Returning War Heroes
Exploring Life after the WWII Ticker Tape Parades, Funerals, and Hospital Releases
Part 1: Have We Over Glorified the War?
Victory! Excitement! Get married, have babies, go to school, live the American dream!
And never utter a word about your experience.
Thousands of civilian and military personnel around the world celebrated May 8, 1945 (V-E Day) and August 14, 1945 (V-J Day). World War II was finally over and the men and women of the Armed Forces would soon be coming home! These were days to celebrate and begin to plan the future! What a bright, exciting, amazing future it would be!
Would the future be what everyone had been envisioning since the war began? Probably not. Many civilians and veterans alike were in for a rude awakening.
The Veteran Returns
Apprehension. Fear. Uncertainty. Excitement.
As World War II continued on from 1941 to 1942, ‘43, ‘44, and finally ended in 1945, everyone’s lives had changed, whether they realized it or not. All the ticker tape parades in the U.S. and military parades in Europe to celebrate liberation, the end of the war, or going home, wouldn’t change the fact that our veterans had been transformed in ways those at home could not imagine. It also didn’t change the fact that thousands would never come home.
The civilians and veterans on the home front had been prepared for the coming end of the war since D-Day 1944. To prepare the public for the returning veterans, articles appeared in newspapers, Reader’s Digest, Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines, bulletins. Radio shows gave advice about a variety of topics as well.
Information about the thousands of veterans discharged early from service due to psychoneurosis. Would they become a burden to their families or society?
How do we help a psychoneurotic family member?
Articles appeared for parents and wives about how to treat and care for their returning husband.
There were articles for veterans about straying wives and veterans returning home to find his wife with a child from another man.
Questions and fears were raised about infidelity of the men overseas and whether or not they fathered children while at war. This led to other articles about how women should overlook this as men will behave this way during war.
Some articles discussed the combat veteran and the worry as to whether or not he will become a menace to society or if he will reintegrate easily. These articles put the fear into the civilians who wondered if veterans would be running around with guns and killing people.
Articles about the G.I. Bill, forgetting the war, starting a family, getting a job, going to school. Living the American dream - which did not include talking about or processing the war.
There were so many other related topics as well to both prepare the public and create mass amounts of fear and worry. Internet Archive (https://archive.org) has issues of Reader’s Digest and Ladies Home Journal from the 1940s if you are interested in reading some of the articles on marriage, veterans, mental health, and more to learn how the public was prepared. You can also search the newspapers for keywords related to this topic to see what articles appear for that time period.
Additionally, many books were written and made available to the public like Psychology for the Returning Serviceman. Soldier to Civilian. Problems of Readjustment. And, The Veteran Comes Back. I wonder if my grandma Libbie read any of those books or magazine articles as she waited for my grandpa to be discharged.
Regardless of what civilians read, there was a sense of apprehension about who the veteran would be upon his return. Veterans also wondered who they had become and also how the family would receive them.
Discharge
For some veterans who required no hospitalization and had enough points for discharge, it didn’t take long upon return to the U.S. for them to be released from duty. Although there was some initial turbulence for employment and college for a short period after the war ended, things balanced out. Most veterans were more easily able to find a job and even higher income than they were prior to the war. Others did not fare as well in smaller towns where people worried about the veterans’ mental and physical states.
Additionally, many veterans chose not to remain at home where they lived at the start of the war. The war forced these young men, who were 18, 19, 20, upon entry into the service, to grow up quickly and in ways civilians were not required. To go back to what was, no longer appealed to many returning veterans. They wanted a new start, a new city, a new life. Maybe it would be easier to forget the trauma they’d endured while at war if they weren’t constantly reminded of it by family and friends.
Still others married, settled down, began to work or go to school, and start families. Many other veterans were not so lucky.
Military Hospitals
Many men and some women, were wounded while in service and required a little or a lot of medical services at the end of the war. Others lived in a POW camp for a period of time and required medical attention upon liberation due to starvation and disease. Most were sent through a system of military hospitals while overseas and then back in the U.S. Within these hospitals veterans received care for burns, loss of limbs, wounds that required more care than a field hospital could provide, disease, weight loss, and mental health.
Hospital stays for some meant better health, a new way forward and time to process their experience as they recovered. For others it was a nightmarish hell full of painful surgeries, procedures, and recovery. This hell was something many veterans dreaded sharing with wives and family members. How might a wife respond to knowing her husband lost both legs in an artillery attack?
How might parents respond knowing their son has been diagnosed with psychoneurosis because of the hundreds of days on the front line listening to artillery, watching his friends die, being cold, hot, hungry, and sick? Who would take care of him?
What about the veterans with burns that caused disfiguration? How would they fit back into their old lives and society? Would anyone hire them? Would children be afraid of them? What kind of life was left to create?
Civilians had their own worries about veterans who required hospital stays. In the book, Soldier from the War Returning, Childers gives an example of Grace, the wife of Willis, who lost his legs during the war.
Grace had prepared herself as best she knew how. She had read the burgeoning advice literature and uplifting magazine stories about teh blind, the disabled, the disfigured, and the wives who stood beside them. Still…she was terrified. What would he be like? What would he look like? What could he do? Would she recoil when she saw him? Would she be able to embrace him? Was he angry, resentful? Would he still want her?1
For wives there was also the question of sex. Would her husband be able to perform, would he want sex and intimacy, or would his wounds or mental issues put an end to that part of their marriage? Again, the literature of the time had plenty of advice for wives.
Finally, it’s worth considering that for veterans who spent months or years in a hospital undergoing procedures, surgeries, and recovering, the idea of going home may have created a lot of apprehension and fear. Hospital life had become comfortable, safe, and the veterans were among others just like them. The outside world could be cruel - were they ready for that?
Funerals
Not every veteran returned walking off the train. Some returned in flag draped caskets beginning a few years after the war ended. Families had to deal with the loss of a son, brother, sister, husband, father and figure out how to grieve and move on with life.
Grief was present in every community and most families, even when their veteran returned alive. Grief was a pervasive energy that aged parents, made their illnesses worse, and for some who couldn’t cope - it meant a life in a mental institution. You would be surprised how many IDPFs I’ve read that have mental hospital commitment papers for one of the parents which left the other parent or sibling as the new legal next of kin.
Widows of the war dead had decisions to make. Some with children chose to marry someone else before the remains of their husband were returned. Others waited years. The marriage of a widow, with a child to a new man often meant a great change for the child(ren). I’ve had many children in this case tell me their stepfather refused to allow anyone to talk about the dead war hero. In some families the wife never uttered a word about the child(ren)’s biological father until the stepfather had died or they divorced. Many a death bed confession to a son or daughter were made stating the mother had kept a box of their dead father’s things in the back of the closet.
These death bed confessions led to a variety of emotions in the child(ren) and many unanswered questions. This is often when a child of a father who died in war will seek out help to find the military records and answers. They need to know.
Veterans Hospitals
Finally we have the topic of discharged veterans living out months, years, or the rest of their lives in Veteran Administration Hospitals. One of those veterans was my grandpa Joseph Holik. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in July 1945 after being removed from his third ship. After a stint in a few Naval hospitals, an Honorable Discharge, he was sent home. Upon his return, my dad was conceived and shortly after, grandpa was confined to the Downey Veterans Hospital in North Chicago for the last 17 years of his life. In a sense, my dad grew up a war orphan, never having known his dad prior to the war, like his brothers. I can only imagine all the chaos this caused.
Many veterans spent a great deal of time in treatment for physical, mental, and emotional issues due to the war. This would have impacted families in different ways. Have you asked your family about the impact of war and VA Hospital treatment for your veterans? This question and the resulting information isn’t just for World War II. Our veterans and the generations that followed have been impacted by every war.
Impacts of War
There are so many impacts of war that I could probably write a book about it, but I won’t. Below are several impacts that you might consider in the context of your family history. These impacts don’t just apply to World War II, they can apply to any war. I invite you to journal about these impacts and talk to your family to see what more you can learn. You might do some healing along the way.
The boys are gone. The men are home. For families that sent young men, fresh out of high school or barely in college to war, saw aged men return home. Gone are the happy go lucky days of youth. The hardened veteran was here with all of his experience he couldn’t share with his family. For some families, this foreign man who showed up may have disrupted the calm and overturned the family structure.
The war hero, the glory and celebration come to an end. Many cities and towns had parades welcoming home the veterans. However, those same celebrations weren’t held for veterans who were not discharged until months or a year after the war’s end. This may have led to some disgruntled veterans who felt society had turned their back on them. Additionally, after the initial “shock” of being home subsides and life settles down, families may have seen the change.
Coping with the Experience of War. Once home and relatively settled, some veterans from World War II reported feeling anxious, nervous, like they needed to be somewhere quiet, they needed to walk and clear their heads. They needed to blow off steam (alcohol, fighting, drugs, running away). This may have been challenging for family members who expected the veteran to return and slide right back into their place in the family, as if the war never happened.
Without proper mental health support in place, which there was little to none back then, civilians and veterans may have had some situations occur that were hard to deal with. Emotional withdrawl of a veteran because no one will understand their story. Survivor’s guilt because they survived when their foxhole buddy died. Angry outbursts were common when the pressure to fit in, conform, get a job, or even get out of bed were expected. Veterans were told to get on with life instead of talking about the war.
Anger over life continuing during the war. Veterans reported they held an image of life at home, family, friends, activities, maybe a special girl, throughout much of their service. As they began to change due to their experiences, little thought was given to how life was changing at home. The veteran was suffering to make a safer world for his family.
However, upon returning and seeing how life in America just went on while they were living in frozen foxholes while being shot at, may have led to a deeper disconnect between the veteran and his family. It was difficult for some veterans to move through their experience of combat versus peace at home. Families at home didn’t suffer, didn’t seem to have gone without much while he lived an agonizing life overseas. Anger. Resentment. Hate. These emotions and more may have risen which created more problems of readjustment for the veteran and his family.
Coping mechanisms may have become drinking at the local bar with other veterans. Using drugs, maybe something they used while in combat. Withdrawal, leaving the family home or town. Various forms of abuse and possibly, violence. All of this would have impacted the entire family. What couldn’t be spoken, healed, or processed was then passed down through beliefs, behaviors, patterns and possibly PTSD.
War Orphans. Kind of War Orphans. Children who lost a father during the war were given the title of War Orphan. Yet I think we can take that a step further. Consider the kids like my dad and his brothers, who didn’t lose their father to death but because he was living in a Veterans Hospital, never to return. Some might take offense to this suggestion but I see my dad in a way, as an orphan of war. His dad mentally never returned. His dad physically never lived with him. Think of the impact. I’m writing about this as part of the story of inherited trauma I was living out from my grandparent’s war experience in my upcoming book.
Moving Forward
The war impacted veterans and civilians alike, just in different ways. If we as a society would like to move forward, we need to look at the dark, unspoken things in our past. We need to dig deep and find answers to the family secrets, the whispers, and the intuitive knowings we carry. The burdens, shame, guilt, anger, grief we carry sometimes belong to an ancestor.
Those reading this article are likely the family cycle breakers. The ones who chose to stand up in this life and heal the lineage. To heal the collective. To help us create a new world and reality in which peace exists and war is only a memory.
I invite you to sit with these three articles on the war and look at your own family beliefs, behaviors, traumas, and patterns. What are you here to identify and heal? Who might it impact? How might it help you create a greater, more abundant life filled with love?
Would you like help with your WWI or WWII Research?
I am taking new clients and have space for one or two new book clients. To learn more about a possible research or book project, email me at jennifer@ancestralsouls.com to set up a free consultation to discuss your needs.
Additional Resources
Psychology for the Fighting Man. https://archive.org/details/psychology-for-the-fighting-man
Psychology for the Returning Serviceman. https://archive.org/details/psychologyforthereturningsoldier
Red Cross Prisoner of War Bulletins. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=arcprisoners
Soldier to Civilian. Problems of Readjustment. https://archive.org/details/soldiertocivilia00prat
The Veteran Comes Back. https://archive.org/details/veterancomesback00wallrich
Childers, Thomas. Soldier from the War Returning. NY: Houghton Mifflin Press, 2009.
Dumas, Alexander G. and Keen, Grace Graham. A Psychiatric Primer for the Veteran’s Family and Friends. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1945.
Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves. Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Van Ells, Mark D. To Hear Only Thunder Again. NY: Lexington Books, 2001.
Childers, Thomas. Soldier from the War Returning. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2009, p. 147.
Have we over glorified war? At some points in time, yes. Particularly at the beginning, or escalation of conflict. Was it needed? Maybe. What we need to do is glorify those warriors who fight for our freedoms, who give so much of their lives and in doing so, give so much of the lives of the people who love them as well. Like war, or not, we need those warriors, those souls who give their lives to service for the greater good. They deserve every bit of support and respect we are able to muster.
Exceptionally well written piece on a difficult subject. No doubt will resonate with all the families, friends and loved ones that inherit the burden of someone re-entering civilian life after any war conflict. Much "food for thought" here. Thank you Jennifer.