Once again, America is revisiting the Second World War. The latest passage is the dedication of another museum, this one commemorating D-Day, the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944.
By now, the pattern of memory is familiar. Out of guilt or gratitude, someone proposes a museum or a monument. The idea takes root. The money pours in. The project grows.
So it was with the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Stephen Ambrose, the eminent historian, wanted a modest home for oral histories and battle artifacts. Ultimately, his brainchild will cost $25-million and offer 70,000 square feet of exhibits and galleries chronicling not just the Normandy landings, but amphibious operations in North Africa and the Pacific.
It's not that Americans ever forgot the war they were so critical in winning. It was more that the veterans didn't discuss it for so long, much as Jews didn't discuss the Holocaust.
In the 1990s something happened. Few thought that Saving Private Ryan would be a huge box-office success. The film is said to have so raised public consciousness that its director, Steven Spielberg, and its star, Tom Hanks, were awarded the U.S. Navy's highest civilian honour last year.
Books have had an impact, too. The Greatest Generation,the recollections of veterans gathered by Tom Brokaw, was a runaway bestseller. So was its companion volume. Mr. Ambrose's books on the plight of the GI -- Citizen Soldiers and D-Day June 6, 1944 -- are popular. The latest contribution to the genre is James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers, honouring the Marines at Iwo Jima.
America is remembering in other ways. A bill ensuring military honours at the funerals of veterans has passed Congress. A national campaign for a moment of silence on Memorial Day has been well-received; last month, President Bill Clinton, having asked Americans to put "memorial back into Memorial Day," placed his golf cap over his heart as he stood on his private putting green at 3 p.m.
Of all of the talismans of memory, the greatest is the proposed memorial on the National Mall in Washington. A sunken temple, it will sit on the sweeping greensward, near the Reflecting Pool, between two enduring symbols of the republic -- the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
What is telling about the memorial is that it has taken this long. The Vietnam War and the Korean War have their own memorials. But the Second World War, in which 16 million Americans served and 400,000 died, does not.
Maybe it was because that generation never asked for much recognition. They returned home and went back to work. It's a mistake to think that Americans have always been as seized by the war as they are today. In truth, their interest is more recent, driven largely by the realization that the veterans are dying at a rate of 1,000 a day.
So the movies, the books, the moment of silence, the national memorial -- all reflect a desire to pay tribute to a fading generation, and it has brought a new mourning in America.
But what kind of memorial? Veterans, politicians and preservationists are quarrelling. They don't question the proposal's purpose or cost ($100-million, raised privately), just its design and size. In a sense, they are fighting America's last battle of the Second World War.
The critics say that the memorial will obstruct vistas and disrupt continuity, and that its 7.4 acres of marble and stone -- the size of a football field -- will overwhelm the Mall, where Americans have traditionally gathered.
Curiously, the design is a return to the beaux-arts grandeur of the turn of the century, in which war dead were enshrined in seas of stone and open plazas. In Europe, it was the style favoured by the Fascists.
But in the Vietnam and Korean memorials, the United States moved beyond that uniformity. Instead of anonymity, the fallen were given identity. In remembering Vietnam, that meant carving names in a wall; in remembering Korea, that meant pictures. Not so here.
The iconography of the new memorial is triumphalist, even jingoistic, however strange that seems. But this is the United States, which has always trumpeted its idealism and democracy, and there is something wrong with the wholly impersonal and faintly imperalistic nature of that coffin and those pillars and arches amid the humanity of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt.
Congress wanted the memorial to commemorate the courage and purpose of a people (including women, blacks, factory workers). In its tone and magnitude that message is diminished. As one critic said, it's what Hitler would have built.
No matter. The design will be approved this summer, and ground will be broken this fall. The greatest generation will finally get the memorial it deserves, even if it isn't necessarily the memorial it wants.