The inheritance

But for Tom and Willis and many other men who returned from World War II, there was another, more complex and unsettling reality that lurked below the glossy surface of the Greatest Generation storyline. The men and women of that generation deserve all the testimonials they receive, but the uncomplicated, reassuring portrayal of their experiences found in Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book and in our public discourse has become more than a tribute to a passing generation; it has become our public memory of “the good war” and its aftermath. Indeed, it has been repeated so often in public commemorations that it has become almost an incantation, more liturgical than historical.

I thought of Willis and Tom earlier this month as I watched dignitaries and aged veterans gather in Normandy to commemorate the fateful D-Day landings of June 6, 1944. Never mentioned in such ceremonies or in the vast media attention devoted to the “Greatest Generation” is another battle our fathers waged. That battle was not fought in the fields of Europe or the jungles of the South Pacific but in towns and cities all across America, sometimes in highly public spaces - hospitals and courtrooms - but more often in parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms. As many veterans and their families would discover, the last daunting challenge of the war, for those fortunate enough to survive it, was attempting to resume a life interrupted and forever changed by war.

At night, when I slept over at Gary’s house, we would sometimes be awakened in the dead hours before dawn by shouting - his father Willis, in a towering rage, howling, slamming his wheelchair into the walls, pounding on the locked bedroom door where Gary’s mother had taken refuge. Terrified, we would jump out of our beds and slide a bureau against the bedroom door. Sometimes we would climb out of the window into the dewy grass and wait until the bellowing subsided. A patrol car might arrive, red light flashing, and there would be muffled words in the driveway. Lights went on in the houses across the street. The Allens’ troubled household had become a neighborhood spectacle.

Although long forgotten or ignored, many of the profoundly disturbing social and personal problems arising from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan - homelessness, unemployment, shattered personal relationships, substance abuse, and severe psychological disorders - were glaringly present in the aftermath of World War II. Until recently we seem to have assumed that such readjustment troubles were somehow unique features of the bitter Vietnam experience. Bad war, bad outcome, bad aftereffects. Perhaps if we had taken a more hard-eyed look at the psychological wounds of our fathers’ war, we would not have been caught so unprepared, so surprised to discover that the men - and now women - returning from today’s conflicts are confronting the same wrenching experiences as they struggle to readjust to civilian life.

Certainly the price paid by my father’s generation was far higher, the toll extracted from them and their families far greater, and their struggles far more protracted than the rosy tributes to the “Greatest Generation” would have us believe. It is a cautionary tale, and with American families once again caught in the pitiless grip of war, one of great relevance on Father’s Day.

Unlike Willis, who came home with his legs amputated, my father Tom bore no visible scars from the war; his wounds were of a different nature but no less real or lasting. Like Willis, he married just before Pearl Harbor and entered the service in 1942, at the age of 20. He spent two years overseas in the Eighth Air Force and, in 1945, returned home.

It was not the joyous homecoming he had dreamed of. He had not seen his wife Mildred or heard her voice for two years, and when they at last met again, they discovered that they were strangers. He also returned to a family consumed with grief. Howard, my mother’s brother, had been reported missing in action, the telegram from the War Department reaching the family on V-E Day. Shortly before my father’s return, a second telegram arrived, confirming that Howard had been killed over Regensburg, Germany, on April 21, 1945. As I would later discover, his B-24 was the last American bomber shot down over Germany.

Mildred and the family steadfastly refused to accept the news as final. Why Howard? Why, they asked plaintively, among the 16 million men who had served in the war, was he not coming home?

Tom tried to be supportive, but for two years he had lived in a world where death was a daily occurrence. Friends disappeared or came back splattered across the turrets or cockpit or radio compartment of the B-17s. They were there at chow in the morning, and then they were gone - empty bunks in the barracks, their personal effects sorted and sent home to grieving families. Eventually he had come to accept the war’s brutal intractable realities. You endured it; you moved on.

But back at home, surrounded by the baffled, tormented family, he seemed oddly detached. In unguarded moments, he spoke with the matter-of-fact fatalism that was the prevailing idiom in a combat zone, and his words struck my mother as chillingly cold. He felt out of touch and disoriented, suffocated by the all-consuming sorrow that had enveloped his homecoming. This disturbing air of detachment was common among veterans, a necessary defense mechanism they had developed in the war, but was frequently interpreted by stunned family members as insensitive and coarse. And at home, safe and sound, Tom could not shake a mounting sense of what we would today identify as survivor guilt.

Compounding their problems, Mildred discovered a letter that seemed to hint that Tom had had an affair with a woman in England. He denied it, but she could not be convinced. Ever. And in those traumatic post-war months, two emotional currents fused in her mind - the cruel loss of her brother in the war’s final days and her husband’s putative infidelity. He was not the man she had married, she said, but neither was she the optimistic young woman he had left in 1942. He had come home to a woman caught in an undertow of grief and depression so deep and enduring that it flowed beneath the surface of their lives ever after. They argued, and in the first of their many lifelong clashes, she lashed out at him with words that would haunt them for the rest of their lives: “Why have you come back, and Howard didn’t?”

Despite their troubles, my parents soldiered on. They were not among the tidal wave of veterans who divorced between 1945 and 1947, a long forgotten “post-war divorce boom” that produced the highest divorce rate in American history and was not topped until 1974.

Tom worked hard, built a brilliant career in business, and by most any objective standard he was successful beyond his wildest dreams. But no matter how my parents might try to contain it or repress it or forget it, the war was never far from the surface of their - our - lives. It leached out in desperate, sometimes destructive ways, and like a stone dropped onto the still surface of a pond, it radiated outward over decades and across generations.

Over the past 10 years, I have talked with dozens of veterans and their families, both about the war and also the long shadow it cast over their subsequent lives. I visited many World War II oral history collections around the country, reading through transcripts, listening to tape recordings. The stories varied, but basic themes remained the same. Today’s comfortable assumption that “the boys” returned home healthy, happy, and well adjusted, that no one suffered from serious emotional disorders, drank too much, or abused his wife or children would have come as a surprise to contemporaries and could not be further from the truth.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not diagnosed until 1980, but the US suffered over 1 million psychiatric casualties in World War II, and in 1947 half the beds in VA hospitals were occupied by men with “psychoneurotic disorders.” Depression, recurring nightmares, survivor guilt, outbursts of rage, most frequently directed at family members, “exaggerated startle responses,” and anxiety reactions - all of which are recognized today as classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder - were as common as they were unnerving.

Back then, the gulf between what the soldier had experienced and what the public knew, between the horror of armed conflict and polite conversation or even news reporting, was far greater than today. In December 1944 Willis Allen lost both legs to a German artillery shell in eastern France and endured 18 grueling months of painful operations and rehabilitation. Like so many other veterans, Willis carried his inner war in silence. Until recently he could not bring himself to talk about what he had seen on the beach at Salerno: men burning like torches in the surf, mangled bodies lying half buried in the blood-soaked sand, hideous human flotsam - a severed arm, intestines strung like cartoon sausages across the axle of a smoldering jeep, a foot, still in its boot and leggings - washing languidly in the outgoing tide. Did anyone really want to know about the snowy night in December 1944, when a single German artillery shell killed every man in the trench but him, tearing his right leg off high above the knee and shredding the other so horrendously that it was amputated that same night?

The inescapable realities of his physical limitations grew steadily more oppressive, and as the war receded into history, he was no longer an honored disabled veteran; he was just a man with no legs, a cripple, as people unflinchingly said in those days, who could not dance with his wife or play ball with his son or do a thousand other daily tasks that others took for granted.

Beneath the brightly burnished Norman Rockwell veneer, a festering resentment gnawed at him, deepening with time. Ten years after the war, Willis was a man brimming with anger, subject to sudden - and to us children - inexplicable outbursts of white hot rage directed at his wife, his daughter, and, on occasion, at us. By the mid-1960s his marriage had dissolved, his children were estranged.

In the end, a generation of children bore many of their fathers’ scars. Born just after the war, a New Jersey man told me that he grew up “tiptoeing around” his veteran father who suffered from terrible nightmares and a serious drinking problem. His father watched the old ‘50s films on TV, films in which the war was presented as “noble and just and heroic,” and would then “cry for hours, a drink constantly by his side.” One woman’s father, who had spent much of the war in a Japanese prison camp, returned with an undiagnosed and untreated PTSD that kept her “family from living full and normal lives, lives others take for granted{hellip}. I was never ‘Daddy’s little girl,’ ” she laments, “but I certainly was his POW.”

The lives of parents are an abiding source of mystery to their children, but in researching my parents’ struggle with the war and the psychic wounds they carried and tried so hard to hide, I have come to a fuller understanding of much that had been incomprehensible. In that often painful process, I gained a greater measure of knowledge not only of them but of myself as well. It is why, I have come to understand, that at 62 years of age, I remain caught in a war that supposedly ended a year before my birth.

There are times when war may be necessary. With all its horrors and grotesque crimes, the Second World War is a case in point. But if, as a last resort, we send soldiers into harm’s way, we should be under no illusions about war’s colossal human costs, remembering that even in the most brilliant triumphs there is heartbreak and that the suffering does not stop when the shooting does. It is a lesson that a new generation of fathers and sons and families, to their infinite sorrow, are relearning every day.

Thomas Childers is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is “Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).