781588341280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256