David Nasaw, "The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II" (Penguin, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Professor David Nasaw
Book Discussed: The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II (Penguin, 2025)
Date: December 16, 2025

This episode features Professor David Nasaw discussing his new book, which examines the profound and enduring challenges faced by the millions of American servicemen and their families during and after World War II. Nasaw challenges the myth of the “Greatest Generation’s” seamless homecoming, revealing instead a story of widespread psychological trauma, domestic strain, and unequal access to the benefits of postwar prosperity.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Personal and Scholarly Motivations (03:01–08:24)

• Nasaw’s Background: Taught in the CUNY system, culminating as the Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History.
• Genesis of the Book: Stemmed from his earlier work on displaced persons post-WWII and a desire to understand his father’s silent struggle after his WWII service.
• Personal Narrative: Nasaw’s father returned from wartime service with severe health issues and never spoke about his experiences—an experience he later learned was common among veterans.

“What I discovered was that wars do not end with ceasefires, with armistices... For civilians and soldiers alike, the war goes on and on and on.”
— Professor David Nasaw (06:00)

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2. Returning Before the War’s End & “Wounded Generation” Defined (08:24–14:04)

• Early Returnees: Over one million US servicemen discharged before war’s end, half with disabilities, many for psychological (“psychoneurotic”) reasons.
• Stigma: Physical wounds were understood; mental wounds brought shame and survivor’s guilt. Veterans struggled to explain their presence at home.
• Media Coverage: Fortune magazine’s December 1943 cover story, “The Psychiatric Toll of Warfare,” alarmed the public about rising psychiatric casualties.

“They had to somehow explain to their loved ones and to the world around them why they were home. And they couldn’t quite do it. They felt enormous guilt, survivors guilt...”
— Professor David Nasaw (13:20)

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3. Women, the Home Front, and Societal Messaging (14:44–21:17)

• Women's Roles: 7–9 million women worked in war industries; sustained households during men’s absence.
• Total War: Media, movies, and government messaging constantly reminded civilians they were integral to the war effort.
• Constant Anxiety: Families were haunted by newsreels and radio reports—never out of touch with war’s violence.
• Anticipating Change: Widespread concern about how returning men, trained for violence, would readapt to civilian life.

“What will these men and boys come back as? How will they be changed? … Will they come back as killers?”
— Professor David Nasaw (20:26)

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4. The Process and Strains of Demobilization (23:16–29:23)

• Delayed Homecomings: Most soldiers weren’t immediately discharged. Many were sent to occupy Europe or the Pacific. Demobilization took over a year.
• Logistics & Discontent: The US used every ship available; “cigarette camps” in France (e.g., Camp Lucky Strike) were staging grounds for repatriation. Troops waiting became restless, discipline broke down, and mothers’ clubs lobbied for their return.
• Cultural Dislocation: Extended absences and waiting periods contributed to later adjustment difficulties.

“Discipline broke down entirely...and it became abundantly clear that any plans for an occupational army had to be quickly cut back.”
— Professor David Nasaw (26:30)

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5. The Realities of Coming Home (29:56–35:23)

• Alienation: Veterans, symbolized by Norman Rockwell’s famous homecoming painting, felt unable to cross back into civilian life.
• Family Strains: Children often didn’t recognize fathers, and gender/work expectations clashed.
• Divorce Spike: 1946 saw record divorce rates, decades ahead of broader social shifts.
• Emotional Struggles: Most returning veterans suffered a range of symptoms now recognized as PTSD—anger, restlessness, substance abuse.
• Survey Data (Nov. 1945):
  • 61% more bitter and cynical
  • 76% more restless and nervous
  • 54% angrier
  • 49% drank more
  • 47% acquired bad habits

“They are very different now. Don’t let anybody tell you they aren’t.”
— Bill Mauldin, cartoonist (31:50, paraphrased by Nasaw)

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6. The Myth of the Veteran Crime Wave (35:55–40:16)

• Fears Stoked: Media and officials predicted a wave of violence by “damaged” veterans, depicted in noir films and news reports.
• Reality: No crime wave materialized. Suffering was internal—anxiety, depression, and family discord, not widespread violence.
• The Greatest Generation Reframed: Nasaw credits their resilience, noting many “cured themselves” through work, family, and silence; yet this came at a personal cost.

“In reality, there was no crime wave among the veterans… The men brought the war home with them in their minds, in their souls, some on their bodies, and it would take time to recover.”
— Professor David Nasaw (37:40)

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7. The GI Bill: Promise and Exclusion (40:16–47:34)

• Revisionist Take: GI Bill’s primary intent was to prevent economic and social unrest, not simply reward service.
• Scope of Benefits: Generous provisions for education, housing, and unemployment benefits enabled class mobility for white veterans.
• Systemic Racism: Black veterans, especially in the South, excluded due to segregated colleges and discriminatory loan practices. The resulting racial wealth and opportunity gap persisted for decades.

“The GI Bill created exacerbated wealth and income inequities between black and white that persisted for generations.”
— Professor David Nasaw (46:50)

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8. The Recognition and Legacy of PTSD (47:34–53:31)

• Evolving Understanding: Earlier terms included “shell shock,” “battle fatigue.” Only in the 1980s was PTSD formally recognized.
• Delayed Support: Few veterans received official help until late in life; many suffered silently for decades, especially after retirement and the loss of loved ones.
• Long-Term Impact: The “wounded generation” label reflects multi-layered, intergenerational trauma and adaptation.

“Forty to fifty years after they had come home from war...the doctors would look at them and would say, my God, man, how did you live for 40 to 50 years with this?”
— Professor David Nasaw (52:00)

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9. Research Reflections & Looking Forward (53:31–54:53)

• Research Methods: Nasaw immersed himself in primary sources—newsreels, oral histories, letters—deliberately narrowing his focus to avoid repeating triumphalist “Greatest Generation” narratives.
• Future Plans: Nasaw, exhausted by the scope and gravity of the project, plans to take a break before considering what comes next.
• Book Info: The Wounded Generation available from Penguin (2025).

“I am exhausted from this book...I had to sort of put on blinders to all the secondary literature...and go back to the 1945–1950 and look through the newspapers and the magazines and listen to the radios and look at the films and the newsreels and then find the abundant oral histories and letters and medical records.”
— Professor David Nasaw (53:58)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the legacy of trauma:
  • “Wars do not end when the fighting men, boys and women return home. For civilians and soldiers alike, the war goes on and on and on.” (06:00)
• On women’s home front experience:
  • “Millions felt that way. The war was never absent from the United States. Never, never, never.” (15:49)
• On public anxiety and the returning veteran:
  • “What will it mean that they've been taught to kill? … Will they come back as killers?” (20:26)
• On adjustment difficulties:
  • “He can’t get out of, make that step from war to peace, from soldier to civilian. It was not easy.” (30:20)
• On systemic racism and the GI Bill:
  • “The GI Bill created exacerbated wealth and income inequities between black and white that persisted for generations.” (46:50)
• On the deep toll of PTSD:
  • “My God, man, how did you live for 40 to 50 years with this?” (52:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:01: Nasaw’s background & motivation for the book
• 08:59: Discussion on early-disabled/discharged soldiers
• 14:44: The home front: women, media, and total war
• 23:40: Demobilization, logistics, and delays
• 29:56: Veterans' homecoming: alienation, family, divorce
• 35:55: The “veteran crime wave” myth vs. reality
• 40:16: GI Bill: benefits and exclusions
• 47:34: PTSD—diagnosis, recognition, and legacy
• 53:31: Research challenges & Nasaw’s future

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Tone and Style

Throughout, Nasaw’s tone is forthright, compassionate, and scholarly—equally at home discussing archives and personal stories. The host, Dr. Melcher, guides the conversation thoughtfully, ensuring clarity and context for listeners unfamiliar with the period.

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Conclusion

The Wounded Generation uncovers the hidden wounds of an entire generation, illuminating the gap between myth and reality in America’s return from World War II. Nasaw places family, class, race, and mental health at the center of the conversation, urging a deeper consideration of war’s long shadow.

Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking speaking with Professor David Nassau about his book titled the Wounded Generation Coming Home after World War II. Now, the book does exactly what the title suggests, right? But in those very few words of the title and subtitle, there's a lot packed in there, right? There's the actual process of immediately coming home. I mean, for one thing, how did for example, American soldiers get from, say, France back to wherever it is they were from in the US Like That's a whole process. What was it like for the people waiting for them at home? What happens if they came home during the war? And then what's the longer term consequences of all of this? If we move from 1945 and 1946 later on in time, it's not like suddenly, magically everything goes back to the way it was. Right. So there's quite a lot to talk about here in terms of the men themselves and kind of everyone around them too. So, David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.

[Professor David Nassau]

Delighted to be here.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

[Professor David Nassau]

Sure. I taught at in the City University of New York system for a many, many years. I'm now retired. I began at a two year college which became a four year college and I ended up as The Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate center where for the past two decades I taught graduate students. I came upon this idea from two directions. One, the book I wrote before this one was called the Last Europe's Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War. It was about the million refugees, displaced persons after World War II, who like the Jews, did not have a home to return to, or like hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans, did not want to return to a devastated homeland that was now ruled by the Soviet Union. I'm talking about the Ukraine, I'm talking about the Baltic states, Poland and other Eastern European nations. What I discovered in doing this book and telling the story of the million refugees who spent the post war period from three to four to five years behind barbed wire in displaced persons camps overseen by the British army, the American army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. What I discovered was that wars do not end with ceasefires, with armistices. Wars do not end when the fighting men, boys and women return home. For civilians and soldiers alike, the war goes on and on and on. My father fought or was in uniform in World War II. He was a 35 year old New York lawyer who was drafted because he didn't type and didn't know stenography. The army didn't quite know what to do with him. They eventually sent him to Officers Candidate School in South Carolina. He had never been outside of New York City or further than Brooklyn across the river. He ended up as a second lieutenant and a medical supply officer from South Carolina. He was shipped to Eritrea in 1943. By 1943, the American and the British military had succeeded in Their campaigns in North Africa and the Allies were on their way to Sicily and from there to Italy. So my father was put in charge of dismantling a hospital in Eritrea. I don't know what happened to him because like the vast majority of World War II veterans, he did not speak about his war experience. He did not talk about his homecoming. He kept silent. What I do know, and I learned from my brother and my mother, was that he returned home with a heart condition, an alcoholic, smoking four to five packs of Lucky Strikes a day, and unable to get through the night without heavily sedating himself when he went to bed. So heavily sedating himself that when he woke up in the morning, he had to take a variety of uppers to get out of bed and get through the day. Because I was unable to get the story of his war service and the effect of that war service on his post war life, I decided as a historian I would do the next best thing and I would research and tell the story of his generation and sort of through the back door, come up with a better understanding of my father's post war years. He was a terrific father. He talked about everything except the war. He died at age 61 from what the Veterans Administration referred to in a formal letter to my mother as service related disabilities. I still don't know why I attempted to get his army records, but along with hundreds of thousands of others, they had been in a warehouse fire in Kansas City. So I tell his story through the story of the generation, which I call the wounded generation.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, I think even just what you've shared there of your father's story makes the wounded aspect of it pretty clear. And I think that's going to come through even more as we continue our conversation about, as you said, the whole generation. But just as much as you're absolutely right that the war did not end on the moment of victory in Europe or victory in Japan Day, these questions around the wounded generation coming home don't start in that moment either. You talk in the book about, of course, the fact that there were soldiers that came home before the war ended. What was that like? Were they also part of the wounded generation?

[Professor David Nassau]

Absolutely, and my father was one of them. My father came home on a disability, total medical disability discharge in 1944. The American army had, as the British army had, found that during the Great War, During World War I, there were a large number of soldiers who were rendered ineffective and had to be removed from the front lines. The American medical establishment determined that men who fell apart during war, whether on the rear or on the front lines did so because they were psychologically weak, because there was something wrong with them before they went into battle. So at every draft board, at every selective service facility, before you got into the Army, a psychiatrist passed on you. The commanders in the fields in North Africa, Pacific, islands in Europe were told that the men they were being sent and who they would send into battle were psychologically sound. There would be no shell shock, there would be no combat fatigue. Well, they quickly discovered that that was not the case. The first instance was at Guadalcanal, the first land battle of the war, where hundreds, thousands of Marines, then GIs, went into these trances. They. They sort of disappeared into themselves. They were sent off to hospitals in Guam. They were given rest and rehabilitation, and then they were sent back to Guadalcanal. And within two weeks to a month, it was clear that they were of no use to the army, and they were sent home. In the first two years of the war, through the end of 1943, 1 million, it's a large number, 1 million US servicemen were returned, repatriated and discharged from the army because they were ineffective, More than half of them with disability discharges. And of that number, more than half of those between a quarter million and a half million in the first two years of the war were released because of what were called neuropsychological or psychoneurologic. The words were reversed or the discharges. They were told that they had psychological problems which could not be cured while they were in the service, and they were sent home. In December 1943, December 1943, Fortune magazine wrote a lead story called the Psychiatric Toll of Warfare, in which it reported scaring the American people that 10,000 men a month were being sent home with psychiatric or psychological problems. The numbers were extraordinary. And for the men being sent home, the men being sent home with physical wounds, their neighbors, their friends, their families, their employees, employers could understand why they had been sent home. You know, if you have your arm in a sling, if you've had a foot amputated, if you've got huge scars running down your face, okay. But for the hundreds of thousands who were sent home with mental wounds, with psychological wounds, not physical wounds, they had to walk a minefield every day when they got out of bed. They had to somehow explain to their loved ones and to the world around them what, why they were home. And they couldn't quite do it. They felt enormous guilt, survivors guilt because they were now safe from enemy artillery fire while their comrades were not. So it was with Mixed blessings that they were sent home before the war was over.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

You know, it's a very tricky sort of situation for them to be in when they're returning. And of course, being on the front lines was tricky too. But that's not the only sort of sphere during the war where there's lots of kind of mixed messages about what you're supposed to be able to do versus what's actually happening. So turning away from the soldiers for a moment, thinking about the people left behind, especially women, their wives, their girlfriends, those sorts of women, what sorts of messaging were they getting about what they're supposed to do, what they're supposed to not do when the men are away, when the men return, how were those messages being conveyed and enforced?

[Professor David Nassau]

The home front was told that this is a total war. Total war was a concept invented by historians during World War, used by historians during World War I, and it was much more of the case during World War II. The United States produced armaments equipped not only the 16.4 million Americans who went into battle, but the UK armies, the Soviet armies. And that required a huge workforce in the munitions and the armaments in the war factories. And among that workforce were 7 to 9 million women, half of them wives and mothers, who for a variety of reasons, some patriotic, others because they needed extra money to keep their families in housing, to buy them food, to keep the car running, they went back to work. President Roosevelt never stopped telling the American people, we're all in this together. Whether you're a kid collecting scrap iron, scrap metal, whether you're a mother who's writing and sending care packages to your sons abroad, whether you're a war wife or a girlfriend charged with keeping up the morale of your loved one across the oceans, you are part of the war effort. And that was indeed the case. Millions felt that way. The war was never absent from the United States. Never, never, never. Newspaper were filled with stories about the war and two kinds of stories. The official stories released by the generals and the unofficial stories, which were much more read and cherished by the correspondence. The war correspondents who traveled with the armies and interviewed and lived with the men at war, the magazines. More people read magazines than it's. It's unimaginable today. How many people read the women's magazines and the news magazines and the glossies, the Saturday Evening Post and Life. And look, you couldn't go the. In an age before television, one escape from reality by going to the movies to watch Bing Crosby sing White Christmas. But every time he went to the movies you had to sit through a newsreel and watch men at war and listen to what writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas and the other newsreel voices of God referred to as the terrifying spectacle and pandemonium of war. You watched, and this is millions and millions and millions of Americans watched as soldiers were pulled from downed aircraft, bandaged, placed on stretchers, lifted into ambulances, their faces blank or half smiling, contorted with pain. Airmen landing damaged planes, nurses bent over wounded soldiers, GIs and Marines, impossibly filthy, digging trenches and foxholes under fire, trudging up and down ridges and mountains, into valleys and jungles and swamps, over swollen streams, straining their backs, swayed under the weight of their packs. I mean, you saw this every day or every time you went to the movies, which was at least two times a week. A young woman from Alabama remembered, and she said, quote, this is a quote from her, she said, I'd sneak into the back of the theater and see those newsreels. There were hand to hand battles, a lot of them. And I mean, they weren't fiction, they were the real things. It was overwhelming in a sense. You would go to bed and dream about these battles, piercing people with knives and bayonets, you know, and they were horrified. So what I'm trying to say here is that the war engulfed nations. The war involved the home front in ways that no other war had. Every day the radio would be turned on to hear the news at night, and the family would gather around the radio and they would hear reports from the Pacific, from Europe, from North Africa. And they learned two things. One, they learned the dangers that their loved ones were going through overseas. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had determined in late 1943 that the greatest danger to this nation and the war effort was complacency. And it was necessary to lift censorship and let the American people know what the soldiers were going through and that this would be a long, hard war. And on the home front, the inescapable but too often silent question was asked. What will these men and boys come back as? How will they be changed? What will it mean that they've been taught to kill? That they've lived in male only encampments for year after year? That violence has been acceptable in the world that they now inhabit? More than acceptable, it was encouraged. Will they come back as killers? How will they transform themselves back into these innocent young men they had once been?

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, those are some pretty big questions there. But before the men can actually grapple with that or the people behind them or who they left behind, around how, what they will be like. Of course they have to get back home. So once the war was officially over, how did demobilization actually work? Like who got demobilized, who didn't? When? How long did this all take?

[Professor David Nassau]

Yeah, at the end of the war, the end of VE Day in May of 1945, the home front believed that all the guys in Europe who were fighting were going to come home and be released and discharged. No, that was not the case. Large numbers of them were sent directly to the Pacific. Others were given brief interludes of peace at home in the United States and back to the United States. And then after a couple of weeks, they were prepared to go to the Pacific when the atomic bomb drops. Not a soldier, not a Marine, not an airman or sailor. Did Less than cheer because it meant the war was over and they wouldn't have to go to the Pacific. The discharge demobilization process was incredibly complicated. There were more than 12 million by the end of the war. By VJ Day, there were more than 12 million Americans in uniform, 3/4 of them, more than 3/4 of them overseas. There weren't enough ships in the world to bring them all back at once. The Americans leased ocean liners from the nations of the world to bring back our boys. They used reconverted enemy ships. They used every ship available, and they still couldn't get them back. And one of the reasons demobilization took so long and was delayed was that the Americans were trying to figure out how large an occupation army would be needed, how many soldiers would have to remain in Japan, in China, in the islands of the Pacific, in Italy and Germany. Did we want to keep American soldiers in bases in Europe? And while the War Department and the White House and Congress were trying to figure this out, they kept large numbers of American soldiers overseas. The American public was outraged. They said, we don't care what comes. We want our boys home. We want our boys home. Right now we're not worried about World War 3 or a cold war. Peace has come. It took more than a year to get the Americans, all the Americans home. And the reason why it took only a year was that all through the United States, previously apolitical women formed themselves in what were called mothers clubs. And they marched and paraded and protested and sent letters and accosted their congressmen and came to Washington and cornered General Eisenhower, then chief of staff. And they demanded that the boys come home. And overseas, the American army, discipline broke down. This is something that we don't talk about very much, but discipline broke down entirely. And there were near mutinies of the Americans left behind all over Europe, all through the Pacific. And it became abundantly clear that any plans for an occupational army had to be quickly cut back. The numbers cut back, and the boys had to be brought home. The process of bringing him home was not easy. You know, they. They had to be in Europe. The troops were sent by train to the French coast, to Le Havre, where they were bundled together, assembled in what were called cigarette cigarette camps. Every camp for the demobilized soldiers who were awaiting repatriation was named after an American cigarette. There's the Lucky Strike camp and the Chesterfield and the old Gold camp. And the guys waited for weeks, for months, and they didn't wait quietly. They raised hell all through Europe. You know, there was no, you know, French girl or woman safe from the marauding, raucous American soldiers who were enjoying their last moments before they were going home and they were put on. They were put. They were put on ships, sent back to the United States, put into camps where they stayed another couple of weeks until their discharges were arranged, and then sent home by train or bus to their awaiting families.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, this is exactly correct, what you were saying before. Like, this isn't the part of the war that we usually talk about. And yet what you're describing there, like, clearly would have had an impact on these soldiers. Right? Like the whole, they've gotten sent off to fight, they fought. Then there's this whole stage two. Like, that's a whole extra kind of set of pressures really for them to, to contend with. And now they're kind of finally through this additional ringer, really. What then were they most surprised by when they finally got home?

[Professor David Nassau]

Well, when, when they finally got home, you know, there is, in my book, I show this very famous painting by Norman Rockwell that was on the COVID of the Saturday Evening Post and was used to sell war bonds. It's instantly familiar. And you see a sad sack soldier from the back. He's very skinny, he's got on his uniform, he's got a huge rucksack, and in front of him is a joyous crowd of his grandmother and his girlfriend or wife and his kids and the neighbors, and they're all joyously waving at him. And he's standing there as if he's stuck in the ground. He can't cross that barrier to home. He can't get out of, make that step from war to peace, from soldier to civilian. It was not easy. The first night home was great, except if you had small children who had been raised by their mothers or their grandmothers and didn't recognize you. There are dozens, hundreds of stories of 1 and 2 and 3 year olds who, when this big man comes and gives them a hug, they scream and run away crying because they don't know who he is. And for the father, that's a dreadful moment of homecoming. They have to introduce themselves to their children and then to their wives. The difficulty in homecoming, of putting together a relationship or putting back together a marriage is for many insurmountable. The wife had for two, three, four years she had paid the bills, kept the car in running condition, got the roof fixed when it was going to work every day, brought home a check, I mean, brought home payment money, paid the bills, and now suddenly she's got to return to being solely a mother and housemaker. One woman said, we had to take off our trousers and put on the frilly dresses that we had worn as teenagers and put away in the closets. There are more divorces. In 1946, the rate of divorce is higher than it had ever been and was higher than it would be for the next 20 years until the late 60s when divorce was an accepted part of life. In 1946, it was not. And yet the rate of divorce was through the roof. And the guys came back, and the millions who came back with what would later be diagnosed as ptsd, post traumatic stress disorder, didn't know what had hit him. They didn't understand the nightmares and the flashbacks and the rages and the irritations and the quick tempers. One psychiatrist who had dealt with. He worked with the soldiers as they came back at a hospital on Ellis Island. He said, virtually all the men who come back from the war have trigger tempers that are set off at the slightest provocation. Bill Malden, the cartoonist whose cartoons I have throughout my book, he worked with the troops, he traveled with the troops, he talked to the troops, he ate with the troops, slept with the troops, and had these brilliant cartoons about him. When he came back, he said the veterans, quote, the veterans who returned home were not the ones who had left for war. They are very different now. Don't let anybody tell you they aren't. Some say the American soldier is the same clean cut young man who left his home. They are wrong. In November 1945, by which time about half, a little more than half of the GIs were either en route or at home. They were surveyed, and when they were asked about the war and their experience in the war, 61% said they were more bitter and cynical than they had been as civilians. 76%, three quarters were more restless and nervous. 54% said that they now got angry more quickly, 49% drank more, 47% said they had acquired a lot of bad habits.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, those are some pretty staggering numbers, right? And kind of clearly lead to concerns amongst the veterans and kind of everyone else looking at this information. Was this sort of information why there was such fear of a quote, unquote, veteran crime wave? Or is that just something kind of Hollywood made up at this point? Like this doesn't sound like a great situation that there could be crime, there could be a lot of violence from this. Was that in fact the case?

[Professor David Nassau]

The American public and the home front was scared to death by the experts who said, look, this might happen. And this might happen and this might happen. They were scared to death by Hollywood films which continued into the post war period. The Hollywood noir or veteran noir. I mean, there were dozens of films with Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, Robert Ryan, Brando, John Garfield, the, the greatest actors. And in these films they portrayed angry, violent men who couldn't control their tempers. You know, in the year before the war ended, the California attorney general called together all the law enforcement officers in California. And he said, he said, you know, the army's going to let soldiers bring souvenirs back with them. He said, and you know what those souvenirs are going to be from the Pacific, they're going to be swords. And from Europe they're going to be guns, German pistols and rifles. He said, and we've got to prepare now because these guys have been taught to kill and they're coming home with these weapons of war. In reality, there was no crime wave among the veterans. That wasn't a problem. That wasn't a problem. Anxiety, depression, anger, irritation, inability to get along with family and friends. This increasing anger and ire at those who had stayed behind and the veterans thought had made a lot of money, the so called four Fs. But there was no violence. There was no violence. There was from the period of 1945 to 1950, there was, how can I put it? The men brought the war home with them in their minds, in their souls, some on their bodies, and it would take time to recover. I call this generation the wounded generation. But you know, there is some truth to the adjective greatest, which is usually, I mean, which has been the master narrative of the return of the. The narratives, the, the return of the veterans. And why? Because the men who came back with trauma, with ptsd, with survivor's guilt, the men who came back into the worst housing crisis this country has ever seen, the men who came back not knowing if they'd ever work again because they had gone away to war at the end of a depression and they thought it was coming right back again. They end those, the millions with ptsd, they had to cure themselves, as my father did. My father stopped drinking and he resumed his law practice and he distracted himself from the war and whatever had gone on there by becoming a good father and a lawyer. And the millions who came back with PTSD had to heal themselves. And they did by distracting themselves from the war, by not talking about it to their kids, by not reading about it, by not going to war movies and on the 4th of July, shutting themselves in so they didn't hear the firecrackers go off. And there's more to it than that. Obviously. There's the GI Bill in the United States.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, I'd love to talk about that, actually, if we can, please. Why was this, like, did this make such a difference? Because that's part of the narrative, that it was a huge deal. Was it?

[Professor David Nassau]

Yes and no. You know, look, the only. My sense has always been that all history worth writing and reading is revisionist history. If you're going to tell the same old story, you know, become a taxi driver, you've got to bring something new to the story. And what I bring to this story is one, an extraordinary appreciation for the GI Bill. But I complicate the story of the origins of the GI Bill. The GI Bill is often proclaimed the American government and Congress and the people wanted to reward the servicemen for all they had done to protect democracy and the free world and to defeat the evil fascists and Nazis. That's true, that's true. But that's not the major reason for the GI Bill. Congress knew that when 16 million men and some women came back from war and the war factories that employed 17 to 19 million were closed down, there would be a considerable period before the war economy was converted to a peace economy. And during that period, the danger was that these veterans, angry, violent, homeless, because no houses were built during the Depression or during the World war without jobs, might very well follow the path of the Italian veterans and the German veterans after World War I, where they became the foundation of Italian fascism, German Nazism. And to forestall, to make sure that it didn't happen, the GI Bill put together a social welfare program that was by far the most generous that any nation has ever put together. I mean, Americans talk about the beverage plan. Well, the GI Bill was far more generous than the beverage plan, but only for veterans. And I want to tell the rest of the story only for white male veterans. The GIs were given a year of unemployment compensation, and then they were given four years of free tuition and living allowances to go to vocational schools, colleges, graduate schools, medical school, law school. Four years. You put it together and you got five years. So for five years, Congress guaranteed or made it possible that these millions of disaffected veterans would be kept off the unemployment lines. And when they were finished with this year of unemployment compensation and their four years of college, they would be able to enter a converted peace economy. And that's exactly what happened. The GI Bill made it possible for Americans to jump classes. Your father had been a plumber. You Go to school, you become an engineer, you become a lawyer, you become a doctor. There was a leap and expansion into the middle class and an extension of the middle class to the children of immigrants who had never imagined that they would be part of this middle class. And that's because of the GI Bill. But, but, but, and here's the big but. The GI Bill was not for everybody. If you were a Black veteran and 10% of the arm of the servicemen were, were black, if you were a black veteran and you lived in the south, 2/3 of them lived in the south, you couldn't go to college. Why? Because in 17 states, 17 states, all the schools were segregated by law. So if you were a black veteran, the only schools you could go to were the historic black colleges. And they could take only. They were tiny. They could take only the smallest portion of the black veterans. Those who wanted to leave the south could get college degrees in outside the south and the north and the Midwest and the West. But the overall result was that far more, a much higher rate of white soldiers than black soldiers were able to make use of the GI Bill education benefits and jump into an expanded middle class. But more importantly than that, the GI Bill provided mortgage guarantees for veterans who wanted to buy private homes, single family homes. The veterans who came home, many were mistaken, and they thought that the government was going to give them mortgages but no mortgage guarantees. What did that mean? In order to buy a private home, you had to get a mortgage from your local bank and then you had to find a home that would be sold to you. Okay. For a black soldier all across this country, a black veteran going into a bank and saying, I want a mortgage would much more often than not be turned away. And then if it were possible to get that mortgage, when that black veteran went to the new developments like the Levittowns that sprung up all across this country, he was told, there's no place for you. As a result, a generation of white male veterans like my father were able to buy homes. Through the 1950s and the 1960s, those homes appreciated in value. Home ownership is the single largest component in middle class wealth. And the GI Bill created exacerbated wealth and income inequities between black and white that persisted for generations.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's a really important complication, as you said to the usual myth about the GI Bill. The other piece that I'd love to pick up that's come up a number of times is this impact of ptsd. And again, it's one of these where the impact is on the soldiers themselves, but on everyone around them across generations. Right. It also has this short and long term impact, partially, it sounds like, because it wasn't even recognized really as ptsd. When do we get to the point of realizing that that's what's happening to so many of these soldiers?

[Professor David Nassau]

Yeah, in. In every war there were those men who, who come back and, and in the World War II, you didn't have to be on the front lines to worry about getting your head blown off by bomb or by long range artillery. This was not a war where the only people who were killed were those on the front. Those in the rear were subject to bombings. As you know, we know well, vast numbers of soldiers were expendable or believed themselves expendable, and they too got combat. Soldiers were more apt to get ptsd. But everyone who fought in this war overseas was subject to ptsd. In every war there's been ptsd. It's been called shell shock, combat fatigue, battle fatigue. It was not until the middle 1980s when a group of researchers and activists in the United States discovered through after hours and hours, thousands of hours of research, of talking to veterans, of meeting with veterans and meeting with one another, they discovered that there seemed to be three groups that had the same symptoms. Concentration camp victims, women who had been sexually abused, and veterans. And what they all had in common was these recurring flashbacks. Kurt Vonnegut, the brilliant author who had. Whose family thought he had ptsd, referred in his novel Slaughterhouse Five his stand in I forget his name. His problem was what he called time travel. He couldn't stay in the present. He was always traveling back to the past. Well, that's what PTSD is. And it was not until the mid-1980s that the American psychiatric profession recognized PTSD as a specific disorder. And it was not until the early 90s that treatments were made available to World War II veterans 40 to 50 years after they had come home from war. And the men, like my father, lived with this disorder, learned how to lead productive lives. But there was something off again. My father never slept a night without heavy sedatives and never spent a day without uppers. The men. And this is one of the frightening parts of the story of PTSD. My father only lived to 61, but for those veterans who lived into their 80s and 90s, when they retired, when their children grew up and left the home, and many times when their wives or loved ones died, the symptoms of PTSD returned. And the symptoms of PTSD came back and rendered these guys immobile. Fortunately, by the late 1990s and the 2000s, the Veterans Administration had discovered that while there was no treatment for ptsd, they could bring veterans together to talk about what was going on in kinds of group therapy and counseling. And thousands of aged World War II veterans were brought by their children to VA clinics where they were diagnosed with PTSD, where the doctors would look at them and would say, my God, man, how did you live for 40 to 50 years with this? And there are myriad stories of men who spent the last five to ten years of their lives trying to cope with the PTSD that they had distracted themselves from in distracting themselves from the war. And the memories had lived a half century suffering quietly.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, it really speaks again, back to the title of the book, the Wounded Generation. Right. That's been so consistent through everything you've told us and, of course, is in the book, too. So I think this is probably a good place to wrap up our conversation on the book. But is there anything you're currently working on you want to give people a brief sneak preview of?

[Professor David Nassau]

I am exhausted from this book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's fair. Having read it. This was a big project.

[Professor David Nassau]

Yeah, no, I'm exhausted. Look, in order to. What I had to do in this book was I had to sort of put on blinders to all the secondary literature that had been written about the returning veterans, all the stories of heroism and, you know, onward and onward. And I had to go back to the 1945-1950 and look through the newspapers and the magazines and listen to the radios and look at the films and the newsreels and then find the abundant oral histories and letters and medical records. So I am going to take a little rest now, at least for the time being.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Very deserved. And if any listeners want to find out more about this massive project you've undertaken and completed, they can, of course, read the book we've been discussing titled the Wounded Coming Home after World War II, published by Penguin in 2023. David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor David Nassau]

It's been my pleasure. It was really a great conversation.