The post-war period properly begins with three deaths in April 1944: President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12,1 Benito Mussolini on April 28, and Adolph Hitler on April 30. The D-Day assault on Europe by the Allies on June 6, 1944, led to Germany’s surrender and VE-Day on May 8, 1945.
The western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of freeborn men. They have violated their churches, destroyed their homes, corrupted their children and murdered their loved ones. Our armies of liberation have restored freedom to those suffering peoples, whose spirit and will the oppressor could never enslave.”
– President Harry S. Truman, V-E Day Proclamation
On the home front, the victory was dampened by the recent death of President Roosevelt. His successor, Harry S. Truman, dedicated the day to Roosevelt and ordered that flags be kept at half-staff. The American home front was in deep mourning. FDR had been at the center of everyone’s life for thirteen years in a time of great peril. He, through his grand presence, had provided leadership, protection, reassurance, and confidence.
Because few people in the general public knew of the president’s failing health, the nation was shocked. Reporters and close associates were well aware of his deteriorating condition and honored such personal confidence.
His body was transferred from his Georgia retreat, where he had been posing for an artist, to Washington DC by train. Mourners lined the train route no matter the hour. They stood atop overpasses and threw flowers. Black citizens counted heavily in the mourners. At every stop fresh flowers were carried aboard. After a state service in Washington, FDR was transferred to his family estate at Hyde Park, New York and buried with full military honors.
For generations, people who were alive on April 15, 1945, could tell you exactly where they were when they learned of FDR’s passing.
The war was not won yet in the Pacific, where US and Allied forces fought the Japanese in Okinawa, the Philippines and other Far East locations. President Truman urged Americans to temper their elation until all hostilities ended.
Despite this, many Americans rejoiced. New York was the site of the largest VE-Day celebration. Crowds gathered in Times Square, and thousands marched down Fifth Avenue with confetti raining down on them.
Some US cities observed VE-Day in a subdued fashion, adhering to Truman’s advice. From coast to coast, Americans flocked to houses of worship to pray. In Chicago, churches arranged special services, reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. Government and labor leaders asked workers to stay on their jobs, and liquor stores were closed for twenty-four hours. New Orleans “had no frenzied celebration,” and a similar calm prevailed in Dallas, Boston and Denver, according to Newsweek. The mood in Atlanta was “somber, reflective,” while in Los Angeles, the mayor proclaimed: “This is not a holiday.”2
As joyous was the victory, revulsion spread as the world learned more about the hideous atrocities in the concentration camps, sobering the joy. The revelations added to the belief that the war was just.
In August the world, including Americans on the home front, were shocked to learn about the employment of a new and frightening weapon, as the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The weapons produced Japan’s surrender and introduced the world to the nuclear age.
The surrender brought a three-day spree of home front VJ-day celebrations. The mainstay of the celebrations were parades, spontaneous and organized, big and small. Pots were banged, flags waved, firecrackers lit, horns blared all amid screams and cries of joy. Many of the parades’ most enthusiastic, and sometimes tipsy, members were servicemen recently returned home and exultant that their nightmare was over.
Often the ordeal of war was replaced by the ordeal of fitting back in both to work and the family. Some veterans slipped smoothly into college or a technical school. Others found their jobs gone and had to latch on to a job, which became less difficult as 1945 wore on.
The difficult place to fit back into was the family. There would be the sad cases of men returning to children who were not theirs or wives who no longer wanted to be married. In some cases, the returning father had never really known his children when he shipped out. The small child could have difficulty adjusting to this new, large, loud entity now in his life. Often mothers may have created false expectations in their children about what to expect, describing all the great things that Dad would be doing with them not aware that the Dad who left was not the Dad who was coming home.
One problem arose from the human tendency to fashion a good version of reality. A man who was away for the duration with only letters to remind him of home, could come to remember his wife as the embodiment of beauty and love. Likewise, the wife might remember only the very best of her husband. The expectations these fantasies created could make the man’s homecoming even more difficult.
Women were quicker to realize that the man standing at the door in his uniform was not the same man who left. Most were prepared to do what it would take to help him readjust to peacetime life in a family. The returning men, however, were often not prepared for the changes that their women had undergone in their absence. A common denominator for the returning men was surprise. They found their women independent-minded and full of a confidence they had not had before the war. Women now knew how to make household repairs, change a tire, balance a checkbook and more. The men who felt diminished by the loss of their old roles had a harder time. Some, sadly, could not make the adjustment. Many men felt that they had lost time out of their lives, that they needed to “get caught up” as they expressed it. Embracing materialism, buying things that they had longed for was one way of coping, but the lost time could not be reclaimed.
When a serviceman returned disabled, the problems were far more difficult, particularly if the veteran was classified as NP, a shorthand for neurotic-psychotic (also nicknamed shell-shock) which did not mean mentally disabled but did mean that professional counselling was advised. Unfortunately, while veterans with physical disabilities could find ample rehabilitation, NP veterans had difficulty finding help.
Any high expectations that life would quickly and happily pick up where it left off before the war were severely tested. At a peak spike in 1946, nearly 40 percent of wartime marriages ended in divorce.3 “Marry in haste – repent at leisure,” certainly rang true. The proof was that in just a year or two the frequency of divorce quickly slid back to its long-term rate.
Stirred by the great relocation of both servicemen and civilians adjusting to changing economic conditions, Americans got to know their country and each other. Educational institutions had been shaken to their core and came out better for it, narrowing the huge regional disparities in quality. The war boom gave second chances – even first chances – to many Americans who had been held down by poverty and social injustice.
The relocation and mobility did displace some Americans creating rootlessness for them. It altered, and somewhat homogenized, regional provincialism. It was now a different America.
August 1945. The war was truly over. The American home front was now freed to be simply home. What happened in a very short space of time reshaped the country. As with so many things connected with the war, reconversion and absorbing the millions of returning servicemen was bumpy. For much of 1945 returning servicemen scrambled to find jobs as defense plants wound down and their conversion to civilian goods was slow, but by the end of the year “help wanted” ads filled the papers. For those who did have trouble finding work, the government provided what was called the 52–20 Club which provided $20 a week for 52 weeks giving the veteran the security of a guaranteed income for a year to aid in readjustment.
By Joseph A (b. 1935):
When most of us who were there at the time think about the end of the war we think about the parades and celebrations, but the readjustments were difficult – for both the servicemen and their families. We had four boys in our town who had what we called shell shock. They stayed to themselves mostly, but it was awful to see them on the street.
But lots of other boys who came home found it hard to get back into civilian life. My uncle James had trouble adapting. He tried some work but just needed more time to settle in. One day he told me he was joining the “52–20 Club.” It was a program that gave men like him $20 a week for 52 weeks, or until they got a job, to help them. He joked about it, but he was a little embarrassed I could tell. He got a job in a short time.
We don’t often talk about these kinds of things that happened after the war. There were lots of problems.
These returning servicemen were a big driver for change. They needed housing and they needed the appliances and furniture to fill the houses. And they wanted cars. The billions of dollars Americans had piled up because of rationing were now available to be spent and spend it they did, aided by the new installment plans. The economy began a four-decade march upward. The war had sized everything bigger: business, labor, government, education, farming, transportation, construction.
Arguably the greatest agent of change, one that changed every aspect of American life forever, was a bill signed on June 22, 1944 – the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. Congress had been told that returning veterans wanted educational opportunities which traditionally had been available only to wealthy Americans and the G.I. Bill provided just that.
But the G.I. Bill went much further. It not only provided money for college and vocational education, it provided government backed loans. The so-called VA loans permitted veterans to buy a home with no money down. The result was a building boom never seen before. Instead of building a house or two, people like William Levitt were building whole communities all at once. Levittowns and similar developments seemingly popped up overnight.
Often unnoticed was a special way the G. I. Bill aided the Black community. Many Black people opted to pursue vocational education, setting themselves up for work in the trades to become electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. It was not uncommon for them to then set themselves up in their own business and hire other Black workers as employees. Black entrepreneurship was another G.I. Bill breakthrough.
Thus the G.I. Bill democratized two pillars of American life: education and housing. In doing so it is not too strong a statement to say that the G.I. Bill created the American middle class. With its stored-up wealth, America jumped into its new affluence. After a brief pause, fears of a postwar depression flew out the window as aircraft plants quickly returned to making cars and other factories learned how to make the new labor-saving devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners which freed women up to address their changed aspirations.
Affluence created a brief, often wistfully discussed era: the era of the stay-at-home mom. Women came off their defense jobs and the family was able to live on the father’s income. The myth has mom baking pies and doing housework, greeting the kids as they came home from school every day. That did happen, but the era was short lived. Women’s changed aspirations and the rising cost of living drew women back into the work force to help support the family.
In fact, changed aspirations may be considered the most long-lasting consequence of the war. Depression-era men now aspired to economic security. Black people who glimpsed parity now aspired to equality; women who experienced independence now aspired to full emancipation.
The US had never been bombed or invaded and, in fact, it was stronger after the war, not weaker. The war reaffirmed people’s faith in the promise of the country. WWII was, in fact, the greatest social experiment in the country’s history. While the services did not alter segregation, they did promote social democracy among members drawn from every level of society and every religious and ethnic group. Collective living threw college graduates together with illiterates, Christians with Jews, Catholics with Protestants, Yankees with Southerners, and farm boys with street kids. The services provided reading classes for illiterates, hygiene courses for those needing them, and a well-balanced diet for all.4
The groundbreaking, though limited, efforts at establishing equality for Black people and women certainly impelled the way for advances thirty and forty years later. Segregation did reappear and millions of women defense workers did become unemployed and, as always, disillusionment was the product of raised expectations. But both the Black community and women now had the tools and experience to move forward.
It’s been said that our wildly heterogeneous nation was more completely united in purpose and spirit than at any time in our history. Those were simple times. Good had triumphed over evil. Things were going to get better. It was a rich emotional experience that gave everyone a vital sense of community. America has lived on that accumulation of cultural capital for nearly eighty years. To some, that account now seems almost exhausted.5