I always pause when a new section in a non-fiction book begins, “Five years later.” Five years is a long time in our short human lives, and even if those five years pass without historic conflicts, we still experience a series of fascinating, traumatic and often life-changing events as we ricochet through our allotted three score years and ten.
Or these days in Canada, an average of 85 years for women and 80.7 for men.
That’s one thing I particularly like about David Nasaw’s new book, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. He doesn’t telescope. According to cliché, heroic Allied troops returned from the war and quickly settled into a peaceful mid-century modern life. But in his meticulously-researched book, Nasaw busts open the fairy tale on two fronts. Millions of veterans weren’t at peace with themselves. And those first five post-war years were raucous and often violent.
I wrote last time about Nasaw’s portrayal of the men and women who came home, his father and mine among them.[1] Many veterans were indeed heroic, but most had also been damaged by the war. Nasaw explores at length the post-war epidemic of undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, known at the time as psychoneurosis.
Most veterans tried to suck it up, never seeking psychiatric help and seldom talking about the war. But their PTSD could show itself in problem drinking, or maybe an addiction to a pack or two of smokes a day. Many vets had nightmares and unpredictable outbursts of rage, or they overworked to try to exhaust themselves into a heavy and forgetful sleep.
Behind much of this was a common feeling that they didn’t count for much. When fighting overseas, they’d come to see themselves as cannon fodder, expendable, “a big nothing,” as my father would say. “They think I’m a big nothing.”
The second fairy tale: immediate access to housing
Despite their trauma, and because of it, veterans felt they’d earned a good job and a comfortable house. Yet as Nasaw writes, when the men arrived home, there wasn’t enough of either to go around. The lack triggered a wave of post-war protests, divorce, fraud and a sickening increase in lynchings in the American South, with racists murdering “uppity” returned Black soldiers who demanded their rights.
How fascinating to learn that both the U.S. government and the military had anticipated the disorder.
Writes Nasaw, “No one in Washington and few among the general public had forgotten what had happened in 1932, when world war veterans thrown out of work by the Depression marched on Washington to demand the payment of bonuses that were due (later) but that they needed now to support their families…
“(In response,) General Douglas MacArthur, with four companies of artillery, four of cavalry, and six tanks, routed the veterans, chased them from government buildings, and burned down their shacks.
“Images of the violence meted out to this ragtag, poorly organized army of aging, infirm, impoverished, unemployed veterans were captured by newsreel cameras and played back on a seemingly endless loop to theatregoers across the land. Recurring memories of the protesting veterans, destitute and desperate, would haunt the public and politicians for years to come.”
One of the first high-level attempts to avoid post-World War II conflict almost immediately backfired. Fearing it would be disastrous to release too many soldiers at once, the U.S. army announced a “slow demobilization” after the Allied victory. Under the initial plan, it would take more than a year to send five million U.S. servicemen home.
Stuck overseas, the soldiers grew increasingly bored and rebellious. Some began disappearing without leave, mobbing nearby cities while drinking heavily and brawling. Many rapes of local women were reported (and seldom punished). Enlisted men began to refuse orders from officers, which had graver consequences. White soldiers could end up in the brig, but when one Black serviceman talked back, an officer pulled out his gun and shot him.
At home, families formed “Bring Back Daddy” clubs and began letter-writing campaigns to their congressmen, warning that they wouldn’t vote for candidates who ignored their demands. Writes Nasaw, “More than thirty members of the Maryland chapter ‘threatened to put on slacks and picket the Capitol unless Congress orders the release of all fathers from the armed services.’”
They won. Or did they?
As a result of the protests, the U.S. army accelerated the rate of discharge—and those arriving home found, as predicted, little housing and few jobs. Many were forced to live with their parents.
“The future poet Frank O’Hara, who had enlisted in the navy at age eighteen, gently but firmly warned his parents via letters that he was a different man now, ‘on the whole, more independent, freer, more confident, happier and more at ease…but I imagine our mutual affection will take care of most of the obstacles.’ It didn’t. At home on leave for Christmas 1945, he and his father fought as they had never fought before the war.”[2]
Things were even more complicated for married veterans. Many wives disliked being forced to live with their husband’s parents, and it was especially difficult for women who had worked during the war and grown used to living independently. Their unhappiness was compounded by the fact that many of them had been fired from their jobs so male veterans could take their place.[3] The divorce rate skyrocketed.
“In mid-November 1945, The Washington Post reported that the offices of two of Washington’s busiest divorce attorneys were swamped with returning veterans. The rate of filings had ‘shot upward 60 per cent during the fiscal year of 1945 over the fiscal year of 1939, and is increasing monthly.’” By 1950, a million U.S. veterans had been divorced.
Years of ongoing dissent
Housing was another huge issue. Nasaw’s book focused on the U.S., but veterans in Canada protested the lack of available housing as well, including a group of demobilized soldiers in Vancouver. Less than a year after the war ended, they occupied the once-plush Hotel Vancouver to demand housing. The hotel had been commandeered by the military during the war, but the army decamped after peace was declared, and the owners of the building planned to tear it down.
In a well-planned operation, the veterans marched into the hotel lobby on Saturday, January 26, 1946, demanding that the rooms be converted to apartments for soldiers and their families with nowhere else to go.
“By Monday morning,” according to The Vancouver Sun, “700 homeless veterans had registered at the hotel, which was run with ‘rigid’ house rules. By Jan. 29, a group called the Vancouver Citizens Rehabilitation Council was formed to operate the hotel as a hostel for a year, with the city and federal government kicking in $70,000 apiece to subsidize the hotel.”
As The Sun notes in its retrospective story, the public was sympathetic and housing developments would be pushed through, but it was two years before the last veterans were able to move out of the hotel.
The famous GI Bill
Back in the U.S., a series of bills to reward veterans passed through congress, the last one enacted in 1950. Among other initiatives, the legislation provided monthly payouts to unemployed veterans to keep them quiet. They were promised loan guarantees that would allow them to purchase homes, businesses or farms. Free medical care was established in veterans’ hospitals, and the men were offered free tuition in colleges and trade schools, a move largely meant to divert them from the job market until the post-war economy could be retooled.
As a result, a veteran named Henry Kissinger went to Harvard, which he couldn’t otherwise have afforded, and looked what happened afterward. Joseph Heller, who would write the novel Catch-22, had his way paid when he enrolled in the University of Southern California, transferred a year later to New York University, earned his BA in two years, then did his MA at Columbia. Heller later said the GI Bill allowed him “to delay, to buy time. I didn’t want—I felt myself much too young—to have to decide right away what I was going to do for the rest of my life.”
Other artists knew exactly what they wanted, and the bill funded a few rich years of creative cross-pollination. In Oakland, jazz great Dave Brubeck studied under Darius Milhaud, “’one of the few great accepted classical composers that absolutely liked and accepted jazz.’ Milhaud ‘guided the 26-year-old’s studies in counterpoint, theory, polyrhythms and polytonality,’ lessons that he would incorporate into the music he composed and played for decades to come.”
On the east coast, veterans Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau and Tony Curtis studied at New York’s Dramatic Workshop, which helped all three launch their celebrated careers. “The school, which had barely survived the war, needed the veterans’ tuition payments to stay afloat; the veterans needed the living allowances,” Nasaw writes. “‘A lot of the GIs who went to that school,’ Curtis recalled in a memoir, ‘were just scammers. They went through the motions so they could withdraw their GI Bill stipend of 60 bucks a month without having to get a job.’”
As Nasaw points out, some of the schools themselves were grifts. Many trade schools were set up quickly after the war so the owners could scoop GI Bill money. They taught the veterans few skills, although not all of the men cared. Like Joseph Heller, some used their time in school to try to decide what they wanted to do. Yet many of these schools failed veterans who had hoped to learn trades, especially Black veterans barred from more established colleges and schools.
The Black American experience of war
The GI Bill is given credit for educating and housing the post-war American middle class. But as Nasaw shows, it produced a white middle class, and that was by design. Black veterans were routinely denied not only an education, but loans that would have helped them buy homes and set up businesses. This kept them from accumulating capital, and helped ensure that racial inequality remained entrenched.
At the beginning of the war, most Black soldiers were assigned roles as servants, shining shoes and cleaning dishes. But in 1944, with front-line casualties soaring, the army reluctantly began to move Black soldiers into combat roles, meaning they sometimes served alongside white soldiers. This unsettled racists, as did the fact that Black soldiers discovered societies more open than their own. “’It was nothing strange in Australia,’ a White Southern Carolinian wrote home, ‘to see a negro walking proudly down a street with a beautiful Aussie girl… What’s to happen when those fellows get back, after having been with white girls?’”
Several things. First, Southern Democrats held up passage of the GI Bill until they ensured that education and housing loans would be approved at the state level, meaning that racist local Southerners could deny Black applications for grants and loans.
Worse was the appalling increase in lynchings. On September 23, 1946, singer and activist Paul Robeson led a delegation from the American Crusade to End Lynching to the White House, where they presented a letter to President Harry Truman.
“A wave of lynchings and mob violence is sweeping across America,” it read. “The total number of recorded lynchings during the last six months exceeds the number of the entire period of the war. At least 41 have been reported since V-J Day—in Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, and Mississippi. The number has mounted monthly. In almost every instance, the victim was a veteran, recently returned from service in a war to win freedom from fear. The lynchings are intended to strike fear into the hearts of Negro servicemen who have come back to their homes determined to vote and take an equal part in the birth of a democratic south.”
Yet positive things happened, too. Some Black veterans, reflecting on both their service and the post-war outbreak of racial violence, figured out how to maneuver past roadblocks and use the GI Bill to get a real education. These men would be among the founders of the American civil rights movement.
Medgar Evers earned a high school diploma after his discharge and went on to enroll in college using money from the bill, graduating with a degree in business administration. Aaron Henry, one of the future organizers of the NAACP, got a government-funded degree in pharmacology.
None of this was easy. Hosea Williams later spoke about travelling home to Georgia after his discharge from the army in October, 1946. Still in uniform, he got off the bus and filled his cup from a whites-only water fountain. “And those white men beat me until I was unconscious,” he later said. Williams went on to finish high school, then got undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry with GI Bill money. He later worked alongside Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
In the five years after World War II, immense change was seeded in American society, as it was here in Canada. Those mid-century modern suburbs were earned—including by those men and women who weren’t allowed to live there. Nasaw’s book is a brilliant 478-page exploration of a few key years that are often passed over in a few words. I’ve had to leave out a great deal that he covers, including the effects on women—probably because I read it with my father in mind.
One veteran’s traumatic life
I’ve thought for years that my father suffered from an undiagnosed case of PTSD, and Nasaw’s research tends to confirm that. I was often frightened as a child by my father’s nightmares and his unpredictable bursts of anger. He didn’t drink, not more than the occasional rum and coke, but he smoked so incessantly he developed emphysema. Even afterwards, he always had a cigarette in his hand, saying it was one of the few pleasures left to him.
He also worked all the time. Before reading Nasaw’s book, I put this down to economic need, and that was probably a big part of it. But since he fought in the invasion of Sicily as well as at the notorious Battle of Ortona, I now wonder if he was trying to bury a few memories, too.
My father had married his first wife before the war when they were both twenty or twenty-one years old. They had a daughter, my half-sister, whom I’ve met only once. My father left when she was still a baby, signing up for the Canadian artillery almost as soon as Canada declared war on Nazi Germany in September, 1939. When he came back after five years overseas, his wife introduced him to his second daughter, a girl she said had been born a few months after he’d left.
My mother told me one time that my father was suspicious enough to find a white coat somewhere and wear it into the local hospital, pretending to be a doctor. He searched through the files for a record of the second girl’s birth, and before getting kicked out, he found proof that she wasn’t his child. She’d been born too long after he’d gone overseas.
My father divorced his first wife, who afterwards wouldn’t let him see his pre-war daughter. He told my brother he’d ended up so depressed, he’d tried to commit suicide, locking himself in the garage, turning on the car and waiting to die. My grandfather pulled him out just in time. A while afterwards, my father moved to Vancouver and met my mother.
Looking back at his life, I can see the problems he had common with other members of Nasaw’s wounded generation. Ill health, PTSD, divorce. Most of all, the book woke me up to the fact that my father’s sense of being “a big nothing” was shared by many soldiers—men who realized quite correctly that they were cannon fodder, expendable and unimportant.
Yet there was far more to my father than that, with post-war positives mixed in with the trauma. I’ve mentioned before that although he was a white Canadian, his hero was Martin Luther King.[4] If my brother and I were being noisy during the TV news, we might hear, “Be quiet! Dr. King is speaking!”
I remember the time he leaned down—my father was tall—and told me very earnestly that Dr. King said that all men are created equal. I was just a kid, but I sensed he meant that he was equal, too.
I never heard my father say the racist things other people in our suburban neighbourhood let fly, and he was a shop steward in his union. He identified with the people who suffered, not the ones on top. When King was assassinated, my father was devastated. He told me, “They won’t even let us have him.”
Tragedies can be huge or they can be personal. Reading Nasaw’s book let me reflect on the ones I’ve known, big and small. Connecting the dots may be all we can do years later, and it’s not much. But it’s something.
[1] You can jump to this first part of this review here.
[2] The quotes throughout are from Nasaw’s book, available through the link above or your local library.
[3] My mother-in-law Mary Knox’s life was one of those greatly changed by the war. She and two of her friends in a University of Toronto math club were able to get jobs in their fields because so many men were overseas. One was Beatrice (Trixie) Worsley, who would become the first female computer scientist in Canada. The other was Catherine Synge Morawetz, the first female Director of NYU’s Courant Institute and the second female president of the American Mathematical Society. Her work on wave equations led to improvements in the design of the wings for supersonic aircraft.
Mary worked for the meteorological service in Toronto, but she suffered the fate of many working women after the war. When she got married, she was forced to resign. You can read the post here.
[4] I wrote a little more about my father’s sense of justice in a post about my high-school friend Derek Wilson here.
__________________________
My latest novel is also about the members of the wounded generation. Yes, I’m a little obsessed.
Far Creek Road is set in 1962, when Tink Parker is nine years old. She lives with her parents in a Vancouver suburb where many fathers are traumatized veterans of World War II and almost all the mothers are housewives. They believe they’ve earned secure and prosperous lives after the sacrifices they made during the war. But under the conformist veneer seethe conflicts and secrets that make the serenity of Grouse Valley precarious.
You can order Far Creek Road here.