Traumatic Defeat

Patrick Gallagher's thesis is straightforward and passionately presented: in both post–World War II West Germany and the post–Vietnam War United States, secret prisoner of war (Pow) camp myths emerged that idolized each nation's Pows and soldiers missing in action (Mia) and “mask[ed] a refusal to accept the realities of war and can threaten to distort the honest telling of the history of such wars” (p. 10). Gallagher is fervent in his insistence that a “defeated nation ... appropriates the suffering of the victims of that nation's wartime atrocities, while simultaneously downplaying whatever responsibility the nation had for the war to begin with” (p. 2). He asserts that his two case studies, West Germany after World War II and the United States after the Vietnam conflict, are only two examples of a “larger phenomenon rather than ... something specific to either Germany or the United States” (p. 3). However, he never presents evidence of a “larger phenomenon.” That is the chief weakness of his book. The author is also more persuasive and detailed regarding the American case than about the West German one. He notes that few German writers address the German secret camp myth, though there is a “more established historiography for Pow/Mia issues” in the United States (p. 6

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