“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commanding General of American forces in Europe during World War II, and later 34th President of the United States
I’ve often wondered how my father, a combat medic in Europe during WWII, could be such a happy person after seeing the worst things a person can see. Like the majority of WWII veterans, he stuffed his feelings away and rarely spoke about it. Many others could not remain detached.
Posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD, was not recognized as a diagnosis until 1980. Many U.S. soldiers returning from WWII did not discuss their war experiences with family members, in part because they thought their stories would be too shocking. Their silence often resulted in more trauma—alcoholism, broken marriages, and lost jobs. Over the course of the war, forty percent of medical discharges were for neuropsychiatric reasons. Over 500,000 U.S. service personnel suffered psychological trauma and mental breakdown.
At WWII’s end, the Army could only account for the remains of 280,000 of the 407,316 American troops who died. Of that number, 171,752 were returned to the U.S. During the war, soldiers and nurses were buried in temporary cemeteries. The number of these temporary cemeteries is astounding—464 in 86 countries on six continents.
My father lost one of his dearest childhood friends who was still in training in the U.S. He also lost friends in his unit. From his journal-1945:
“April 28 was a sad day. Late in the evening we ran into SS at a small town near Mainburg. Billhymer gets killed by a Panzerfaust, and Ringeisen of my platoon gets shot in head by SS buzzgun. Sure lost two of our best soldiers that day! Ringeisen is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Bill from Northern Indiana. Walked into Mainburg and stayed the night after blastin’ the Jerries. In that little town the SS shot 3 Wehrmacht soldiers as they were walking towards us with hands in air—some stuff.”
Statistics from the National WWII Museum:
671,278 troops were wounded
61.2% of all servicemen were drafted
Average length of service: 33 months
358,074 women served in the various military branches: 74,000 were nurses
Statistics mean very little when the war affected so many families worldwide. But the statistics show the enormity of WWII and force us to remember history.
The main character in my novel, Dear Nora, nurse Nora Russell writes home on April 28, 1945:
“Sometimes a day has felt like a lifetime. The patients either drain me completely or cause my heart to overflow. These poor men, confined to their beds, prisoners of their bodies or their minds, have suffered so much. Sometimes I’m so angry that I don’t know what to do. Angry that anyone ever thinks war is a solution, angry that merciless, power-hungry leaders abuse their own people and send young men to fight, angry that innocent civilians get caught up in it, angry that so many lives are changed forever, and angry that I am powerless to stop it.”
Fifteen years ago, I started writing about WWII because of the last sentence in the paragraph below. It’s from a letter my grandmother wrote to my 19-year-old father, a college student, on Dec. 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor:
“Patriotism is fine but I do hate to hear people trying to arouse racial hatred. I heard a congressman say, “Let’s exterminate those war-mad Jap devils from the face of the earth.” There may be a group of leaders who do deserve to be wiped out but most of the Japanese soldiers are boys just like you, with homes and families and ambitions of their own, and it isn’t their fault they are made to fight. Why can’t the poor old earth just learn to exterminate War?”