The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II

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.)