Americans Throw a Parade for WWII Veterans Returning Home
When I think about war veterans today, I imagine men and women in uniforms, coming home to their country, awaited by a fanfare of love and respect. What I did not think about however, was how this homecoming would go down if the veteran’s home was no longer a part of the picture, or if it had changed so much, it no longer felt like home.
Following the end of WWII, soldiers who were recalled back to their countries were not always lead back to the original home they left behind. Exciting parades and banners would in fact await them, but these events do not always bring strictly positive outcomes. In fact, Robert Dale suggests in his article, “Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad 1945-50”, they could potentially mask the negatives of returning home (pg 114). In some cases, not even the majority of the veterans were allowed to go home yet. Some countries allowed the oldest to go home, while the United States had a point system which included age, rank, and service years. This means that these parades could have very well just been for a select few, while the majority of the veterans would have come home well past the parade times. My great grandfather recalls coming home from WWII as just another ordinary day. Only his wife was ecstatic to see him. He joined the military late into the war, so he was not among the first groups of men to return home. My grandfather was lucky that he had a home to go back to in America, Robert Dale writes that Russians returning to Stalingrad or Kiev most likely found their homes in ruins (pg. 120).
Once home, the internal battle began. Veterans who were not physically wounded, but mentally wounded found themselves struggling with their country’s set ideals on masculinity. Feelings of aloneness or sadness were regarded as unmanly and something that could easily be cured. In her article, “‘If He Comes Home Nervous’: U.S. World War II Neuropsychiatric Casualties and Postwar Masculinities,”Christina Jarvis writes that some Americans found masculinity to be a, “self-regenerating process” that can be cured by, “employment, self-sufficiency, and communal masculine activities” (pg 102). Unfortunately, if that were the case, some veterans found themselves stuck in a never ending line of paperwork when trying to apply for a job. A corrupt beaurcratic system left them going from place to place to sign different papers, which eventually led to them just receiving jobs of manual labor (Dale, pg 124).
Whether their homes were left in rubble, or if they felt alien as civilians disregarded their feelings of aloneness, veterans did not always have the same home to return to. Some lucky few were able to return home to their loving family under the same roof. Some were fortunate enough to have no psychical or psychological damage from war. These men dominated the veteran myth, or how we usually perceive the life of veterans.
I like your view of the “veteran myth”. The soldiers who are depicted in photos are most always the ones returning to a full house, and seemingly have no mental scars. I do believe that veterans are someone to be respected, but I think that also leads to the exclusion of veterans who come back to a broken home or are suffering heavily from PTSD. We have this notion that veterans are superhumans that can do it all, when, especially after WWII, a lot of them needed emotional support, but will likely never receive any.
I agree. If we treat them like superhuman, why should we think they need help? On one hand, glorifying them is hurting them, but on the other hand, these men and women ARE amazing. They DID do great things for our country so how could we not glorify them? The only solution I can think of is to continue this glorification while shining more light on the difficulties veterans face and how we can help them.
I also liked how you brought up the idea of “veteran myth”. Once the media decided it needed to address the problem of psychiatric injuries it only portrayed the soldiers who recovered quickly and had a loving family. The media left out the veterans who didn’t get a big welcome back party and the ones that didn’t have families, homes, or jobs to return to. Also those veterans who were dealing with PTSD didn’t receive medals or awards like some veterans did for their physical injuries. Would this also effect their sense of masculinity? People back home didn’t understand how to deal with veterans PTSD, so I think that is another reason why it was in the dark for some time.
Absolutely agree with you and Jarvis that there was a great threat to veterans’ masculinity which in turn lead to difficult not only assimilating back into society but overcoming mental hindrances to their own recovery (i.e., images of themselves). I wonder how men who didn’t go to war saw themselves and their masculinity amongst the veterans, both physically wounded and not?
I liked that you incorporated your grandfather’s experience into your post. It makes the article more relatable when you draw on a personal story related to the topic. I think it was interesting that you focused on veterans not having a home to return to. I think it was a good point to discuss because people often do not think of what happened to soldiers following the war. They often just think their jobs were over and returned to the life they once knew. However, as you pointed out many no longer had homes because it was either gone or changed from what they knew. I also liked how you paralleled PTSD as a way of these veterans not feeling at home, they felt like social outcasts and as if their governments did not want to help and simply pushed them aside.
Great post, i really liked the way you incorporated your grandfathers experience into your post. You make great points showing that while veterans in the US could expect to return to their home as it was and hopefully reclaim their old job this was not no for other countries such as russia where soldiers often returned to destroyed homes and scattered families.