The creation of the Nation WWII Memorial on the Washington Mall. It looked like it would help bring back the celebration the community once has. It had a classic look to it, and real life work. It helped bring people back to the victory culture once has. The memorial though caught some controversy for its imperial nature. It showed the European and Pacific theaters equally but barely had any reference to the HoloCaust or Japanese and American side. The war’s memory transition has been more severe since the 1990s. Heroic, critical and personal are now competing stories told by popular literature, films, video games, and exhibits. The phrase “Greatest Generation” that was popularized by Tom Brokaw in 1998, is used side by side with scholarly research that uncovers military racism, wartime atrocities committed by the victors and the psychological trauma left on the fighters. As the last of the veterans vanish the last American WWII veteran is already over ninety five the war moves from being a lived experience to one of a historical event. New controversies regularly erupt around the matter. There are discussions on the renaming of military installations where Black soldiers were trained but were under the command of Confederate officers, and different stances on how or whether to memorialize the bombings, as well as disagreement on the character of the new monuments in states and cities. Eighty years after the victory, World War II remains the nearest thing to an American national story, yet at the same time, one of the most hotly contested areas of the nation’s history.
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