The greatest generation in history suffered terribly–and in so many ways– in WWII and its aftermath. This story is an eye-opening account of a war whose devastating consequences still reverberate today.
Historian David Nasaw wrote; the men and boys who returned home, were not the ones who left for war. Many harboured intense psychological troubles, suffering from the PTSD that would not be diagnosed properly until the Vietnam era. ” Battle Fatigue”, as it was called, was a source of shame; in that time, going to a shrink would have been in itself, a sense of shame, an admission of weakness. In William Wylers’ brilliant, ironically titled 1946 film ” The Best Year of Our Lives” depicted so well, the veterans returned and suffered, mostly in silence.
Divorce rates spiked during and after the war, Nasaw writes, with more than 1million GI’s leaving or being left by their spouses by 1959. Alcoholism soared, and everyone, it seems, smoked, an outcome of the distribution of cigarettes in every ration issued.
As Bob Doles, the future senator who would be badly wounded in Italy, was a non-smoker, began puffing away, reasoning, ” If cigarettes weren’t good for us, the army wouldn’t put them in our food containers.” The author observes that Black soldiers suffered from these and other maladies, often finding themselves treated even more poorly then they were before the war, as southern whites in particular were fearful that Black veterans, having served in combat, would resist Jim Crow. The home front suffered too: veterans often failed to connect emotionally with children who had been raised while they were away, many suffering from accelerated rates of anxiety and fear, although, “they had no such problems bonding with children who were born after their return.”
Nasaw digs deep into history, even connecting the declines in Joe DiMaggio’s and Hank Greenberg’s batting scores due to their years away in uniform. THE WOUNDED GENERATION makes emphatically clear, a good war is an oxymoron. Just wars there are and necessary wars, but there are no good wars. Nasaw deftly explores the ambivalent legacy of a war that Americans have been taught to think of as the good one..
The heart of the book is the author’s nuanced consideration of the incremental yet monumental construction of the ‘Veterans’ welfare state throughout the 1940s. In a lovely touch, Nasaw illustrates his book with Bill Mauldin cartoons, which are far more trenchant and provocative than most readers will remember.
Richly informative and compelling THE WOUNDED GENERATION is an important history of the tragedies of war and the triumphs of a democratic society that fully supports veterans well being. Based on oral histories, correspondences, service newspapers and government reports, this is a well-written account that highlights one of the little-known, forgotten stories of postwar America.
Nasaw, an emeritus Professor of History at the City University of New York, marshals such experiences to argue that, beyond the ticker-tape parades, millions of men came home to little fanfare. Nasaw’s book is a corrective to the simplistic narrative of stoicism, unity, and triumph that dominates conventional naratives of “The Greatest Generation”, lifting voices of pain and disquiet that were understood in the years after the war but faded from popular memory in the decades after.
Approximately 45,000 of the original 16 million WWII veterans are still with us today. As the last of those survivors fade away we should pause before we send future generations abroad to fight wars, ‘good’ or not.
