The wounded generation Coming home after World War II

Best-selling historian Nasaw (The Last Million, 2020) deepens the usual approach to WWII's Greatest Generation by examining the real-world costs and sacrifices made by veterans, their families, and society at large. He focuses on the unseen wounds--neuropsychiatric symptoms previously understood as shell shock or battle fatigue and that are now known as post-traumatic stress disorder--and how their symptoms, including nightmares, headaches, irritability, and alcoholism, affected veterans and their loved ones. In parallel, Nasaw tracks the complicated processes of demobilization and reintegration of veterans through the many provisions and programs of the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, which, however imperfectly executed, was light-years ahead of the chaos surrounding the endings of previous wars. Nasaw covers the inequities of the transition from military to civilian life, the uneven distribution of benefits, and, despite myriad sham schools taking advantage of veterans' educational programs, how the GI Bill produced a large middle class of educated and professional homeowners. 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.

Historian Nasaw (The Last Million) provides a lucid investigation into the cultural impact WWII had on the U.S., primarily via returned veterans, who came home as deeply changed men. With "nearly 32 percent of males between eighteen and forty-five" serving in the armed forces, as well as millions of women working outside the home, the cultural shift was unmistakable, Nasaw writes. PTSD was little understood, and Nasaw extensively examines the impact experiences of violence, deprivation, and horror had on returned soldiers, but he also digs far beyond the untreated trauma. Most fascinatingly--and contrary to the more popular images of the Greatest Generation's stoicism--he surfaces a liberatory strain of thought and feeling that permeated the veterans' worldview. Many of them had experienced idleness and freedom of a type that permanently altered their expectations--having smoked, drunk, and indulged "near insatiable sexual appetites," they were now skyrocketing the divorce rate. Black veterans, meanwhile, having experienced life without Jim Crow, returned with liberated mindsets that contributed to the growth of the nascent civil rights movement. With the country facing shortages of food and housing--soldiers were chafing in cramped conditions, often living with parents--the GI Bill was, in Nasaw's telling, a means to contain the restless energy of returned soldiers, and its calcified inequities of race and gender defined the century to come. It's an expansive redefining of a generation. (Oct.)

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 filmThe 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.