The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II

The veterans of World War II returned to America with great expectations. After all, the Great Depression was over, the Germans and the Japanese were defeated, and the home front was celebrating victory. After their heroic service overseas, Black service members believed their countrymen would look beyond racial divides, Jewish soldiers hoped antisemitism would be vanquished, and the wounded assumed that America would care for their injuries. More than 75 years later, the enduring image of postwar America is still informed by the hopes and dreams these veterans carried home with them, that their future - and with it, the nation's - would be brighter than the past. However, as historian David Nasaw makes evident in this masterful recontextualization of these years, the stories of post-World War II America which persist across art, history, and literature, have failed to account for the realities of the veterans' return as well as the traumas that characterized postwar America- the consequences of which we still live with today.

In The Wounded Generation, David Nasaw illustrates how veterans and civilians alike were confronted with the aftershocks of World War II, and how the media and the government failed to prepare America for what lay ahead. News outlets, which had censored the carnage of battle, now had to account for the grief and guilt felt by surviving soldiers; motion pictures and radio programs struggled to portray the true anxieties of homecoming, as husbands, wives, and children were reunited after not just time but trauma. Women who had been welcomed into the workforce lost their jobs to returning soldiers, and were pushed back into the home; doctors, who had no understanding of PTSD, were unprepared for the rise of neuropsychiatric disorders and unable to treat those afflicted. The nation faced enormous challenges transitioning to a peacetime economy; jobs, homes, and cars were in short supply; crime, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, and divorce were on the rise. The country took a major step in passing the GI Bill, which provided veterans with tuition, unemployment compensation, low-cost mortgages, and business loans, but Nasaw also reveals the political machinations behind the bill, and how states eager to preserve the status quo disproportionately blocked Black, gay, and female veterans from receiving benefits. The social issues which were laid bare in the immediate post war period - racism, gender biases, homophobia, lack of affordable housing, no national healthcare system, and severe income inequality- continue to ravage our nation and its people.

In this richly textured examination, David Nasaw presents a fascinating and complicating tableau of the postwar years. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material, including personal memoirs and oral histories from veterans themselves, he looks beyond the welcome crowds and victory parades, and illuminates a largely hidden story of a country in transition.