WWII--A Really Bad War--not Good.

...The Greatest Generation is fast becoming the fading generation. Of the 16 million veterans who returned from WWII, there remain about 2 million. The Korean War and the Viet Nam wars have been known as the "bad" wars; WWII has often been referred to as the "good war." Actually, there was nothing good about it. Millions of people lost their lives--not including the Holocaust. It was a global war and American deaths in battle totaled almost 300,000 while in Viet Nam 47,000 Americans died in battle. At Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked a sleeping peaceful underarmed democratic nation. But they awakened a sleeping giant. There is nothing much that I can add to the many books, films, and television shows, except to give my own personal views of that devastating conflict--not a good war at all--only good in the sense that it was won.

...The facts are that, although many veterans were able to return to civilian life and make the adjustments required, still millions of others found themselves unemployed and unable to find jobs. The joblessness among veterans was many times the rate of civilians--at least three or four times. Finding housing was extremely difficult--and even after marriage, millions of veterans had to move in with their parents or other relatives. There was very little construction of new homes during the depression years. No, WWII was not a good war; the divorce rate skyrocketed in the aftermath; the rate of divorce among veterans was many times that of the civilian population.

...When I was discharged in November, 1945, I moved in with my mother and sister in the Bronx. Prior to my joining the military as a combatant, I was working in a bank as a teller, and after the war I was able to return to my job in that capacity. However, it wasn't long before I began to feel extreme anger at having to be confined in a cage as was the situation for tellers back then; of having nowhere to live on my own. I had higher aspirations and could see no way of attaining them. I began to have nightmares and flashbacks of combat. I only had a high school education, and neither money nor academic preparation for college, and thus I was in despair of never being able to move out of that cage.

...I was engaged to be married in June of 1947, but I was not ready for that kind of responsibility, and pretty soon I collapsed--mentally, and found myself in the locked ward of the VA Hospital; locked in order to prevent suicide. I was diagnosed with "PT"--referred to as neuropsychiatric symptoms; psychoneurosis. This was a polite name for battle fatigue--suffered by millions of other veterans confined to hospitals. These symptoms included rage, depression, survivor guilt, anxiety, nightmares, and flashbacks of wartime experiences. It was many years later that these symptoms became known as PTSD--post-traumatic stress disorder. I remained in that hospital for six months. What happened after that is much too long a story to be studied here--it's all in my book, "The Memoirs of a Tail Gunner," a book which I had to write in my retirement in an attempt to expurgate and relieve the PTSD which afflicted me for decades. For many veterans the symptoms of PTSD did not occur until many years after the war, and former POWs were particularly vulnerable to PTSD even decades after their liberation. The VA hospital wards are filled today with elderly veterans, and it won't be long before the VA hospitals will be caring for casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan.

...One of the most irritating articles I have read recently recounts how the Japanese are distorting the history of their role in WWII. The article points out that "...at least three generations of Japanese have learned in their schools that a 'peace loving' Japan of the 1930s and 1940s was attacked by the Western powers, fought a largely defensive war, and suffered disproportionate wartime damage." American schools are indeed also culpable of revising history. The article continues, "...in many American schools, the Pacific Theater is presented largely through three themes: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans in camps, and the heroic labors of American women--the millions of once-neglected Rosie the Riveters in factories at home." The fact is that American men fought heroic battles on land, at sea, and in the air and it was they who won the war against Japan. And August 14 ought still and forever to be called "VJ DAY" (Victory over Japan) and not "Victory in the Pacific" in order to assuage Japanese guilt.