Book Reviews

Brandan P. Buck | 10.31.2025 10:30 AM

The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II, by David Nasaw, Penguin Random House, 496 pages, $35

"There wasn't any band there; there wasn't anybody greeting me except the girl that I had [written] to while I was overseas. That was my homecoming." That poignant moment recounted by World War II veteran Clinton Riddle is one of the many vignettes that populate David Nasaw's new book, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II.

Nasaw, an emeritus professor of history at the City University of New York, marshals such experiences to argue that, beyond the ticker-tape parades, millions of men like Riddle filtered home to little fanfare. After returning to America, many struggled with alcohol addiction, marital problems, unemployment, crowded housing, and psychological issues that medical authorities didn't fully understand. Nasaw's book is a corrective to the simplistic narrative of stoicism, unity, and triumph that dominates conventional narratives of "the greatest generation." It isn't a work of revisionism so much as an act of recovery, one that elevates voices of pain and disquiet that were understood in the years after the war but faded from popular memory in the decades thereafter.

While the book bills itself as a history of veterans' lives after the conflict, Nasaw adroitly begins his narrative in the thick of the fighting, tying the experiences of returning veterans to their experiences abroad. Beyond the scarring practice of combat, Nasaw illustrates a military culture awash in alcohol abuse and philandering, not to mention soldiers' nagging concerns about spousal infidelity back home. He continues his narrative through the immediate postwar period, with two final chapters covering the individual and institutional legacies of the war.

Nasaw's goal is to incorporate the toll on returning veterans and those........

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