Those Who Have Borne the Battle (20 page)

Nearly 292,000 Americans died on the battlefields or in engagement with the enemy on the seas or in the air during the war. Another 114,000 died in service but not in theater. And there were some 671,000 wounded in combat. It was a costly war: some 2.52 percent of those Americans who served died in the war—in World War I the figure had been 2.46 percent, and in the Civil War, Union and Confederate combined, it had been 15.02 percent.
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My father came home from Germany in December 1945, having first been put on hold to see if his unit would be sent to Japan for that war and then waited for the logistical nightmare of demobilization. I remember a song he taught me more than sixty-five years ago, one they sang in Germany in the late summer and fall of 1945:

Getting the troops home was complicated, but it was also done relatively smoothly and quickly. People in government had been worried for some time about what all of these servicemen would do when they came home. Some feared that resentment was building between those who were serving and those who were not. A Red Cross worker in Italy had written home that “many a G.I. thinks every man back home is a 4-F making easy and overlarge war profits. This is a frightening indication of the growing gap in understanding and mutual tolerance between the civilian and the man in uniform.”
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It is not clear why this gap was described
as “mutual”—there is not much evidence that the home front had developed an intolerance for those in uniform—a fear perhaps, or in some cases, a sense of guilt.

One GI wrote after a Glenn Miller Orchestra performance in England that men were crying and thinking of home. This was about more than sentiment; it was about hopes. “You owe these guys when they get back, not so much money or gadgets, but a shot at the way of life that many of them have been dreaming about.”
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In July 1943, in the middle of the war, President Roosevelt surprised many, as he was always capable of doing, by arguing in one of his fireside chats that it was necessary to begin planning for the veterans to return to civilian life. He and others were concerned about the capacity of the economy to be able to provide appropriate employment opportunities for these men and women. They must not be “demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on the breadline or on a corner selling apples.”
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In contrast to any previous American war, the president was thinking of a payment to all veterans upon mustering out of the service as well as perhaps a year of college or other training and unemployment benefits.

Roosevelt continued to wrestle with the issue that had troubled him early in his presidency with the Bonus Expeditionary Force: how much did the country owe to able-bodied veterans? He also recognized the need to initiate some veteran program. In the fall of 1943 he said, “We have taught our youth how to wage war; we must also teach them how to live useful and happy lives in freedom, justice, and decency.”
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Over the next several months Congress and the administration worked on developing a comprehensive veterans program. Partisan politics played a role, not surprisingly, in the debate, and the American Legion came to be a major participant in the shaping and passage of legislation. The Legion's lobbying during the war was more influential than any that observers at the time recalled from any group. The Legion had early on raised concerns about support for veterans returning with serious injuries. This lobbying effort positioned them well to push next for able-bodied veterans.

Legion officials even raised implicit threats: “God knows what will happen” when these trained killers came home and discovered that there
was no provision to enable them to recover the lives they had lost. The Legion insisted that the veterans were not after “gratuities” but were entitled to “what is justly due them.”
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On the other hand, the Disabled American Veterans were concerned about any legislation that would provide support for the able-bodied at the cost of programs for the disabled and seriously injured. The DAV explicitly questioned those who had served briefly, had no injuries, and were the “the lazy and chisely” types who would become beneficiaries of a new program.
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There were ongoing challenges raised by political leaders, often for partisan or sectional reasons, about increasing the federal authority and its bureaucracy, about states rights, and, predictably, about race. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi was a major force in the drafting of the bill. His concerns focused on race, especially upon the program providing unemployment benefits for veterans since he assumed that the black veterans from his state would not work, and he surely was troubled about any educational benefits that would provide for integrated colleges and universities. Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri insisted that the entire legislation was held up “based entirely upon the hatred of certain Congressmen for the colored portion of our armed forces.”
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A conference committee finally agreed upon a bill—despite Rankin's obstruction—and Roosevelt signed the legislation on June 22, 1944. It was officially called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. But the American Legion had already titled it the “GI Bill of Rights,” a label that was far more politically popular.

This legislation expanded traditional medical and disability programs and went far beyond this in providing for a significant investment in the transition of all veterans back into American society. The GI Bill provided for up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment benefits; established an interest-free loan program for the purchase of homes, farms, or businesses; and offered a comprehensive and generous plan to support education or training for veterans.

All of the earlier veteran legislation in previous wars had provided for medical support for those in need and, often later, pensions for elderly veterans. The 1944 GI Bill did provide medical support, but this
legislation set a new standard with an investment in young, healthy veterans—the only clear precedent for this might have been the land grants that were made available through the first seventy-five years of the nation. As David R. B. Ross notes, government-veteran relations changed: “The 1940–1946 period represents the crucial turning point. For the first time the government anticipated the needs of all its veterans. The notion that the disabled alone needed aid was discarded.” Ross points to this as a consequence of the New Deal philosophy of government responsibility.
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Interestingly, some of the opposition to the GI Bill came from the higher-education community. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, worried that the bill would “demoralize education and defraud the veteran.” He was concerned about veterans going to school if they could not find jobs, resulting in colleges becoming vocational schools and, even worse, “educational hobo jungles.” James Bryant Conant of Harvard was more cautious in raising some of the same concerns. He believed college attendance should be based on demonstrated academic accomplishment rather than military service and hoped that the GI Bill would cover only “a carefully selected group.”
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The politics of passing the GI Bill was marked by compromise—a lubricant of democracy, but one that often introduces selective provisions and qualifications. The legislation and the understandings that were part of the GI Bill made clear that Jim Crow laws would not be challenged. The VA ruled that benefits were not available to gay servicemen who had received “blue” or undesirable discharges, which was their fate if they were determined to be homosexual. There also were numerous allegations and incidents of fraud and abuse in the GI Bill.

Time
did a story on the first GI Bill graduates in 1947 that evinced a pretty negative view of their experiences. The article used phrases such as “crammed in crowded Quonset huts” and “grim experience.” It said that veterans insisted that they were all trying to get to where they would have been if not for the war. Obviously, any veterans graduating in 1947 would have matriculated and taken classes prior to their military service.
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Despite these early concerns, scholars have found the experience to have
been positive for most of these students and one that did provide opportunities for their lives.
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While the postwar years were marked by some substantial adjustment problems and labor unrest, there was little of this that was directly the result of veteran activism. There were no new veterans groups organized by the World War II veterans. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion represented them. At midcentury the GI Bill was the largest entitlement program down to that point in American history (Social Security would shortly surpass it, but it had not yet done so). In 1950 some 25 percent of federal expenditures went to the support of its programs, and in the several years following the war the Veterans Administration had the largest number of employees of any government agency. In 1950 71 percent of federal payments to individuals went to veterans through the various veterans programs.

A Veterans Administration study in 1955 noted that there had been 15,750,000 veterans eligible for benefits under the GI Bill. Of these, more than half, 8.3 million, received unemployment help; slightly less than half, 7.8 million, received education or training benefits, and some 4 million received support with home, farm, or business loans.
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Most commentators talked about the ease of the process of reabsorption. One scholar, Lee Kennett, believed that it was smooth

Kennett quotes from Robert Havighurst's study of veterans that concluded there was “remarkably little difference in the adjustment of veterans and nonveterans four years after the close of the war.”
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These positive experiences were not shared by all who came back from the war. The period after the war was marked by some significant labor unrest, as unions were now free to challenge for higher wages. There were some 5 million workers out on strike during 1946. Veterans who were members of the striking unions joined in these. In the postwar period, racial tensions flared. Many black veterans came back to the South, where they insisted upon more respect and recognition. They seldom received it. Beatings and lynchings increased, and veterans were commonly the victims. The Tuskeegee Institute said there were six lynchings in 1946, and some have argued there were four times that many. The NAACP reported that two-thirds of the lynching victims were veterans.
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It is noteworthy that nonwhite veterans used the GI Bill benefits at a higher rate than white veterans, even in the South. “Even as racial segregation persisted in the United States, therefore, the G.I. Bill gave African Americans greater opportunities to acquire education and training than they had ever known.”
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Nonetheless, black veterans experienced generally systematic indifference or hostility within the various government offices as well as outright racism and exclusion, and not only in the South. So their success in taking advantage of the GI Bill is also a tribute to their dedication to doing just that.
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As had been true in all previous wars, Americans did seek ways to set up monuments that would salute and memorialize this war. The postwar memorials of World War II focused on the theme of sacrifice. John Bodnar concludes, “The veneration of national sacrifice stood above reminders of personal loss.” He states that the major monuments and cemeteries “performed well the cultural work of turning the tragic aspects of war into
honor and heroism and diminishing the reality of suffering. Virtue and strength stood above violence and death.”
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The American Battle Monuments Commission, established after World War I, was in charge of official monuments. Their “goal was to transform tragedy into honor and mass death into national pride.” The inscription at the US cemetery near Florence, Italy, asks that visitors there “not mourn with the parents of the dead who are with us. . . . Rather, comfort them. Let their burden be lightened by the glory of the dead, the love of honor.”
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The Marine Corps War Memorial became a symbol for much of the debate about the art and memorials for the war. The Marine Corps wished to have a statue based on the Joseph Rosenthal photo of the flag being raised at Mount Surabachi on Iwo Jima. This photo, though staged, became one of the most important and iconic pictures of the war. It had been a costly, horrible battle for this small island. Some 30,000 marines went ashore there, and 5,931 were killed and 16,168 wounded in action. The Japanese fought until essentially all of them, more than 20,000, were killed.