The soldiers returning home was a call for great celebration. They had accomplished a great deal in dismantling the regimes that threatened the order of the world. The fascists were gone, and so was Imperial Japan. The destruction provided the birth of millions of people within the class of veteran. The video featured here shows the excitement that the US had as their men returned home after D-Day. The tone of this video, the joy it ought to bring the heart, is thin. It is masking, whether it realizes it or not, the reality of returning soldiers and their experiences in their countries. Every country involved was now left to deal with what it means to have so many people coming back to the home front seeking to return to their old lives.
The common thread of many historians’ research on the subject of demobilization focuses on the fact that it was not as smooth or glamorous as public perception and memory seem to make it out to be. The fruit of this reality varied depending on where a soldier returned, their own backgrounds, and the ways that the war affected them. But regardless of the diversity in these areas, the bottom line was fairly consistent: it was not a swift return to the way things were. This was particularly the case for those soldiers who were returning from the war wounded in some way or another. Assistant professor at Xavier University, Robert F. Jefferson, summarized the struggle for disabled veterans in this way: “Returning home from overseas service was though for all veterans, but it was tougher still for black veterans and disabled white veterans and was perhaps toughest of all for disabled veterans” (“Enabled Courage”, p. 1103). Jefferson’s writing focused on the interrelation of race, disability, and veteran status in the postwar era, but his assessment is sufficient to apply broadly to disability as a result of war.
The disability question of the postwar era did not end with physical disability. The reality of PTSD was pervasive among veterans, those that had been physically wounded and those that had not. Likewise, there were many who had to be discharged because of the presence of psychological distress that was keeping them from performing their duties. The problems of addressing mental disorders has existed for a long time, and hasn’t done much to change in the past 75 years. The goal of administrative powers is always to make things look as good as possible, regardless of reality. This led military leaders to discharge people on the basis of “combat exhaustion… ‘because it was thought to convey the least implication of neuropsychiatric disturbance'” (“If He Comes Home Nervous”, p. 101). This dancing for appearance is something that is done even in the twenty-first century. It is why schools focus on mental problems when they are apparent problems, but do not do much except when someone is watching. The US government had this goal with the soldiers. They did not want the image of the brave soldier tarnished, and since they believed that mental duress would tarnish that image, it had to be painted in a different light. It is too bad that they weren’t as concerned with the image of how they treated black soldiers, maybe that would have given them more of an equal chance as well.
Continuing in the vein of mental duress is the fight for life in the USSR. The Soviet government made it seem as though they were doing everything to support their soldiers as they came back into the Soviet Union. The problem was not only that they were actually doing very little, but that the soldiers of the Red Army were coming back almost as repatriated displaced persons. As historian, Robert Dale, explains, “[n]ot only did [their homes] look different, but [they were] home to different people, who behaved in different ways” (“The Demobilization of the Red Army”, p. 121). Just as was the case for displaced persons, the soldiers coming home to the Soviet Union were entering into an entirely different culture than what they had known before they left. The difference was, the soldiers felt entitled to be treated at least slightly better upon their return. But as Queensland and Western Australia University professors, Crotty and Edele, point out: “Soviet] rulers were simply not dependent on the affirmation of former soldiers at the ballot box” (“Total War and Entitlement”, p. 27). The Soviets did not have the same incentive to care for their struggling soldiers as other countries did at the end of the war.
The Jabberwocky of Fascism had been slain by 1945, but the slayers were not coming home in the Carrollian way. They were wounded and suffering. Their homes had to welcome them back in a way that would not cause the rest of the population to lose hope in what the government was doing. The only way to do this was to make them appear as though the problems were not as severe as they appeared to be. This would ultimately hurt a great number of people, and leave many more disgruntled. It wasn’t only the disabled veterans that were experiencing such frustration, but they are the clearest lens through which to see the struggle.
Bibliography
Crotty, Martin, and Mark Edele. “Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 59, no. 1 (March 2013): 15-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12001.
Dale, Robert. “The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad, 1945-50.” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 1 (January 2010): 113-133. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40542908.
Jarvis, Christina. “‘If He Comes Home Nervous’: U.S. World War II Neuropsychiatric Casualties and Postwar Masculinities.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 97-115. http://dx.doi.org/10.3149/jms.1702.97.
Jefferson, Robert F. “‘Enabled Courage’: Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans in Postwar America.” The Historian 65, no. 5 (Fall 2003): 1102-1124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24452485.
