Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Many couples had married in haste in 1942 and 1943, just as young men were shipping off to the war, and had never really grown to know one another. When reunited, they regarded each other with shyness and apprehension. If they were lucky, they might find that they were well suited to each other, and lived long and happy lives together. Many others recognized quickly that they had erred, and they divorced. Those in the latter category caused an unprecedented spike in the divorce rate. In 1946, there were more than 4.3 divorces and annulments per 1,000 persons—the highest rate recorded up to that year, which would not be surpassed until the mid-1970s.125

  The medical profession had not yet developed effective treatments for the condition known as “battle neurosis” or “combat stress reaction.” Doctors ruefully admitted that their medical manuals and hospitals offered no such thing as “soul surgery.” Powerful social and cultural stigmas inhibited discussion of such disorders. Many veterans were reluctant to acknowledge that they needed help. As a rule, they did not choose to talk about what they had seen and done in the war. They did not have a name for what afflicted them; some called it the “demons of war.” James Covert observed of his older brother: “He and his friends were carrying a lot of feelings that I was not able to understand as a thirteen-year-old. At that age I could not really comprehend the kind of experiences he had endured in the war.”126 Many veterans felt a constant, gnawing anxiety, and were disturbed by nightmares and sleeplessness. They struggled to suppress or forget the ghoulish sights, sounds, and smells they had experienced in combat. Many suffered flashbacks, sleeping or waking, triggered by loud noises or bright lights: they might be triggered by a dropped object, a car backfiring, or an aircraft passing low overhead. Traumatic events from the past suddenly intruded upon the present, as if they had been caught in a time warp. Flashbacks might bring a sudden recollection of sights or sounds from the worst moments of combat; they might also arrive in the form of a sudden onslaught of grief, of sadness for the friends they had left behind, or even for the suffering of the enemy. They awoke in the small hours of the morning, hearts pounding and sheets soaked with sweat. Former sailors complained that a house was too quiet for sleeping. They had grown accustomed to the low throbbing of a ship’s engine, like a heartbeat. As one navy veteran said: “It was so quiet I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t hear, or feel, the vibrations of the diesel electric engines. It was just impossible to sleep.”127 They found it difficult to trust others, and felt a terrible and inconsolable loneliness even when surrounded by friends or loved ones. They had bouts of uncontrollable shaking and weeping, and suffered from a physical muscular tension that led, over time, to chronic physical pain and fatigue. They found it difficult to concentrate on complex tasks. Many were drained by their interactions with others, and sought solitude. They avoided situations that were likely to trigger a resurgence of harrowing memories, and were often intolerant of crowds. Many found it difficult to plan for the future, to make important decisions. Some were alienated from their wives and families, but others developed a pattern of unhealthy and excessive emotional dependence, to a childlike degree. They experienced sudden, uncontrollable surges of anger, and lashed out in violence at their wives or children. They felt a yawning sense of hopelessness about the future, a sense of meaninglessness, an existential emptiness, and an inability to experience joy, even in activities that had once provided pleasure. Some entertained thoughts of suicide, and some proceeded to act upon those thoughts.

  Marjorie Cartwright, a West Virginian who had spent the war in San Francisco, waiting for her sailor husband to be mustered out of the navy, found it very difficult to reconnect with the young man she had married. “When my husband returned from the navy, he was unable to adjust to civilian life. He couldn’t cope. When he joined the service, he was like most young men, a happy-go-lucky person. He came out very disillusioned, very bitter. The doctor said he had gone through too much trauma.” He had fought in the South Pacific, in several of the battles around Guadalcanal. His ship had been sunk, and many of his shipmates had died. Cartwright recalled: “When he came home he had terrible nightmares. It made it difficult for him to go to sleep at night. He said, ‘Every time I close my eyes I see my buddies being killed around me.’ He had one horrifying experience when one of his best friends had his head blown off right in front of him and fell into his arms.”128 He began drinking heavily. “My husband couldn’t deal with his feelings, so he sat around and drank and brooded. The men rehashed their war experiences to each other, of course, but he felt he couldn’t talk to me, that I wouldn’t understand, and I don’t think I could have, because I haven’t been through what he had.” The doctors wanted to place him in an institution, but he refused. After seven years, they divorced. “I didn’t know what else I could do,” said Cartwright. “Staying with him wasn’t helping him or changing him. I realized that I had to do something for myself, because I couldn’t do anything to save my husband.”129

  Approximately 900,000 African Americans had served in uniform. They came home with the confidence and expectations of men entitled to the full rights and privileges of citizenship. But for many, shedding the uniform meant resuming the dubious status they had held as civilians. In the American South, especially, in a culture that valued military service, former black soldiers represented a peculiar challenge to the regime of racial oppression. Like all soldiers, they had been trained to stand up straight, with chins up, shoulders back, and chests forward, with parade-ground posture and bearing. Many had acquired advanced training in hand-to-hand combat, and in the handling of weapons. They were men, after all; but now they returned to a place where they were called “boys” by other adults, and where a black man who held his head high was condemned as “uppity.” In certain rural precincts of the South, where lynching and other forms of extrajudicial violence remained common, black men who had served their country in uniform were specifically targeted. In several notorious cases of late 1945 and 1946, white mobs or police officers abducted, beat, whipped, or murdered black veterans who, in the words of one Alabaman, “must not expect or demand any change in their status from that which existed before they went overseas.”130 Even in the ostensibly more enlightened North, black veterans were systematically denied the full benefits of the GI Bill. Mainstream colleges would not admit them, at least not in great numbers, and historically black colleges could not expand rapidly enough to accommodate the sudden upsurge in demand. Vanishingly few home loans were extended to black veterans.

  For all of that, World War II was a catalyst for the civil rights movement. The war and the economic opportunity it offered touched off a surge in migration out of the American South, to the North, the Midwest, and the West Coast. In all regions, blacks migrated into cities—driven off the land by farm mechanization, and lured into cities by high-wage jobs—so that in the space of one generation, the demographic profile of African Americans crossed the scale from predominantly rural to predominantly urban. By 1945, blacks held about 8 percent of all war industry jobs, a proportion close to the percentage of blacks in the national population. Seven hundred thousand African Americans left the South during the war, and the exodus continued unabated in the postwar years. In the decade of the 1940s, some 339,000 blacks moved to the western half of the country. Large African American enclaves were created in such places as Los Angeles and Oakland. Sybil Lewis migrated from her hometown of Sapulpa, Oklahoma to Los Angeles, where she worked as a riveter in a Douglas aircraft plant. She recalled: “Had it not been for the war I don’t think blacks would be in the position they are now. The war and defense work gave black people opportunities to work on jobs they never had before. It gave them the opportunity to do things they had never experienced before. They made more money and began to experience a different lifestyle. Their expectations changed. Money will do that. You could sense that they would no longer be satisfied with the way they had lived before.”131 Had the war not been fought, Lewis assumed that she would have ended up as a schoolteac
her in rural Oklahoma, “but the impact of the war changed my life, gave me an opportunity to leave my small town and discover there was another way of life.”132

  LACKING THE REQUISITE POINTS FOR DISCHARGE, hundreds of thousands of young Americans remained marooned in the Pacific. Many would pass their third or fourth consecutive Christmas under the blinding tropical sun. That December, Bing Crosby’s ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” played in heavy rotation on the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS)—but now, more than ever before, the melancholy refrain seemed to mock their dilemma: “If only in my dreams.” With diminished responsibilities, men worked at a peacetime pace, giving only the minimum effort required to complete their assigned duties. Discipline gave way to cynicism. An attitude of lethargy spread through the camps and barracks. Men whiled away their hours of leisure playing cards or sunbathing. Black market liquor flowed freely, much of it produced in illicit stills. Everyone knew exactly how many discharge points he had accumulated, and how many more he needed for a ticket home. Having won the war, the servicemen had been told that they must now “win the peace.” But as a navy lieutenant observed, “none of us gave a good goddamn about ‘winning the peace.’ We just wanted to go home.”133

  Pilots continued to fly routine search patrols. Some were dispatched on missions to drop leaflets on islands still occupied by the Japanese, or they were assigned to actually land on such islands and to accept the surrender of Japanese garrisons. Operational accidents were less common than in wartime, but they continued with distressing regularity. All felt a special pity for those who died in plane crashes after the Japanese surrender. Aviators who had fought like lions in air combat now resented flying missions in dicey weather, and remonstrated angrily with their commanding officers. Flying through a nighttime storm over the East China Sea, the veteran dive-bomber pilot Samuel Hynes felt a new kind of fear, different from anything he had experienced in combat. He was outraged to have been placed in that treacherous situation, with the war won, “alone and half-blind with lightning and blackness,” risking his life “on a pointless exercise in the dark.”134

  Fifty thousand marines of the III Amphibious Corps, including most of the 1st and the 6th Marine Divisions, were sent into northeastern China in an operation codenamed BELEAGUER. Their mission was to stabilize the region, and to supervise the surrender, disarmament, and repatriation of Japanese troops and foreign nationals. Many marines who had survived the horrors of Peleliu and Okinawa were caught up in these operations, and did not return to the United States until the spring of 1946. Their brothers in the 3rd Marine Division remained in Guam, as a potential reserve force. To fill up their idle hours, officers on Guam organized a voluntary “school,” in which any marine who had special knowledge or skills in any field taught his fellow marines. Classes were offered in woodworking, geology, auto repair, Latin, watercolor painting, and dozens of other subjects. Majors and colonels attended classes taught by privates and corporals. One marine had participated in an “aquacade”—a synchronized swimming cabaret—in New York. The division still had an ample supply of dynamite on hand. They used it to blast out a huge pool in a coastal reef, rigged up lights and music, and put on a show involving two hundred marines swimming in formation. “So the division became completely and totally occupied,” said Colonel Robert E. Hogaboom, “and we had absolutely none of these problems that occurred in some other units . . . this [attitude of] ‘Let’s go home, let’s get out of here’ did not affect our division, because we had everybody working at something.”135

  For most young veterans, the moment had not yet come to reflect on the war or its meaning, or the ways in which the experience had shaped them. It had been an ordeal, an unpleasant detour from their conventional life plans, a liminal phase between adolescence and manhood. History and fate had thrown the war into the path of their generation, and so they—rather than their fellow citizens in other age cohorts—had been obliged to fight and win it. During the war, they had been living only for the future, for the return of peace, and their return to the United States, when their authentic lives would begin. They had been on the right side of the conflict, and took justifiable pride in having vanquished fascism and Japanese military imperialism, but they did not look to the future with a great sense of optimism. Many assumed, as a matter of course, that the world would fight more such wars in the future. Most had applauded the use of atomic bombs against Japan, but when they took time to reflect on the implications of nuclear power, they feared for the future of global civilization. Norman Mailer, an army sergeant and incipient novelist, shared his thoughts in a letter to his wife: “There will be another war, if not in twenty years, then in fifty, and if half of mankind survives, then what of the next war—I believe that to survive, the world cities of tomorrow will be built a mile beneath the earth.”136 Even the optimists kept their expectations in check. Douglas Edward Leach, a navy lieutenant, said that the end of the war brought “a satisfying sense of peace restored—in microcosm the world as it was meant to be—not perfect, but livable and potentially happy.”137

  There was virtue in forgetting, as well as in remembering. Veterans insisted upon remembering and honoring those who had paid the ultimate price—but with that exception, in 1945 and 1946, they were not much interested in talking about the war, and civilians were not much interested in hearing about it. Their attention was directed to the future, not to the past. Ben Bradlee, who had served in destroyers in the Pacific, and would become editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, wrote that the postwar zeitgeist had left little space for wartime reminiscences. “In 1946, who cared what you did in the war? I thought that the people who sat around and talked about their war were terrible bores.” Only gradually, with time and perspective, did he begin to understand how formative an experience the war had been, for himself and his entire generation. “It may sound trite to modern ears, but those really were years when you could get involved in something beyond yourself—something that connected you to your times in ways that no longer seem so natural, or expected.”138 James Michener, a thirty-seven-year-old naval officer who had served in rear-area bases in the South Pacific, was one of the exceptions. Even in the fall of 1945, he was thinking about “what the great Pacific adventure meant in human terms.” As he began work on the novel that would eventually be published as Tales of the South Pacific, Michener knew that his fellow veterans would show little interest in such a book in 1946, or even in 1947, and few publishing houses would see a market for it. But after three or four more years had passed, and their memories of boredom, homesickness, terror, suffering, and grief began to fade, veterans would look back on their shared experience with curiosity and interest. “Clearly, almost clinically, I concluded that if you ordered all the young men of a generation to climb Mount Everest, you would expect the climb to have a major significance in their lives. And while they were climbing the damned mountain they would bitch like hell and condemn the assignment, but years later, as they looked back, they’d see it as the supreme adventure it was and they’d want to read about it to reexperience it.”139

  December 1945 was the peak month for Operation MAGIC CARPET. In harbors and lagoons throughout the Pacific, sailors worked to patch up their ships, hoping to make them seaworthy enough to be cleared for the homeward passage. Troops crammed into any ship that could take them home. When the escort carrier Fanshaw Bay returned that fall, it carried thousands of soldiers and marines who slept in tiered bunks on the hangar deck. The pilots, aircrewmen, and airedales of the carrier’s air group, Composite Squadron Ten (VC-10), were largely idled, because most of their planes had been put ashore to make room for the passengers. Like the soldiers and marines, they loafed on the flight deck, playing cards or dice, or reading, or just sitting in the sun. At night, the ship turned on its running lights, a peacetime procedure that they still found unfamiliar and unnerving. In daily practice exercises, the antiaircraft gun crews went through a pantomime of loading and aiming their weapons, but they did not fi
re with live ammunition. The ship was crowded and uncomfortable, but no one complained. They were headed home, and that was all that mattered.

  One evening, the VC-10 commander, Edward J. Huxtable Jr., watched the sun sink into the ship’s wake, “and it was one of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever seen with the purples, never had I seen such purples, and the dark hues that were in the sky as in an Arizona sunset.” But few of the other veterans on the Fanshaw Bay were paying attention. They had seen a thousand Pacific sunsets, and the spectacle no longer drew their interest. If they looked anywhere on the sea horizon, they looked forward, to the east, toward home. And one of the other VC-10 pilots, standing nearby on the flight deck, remarked to Huxtable: “You know, Captain, these fellows don’t know it yet, but this experience will have been the greatest experience of their lives.”140

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. FDR Press Conference #676, August 30, 1940, p. 2.

  2. Smith, Thank You, Mr. President, p. 22.

  3. For example, FDR Press Conference #389, August 9, 1937, pp. 5, 17; and #523, February 3, 1939, p. 8.

  4. White, FDR and the Press, p. 31; FDR Press Conference #389, August 9, 1937, p. 23; and #915, August 31, 1943, p. 7.