Childers dives into World War II history

Enthusiastically looking forward to a semester of World War II studies, College sophomore Scott Cohen stood outside Williams Hall's room 215 last week waiting for the teacher he described as a "dynamic speaker" -- History Professor Thomas Childers. After waiting for the previous class to exit, Cohen and a few other students filed in for the first day of Childers' WWII course, History 102. As the group quickly exceeded the number allowed for a "seminar" class, the small-talk became animated with concern. "Is everyone here registered for this course?" asked one student, who hoped to take the popular course even though it was "technically" closed. "I heard he's a good teacher? that's all I hear." Meanwhile, sitting behind a small desk in the middle of 24 students, Childers -- who teaches two acclaimed history courses on WWII and the Third Reich -- delved into the subject by stating the "not-so-obvious obvious." "War has an attraction. In war, humankind shows itself at its absolute best? and it also shows people at their abysmal worst," Childers said with a hint of a Southern accent. Comparing the war to a "morality play," he stressed the importance of studying WWII and its repercussions. "Germany was not so terribly unlike the U.S., yet this terrible movement comes to power," he said. "How does one explain that -- collective madness? I don't think so. [We need to know how] to deal with our own political culture and? with the rights of others." Declaring it "the single most important event in human history," Childers has examined the war from a more personal perspective in the last few years. His 1995 book Wings of Morning was the first in a trilogy of books on WWII. After being "haunted" by his family's WWII experience, Childers said he had a strong desire to clarify the circumstances under which his uncle Howard Goodner died during the war. With the "epiphany" of his discovery of several letters and photographs from his uncle during the war, Childers set off in search of what actually happened. "I learned more about history doing that book than I did in all of my graduate studies," he stressed. After publishing scholarly works like The Nazi Voter and Reevaluating the Third Reich, Childers abandoned a project concerning imperial Germany to write the novel-esque book. "I had nothing new to say about the interpretation of [WWII] in this book," Childers said of Morning, which focuses more on telling a story rather than just presenting facts. "I wanted people to feel? some sense of what war really means. It means loss, people not coming home." Childers is currently working on the last two installments of the trilogy. One, entitled We'll Meet Again, recounts the story of an American pilot who was hidden by a schoolteacher in France before being captured and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The third book, The Best Years of Their Lives, explores the difficulty that servicemen found in "returning to America and re-adjusting to life." History Professor Walter McDougall, who met Childers when the two studied together at the Goethe Institute in Germany, emphasized his friend's Southern "gift of storytelling." "[Wings of Morning] is justifiably legendary," he said, stressing Childers' continuing popularity with students and faculty alike.

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