THE WOUNDED GENERATION

The greatest generation suffered terribly—and in many ways—in World War II and its aftermath.

“The men and boys who returned home,” writes historian Nasaw, “were not the ones who had left for war.” Many harbored intense psychological trouble, 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 psychiatrist would have been a source of shame in itself, an admission of weakness. And so, as William Wyler’s brilliant, ironically titled 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives depicted so well, the vets returned and suffered, mostly in silence. Divorce rates spiked during and after the war, Nasaw writes, with more than 1 million GIs leaving or being left by their spouses by 1950. Alcoholism soared, and everyone, it seems, smoked, an outcome of the distribution of cigarettes in every ration issued: As Nasaw writes, Bob Dole, the future senator who would be badly wounded in Italy, was a nonsmoker who began puffing away, reasoning, “If the cigarettes weren’t good for us, the army wouldn’t put them in our food containers.” Nasaw observes that Black soldiers suffered from these and other maladies and often found themselves treated even more poorly than they were before the war, as Southern whites in particular were fearful that Black veterans, having served in combat, would resist Jim Crow. The homefront 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 to their years away in uniform.

An eye-opening view of a war whose devastating consequences reverberate.