For many vets, peace never came

On the windowsill next to his desk in College Hall, Tom Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, displays photographs of the important people in his life.

Next to pictures of his wife and three children are portraits of two men in uniform. Both fought in World War II. Both are captured in their prime - cinematically handsome, winsomely confident, the cream of American manhood.

Childers knows these men well. One is his uncle; the other, his father. They are his Muses, the inspiration behind his recent work, including the book he is writing now, The Best Years of Their Lives: Coming Home From World War II and Beyond.

The title is taken from the 1946 Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives. Given the book's thesis - for many vets, World War II and its aftermath were anything but "the best" - it's a title steeped in irony.

"The Brokaw 'Greatest Generation' romanticization of the men and women who fought in the so-called 'Good War' leaves the impression that everybody came back healthy, happy and well-adjusted," Childers says. "That didn't accord with my experience at all."

Childers, who now lives in Media, was born in 1946, one year after the war. He grew up in a house full of war stories and witnessed its aftershocks in his own family and the lives of others in his hometown near Chattanooga, Tenn.

His mother's brother, Howard Goodner, was a dashing basketball player who won a scholarship to Western Kentucky University. He was a radio operator aboard the last U.S. bomber shot down over Germany. The telegram informing the family that he was missing in action arrived on VE Day.

"His death tormented the family for years," Childers says.

Childers' father, also named Tom, did return from the war, after serving two years on a ground crew with the Eighth Air Force in England. But, Childers says, "His homecoming was not joyous."

Before shipping out, Tom Sr. had been married only a year. When he came home, he and his wife, Mildred, had to get to know each other again. They did so, Childers says, "with great difficulty."

The difficulty was compounded when Mildred discovered a letter revealing Tom had dallied with an Englishwoman. He insisted it was a friendship. She was convinced it was more. She never trusted him again.

"Tom was never the same after the war," Childers' mother often said, voicing the assertion so often that it became the theme of the family narrative.

Sometimes, when she and her husband would fight, she would finish him off with a verbal shotgun blast: "Why did you come back and Howard didn't?"

Outside his home, Tom Jr. saw other consequences. The father of his best friend lost both legs when an artillery shell burst overhead. Before the war, Willis Allen was a gregarious man who loved to dance. Afterward, he was a "basket case," as Time magazine callously referred to returning amputees. At night his buried anger would explode in awful rages.

"Unlike Vietnam, World War II ended in triumph," Childers says, "but there was also heartbreak, tragedy and loss. My family didn't feel like we 'won' the Second World War."

Curious about whether this was true for other families, Childers, spurred by all the WWII commemorations in the '90s, began researching the war's aftermath. What he discovered contradicted the Saturday Evening Post images of welcome-home parades and sailors being kissed on Broadway.

In 1946, 10,000 vets a month were admitted to VA hospitals with "psycho-neurotic disorder," now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Childers says. In 1947, men suffering from the disorder occupied half of all VA hospital beds.

Many men self-medicated with booze, which hastened the demise of shaky marriages. In 1945, the divorce rate hit what was then an all-time high (3.5 per thousand population, up from 1.9 in 1939). It rose again in 1946 (4.3 per thousand). In a 1947 poll, a third of vets reported being worse off than they were before the war; a fifth said they were completely alienated from civilian society.

"The price these men paid was far greater, and the duration of their struggles more protracted, than what the public record would have us believe," Childers says.

When Childers began his research, he discovered "virtually nothing" about the war's toll among books published immediately thereafter. Only women's magazines, with their focus on relationships, addressed the mental wreckage. The Ladies Home Journal published a story with the ironic title "Peace: It's a Problem."

The country was ready to move on, but many veterans couldn't and didn't, Childers found. The trauma they experienced was difficult to acknowledge, let alone talk about.

Even now, he says, "The people who are talking about it are their wives and widows, and their children, many of whom are in their 50s and 60s."

Their testimony about broken husbands and fathers will appear in Childers' new book. But the meat of it will be the tales of three men: his father; his best friend's father, Willis Allen; and Michael Gold, who lives in Rhode Island.

Gold, 86, was the navigator on a B-17 shot down over Germany in January 1944. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp on the Baltic Sea, where he nearly starved. Though it was not a concentration camp, Jews like Gold, as well as black prisoners, were sequestered in "ghetto barracks," which ratcheted up the stress.

After the war, Gold became a successful ob-gyn in New York. But nightmares stalked him - about being trapped in a crashing plane, about being called up for duty in the Pacific, about being imprisoned in the ghetto barracks. He threw spectacular fits over petty annoyances, often triggered by food. His marriage cracked under the strain. Relations with his sons were troubled. In the '70s, he was diagnosed with chronic PTSD.

"My impression was that he was a war hero," says Gold's oldest son, Dan, 53, a retired dentist, of West Chester. "He was a typical person of that generation in that he didn't show much emotion. I do remember him saying he wouldn't eat cabbage because that's all they got to eat at POW camp."

"It takes an extraordinary person of that generation, or their children, to talk about these matters," Childers says. "I've had to ask delicate questions, and most people have been incredibly open."

Childers has himself to thank. A Penn professor for 30 years, he has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has won several teaching awards. He's a patient listener who speaks in paragraphs that don't require copy editing. His voice is sweetened by the soothing cadences of his native Tennessee. He inspires trust.

The first book in his WWII trilogy, Wings of Morning, was about the bomber on which his uncle perished and the mysterious fate of its crew. His second, In the Shadows of War, was about Roy Allen, a sports star from Olney who survived an incredible series of wartime adventures in a fortuitous manner suggestive of Forrest Gump.

In writing Wings of Morning, Childers abandoned the detached approach of the historian for the techniques of the novelist - evocative scenes, vivid characters, narrative-advancing dialogue, all supported by meticulous research.

"I wanted to go beyond analysis and put people back in time, to recapture the experience of how people lived and how they felt," he said.

The result, published in 1995, was "so much more satisfying," Childers says. Better yet, it was a popular and critical success that was recently optioned for a movie.

"One of the things I discovered is that there is an enormous number of people who want to read about history, who care about history, and these are readers we professional historians normally don't reach," he says.

They are the readers Childers hopes to lure with his latest effort. His models are writers of fiction such as James Salter and Raymond Chandler.

His aim is not to debunk the heroism of the Greatest Generation but to deepen our appreciation for the magnitude of their sacrifice.

"They defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan," Childers says. "It was a phenomenal historical accomplishment and they deserve all the recognition, but they and their families paid a high price.

"I'm not a pacifist. I realize there are times when wars have to be fought. But war is a calamity, and those who beat the drum for war need to realize that the damage doesn't stop when the war stops. The consequences are not just political, but human, and the toll can stretch across generations.

"I never knew my uncle, but here I am still thinking about him and writing about him."