My first novel was called Aftermath. I started writing it when I was 17 and finished it when I was 22. Luckily it wasn’t published, but I mention it because it’s set in a veterans’ hospital after World War II. Its main characters are men who’ve been so badly injured they aren’t going to make it out. 

At 17, I knew nothing about—well, very much, really, including medicine, war and doing research. But when my mother was a nurse in Shaughnessy Veterans’ Hospital in Vancouver, my handsome, troubled father showed up to visit an old army buddy who was still there years after the war, and that was how my parents met. So the subject resonated.

It still does, which partly explains why I picked up David Nasaw’s new book, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. It’s an exhaustively researched book, clearly written and notably kind. You can sense an excellent teacher behind the work, and in fact Nasaw is a history professor emeritus at the graduate centre of the City University of New York, as well as the prizewinning author of seven previous books. He frequently mentions that his father served in the U.S. Army medical corps during World War II.

The people of Nasaw’s father’s cohort—which was my father’s, too—are often referred to as members of the Greatest Generation. The men are portrayed as the upright heroes of a just war. After coming home, they receded gratefully into Father Knows Best-style suburban blandness, enjoying 9 to 5 jobs and a nuclear family catered to by a contented 1950s housewife. 

Maybe the wife had worked as a Rosie the Riveter during the war, but she’d given up her job to a male veteran and settled down to bake cookies and raise 2.5 children. A dash of John Cheever-esque affairs and drinking added a little colour at the edges of the picture, but not too much. The veterans fought, they came home. It was over. 

This is the world that the hard-right conservatives of America’s Project 2026 want society to return to: a place of male dominance and white-bread uniformity. Yet in The Wounded Generation, Nasaw proves this bland narrative to be a myth. 

The post-war period was neither calm nor bland, and while many veterans had been heroic, many were also deeply damaged. ‘Repressed’ is another word, partly because many veterans repressed their experience of war, and partly because of the repression many of them faced when they got home, particularly Black and women veterans. 

The authors of Project 2026 probably like that part, but maybe not the post-war agitation and violence the repression caused, and the social safety net that governments built to try to contain it, all of which The Wounded Generation explores in depth. 

Given my family background, I came to Nasaw’s book because of its revisionist title, hoping he’d address questions that have preoccupied me for years about the long aftermath of war. There’s the simple desire to try to understand my wounded father. There are also all those biblical verses about the sins of the father being visited on his children unto the third and fourth generation. Translate ‘sins’ as ‘traumas,’ and the verses sound both modern and psychologically acute. They also hit pretty close to home.  

The Wounded Generation is a thoroughly American book, the data drawn from U.S. sources. Yet the basic outlines are as recognizable to a Canadian as they probably would be to Odysseus, sailing home from the Trojan War more than 2,500 years ago—and as they will be to troops returning home from Iran if, God help us, it gets that far.

Nasaw opens his book with a dive into the experiences of the one million soldiers sent home during the first two years after the U.S. entered WWII in December of 1941. Half were given disability discharges, and many of the first wave of returnees were marines who had fought Japanese forces during the famously brutal battle of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Among them was Private Robert Leckie, who later recalled his service in an oral history.

Writes Nasaw, “The marines were attacked by flying and crawling centipedes, spiders, crabs, locusts, scorpions, leeches and malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. Rare was the man who was not debilitated by malaria, which was regarded as a nuisance, not a cause for recall from the front lines…

“Most painful of all for the marines trapped on Guadalcanal was the sense you were surrounded by an enemy set on killing you and there was little you could do to escape; that in war, as Robert Leckie put it, ‘men are the most expendable of all. Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.’ For many, that ‘feeling’ would follow them home and haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

In other words, war is hell and soldiers are cannon fodder and they know it. 

So do the brass. Nasaw marshals a wealth of details about top-down efforts to distract servicemen from the dangers they faced, rationing alcohol and prohibiting relations with local women while turning a blind eye to the soldiers’ use of both. Army chaplains would tell recruits arriving in camp to remember their sisters and remain chaste. Afterward, base commanders handed out condoms.

Meanwhile, according to novelist James Jones, “we got blind asshole drunk every chance we got,” usually on home brew.  

Writes Nasaw, “Leslie Moede, who served in Germany, recalled in his oral history the ‘time we liberated a lot of wine and champagne and cognac. Really a lot. Each of us had a locker, ammo locker, full… I never really drank until I got in the Service. I didn’t smoke either until I got in the Service. I got all my bad habits in the Service.”

Unlike drinking, smoking was actively encouraged.

“Cigarettes were regarded as military tools,” Nasaw writes. “They calmed nerves both before and after battle, suppressed hunger, and kept men and women awake and alert long after they should have been asleep…

“Those loaded into landing crafts for the journey across the English Channel on D-Day received cartons of cigarettes to ward off seasickness, reduce fear and shaking, and sustain them during the first days of the invasion. Ernie Pyle, who arrived in Normandy the day after the initial landing there, found thousands of discarded, water-soaked cartons all along the beach. After the beachhead was secured, the army delivered an additional sixty-three tons of cigarettes.

“To make sure there was no shortage for the men in uniform, tobacco farmers were exempted from the draft as ‘essential workers’ and the Army Service Forces organized a division within the quartermaster corps to procure and distribute cigarettes… Testifying before a Senate special committee, Colonel Fred C. Foy revealed that the army’s request for 68 billion cigarettes in 1944 had fallen ‘woefully short’ and it had raised the number projected for 1945 to 114 billion.”

That’s not a typo. 114 billion.

Nasaw’s picture of other glossed-over aspects of military life is just as detailed. We know, however abstractly, that soldiers watch their buddies die and know that they can be killed themselves at any moment. (War is hell.) Yet as Nasaw points out, given the advances in medical treatment during World War II, especially the use of the recently-formulated drug, penicillin, a higher percentage of soldiers survived their wounds than in earlier wars. They had to be sent home in far greater numbers than the army was prepared to handle, crowded onto ships, wedged into hospitals. Many ended up permanently disabled. 

Uncounted others were left with psychological wounds. What we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was known at the time as psychoneurosis. The trauma led to nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks and sudden outbursts of temper. Veterans tried to tamp down memories by drinking and smoking too much, and something I had never thought of before: a tendency to overwork, courting exhaustion and hoping for sleep. 

During the 1940s, psychoneurosis was often treated with electric shock therapy, and lobotomies were performed on the unruliest veterans. Not surprisingly, many men kept their troubles a secret, heading home untreated. As Nasaw writes, the only help they would receive was from their wives and mothers, untrained and puzzled, but trying to cope with the stranger showing up on their doorstep.

“’Will he be changed?’ Franklin Reck asked in the December 1944 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. ‘Yes,’ Colonel William Menninger, famous psychiatrist in the Surgeon General’s office, assures you. ‘He’ll be changed. No man can live thru the experiences your boy has undergone without being changed. Every soldier will be a reconversion problem. It took time to turn Bill into a soldier, and it will take time to make him a civilian.’”

Then there were the veterans’ children, whom Nasaw mentions less often. A balm to their fathers, I hope, even when the poor kids were terrified by his behaviour.

“I’m getting out of here,” my father would say, pacing the kitchen during one of his rages. “What are you going to do for food? Look at me. What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

To be continued….