I was dumbfounded today during our discussion of PTSD and its associations with warfare when Mr. Mitchell commented on how representations of the disorder are conspicuously absent from many depictions of WWII as compared to other grand conflicts like WWI or the Vietnam war. I had never really thought about it, given that I associate more with the film and literature that was created during my lifetime, but WWII didn't engage the topic of PTSD for a significant period after the end of the war.
I did a bit of research into how the conflict has been portrayed (in literature, theatre, and film, the latter being my greatest area of expertise) and was shocked to see how long it took for soldiers to be portrayed as anything but inhuman and unfeeling champions for truth and justice. There are always exceptions that hang on the periphery, but for the most part films and literature about WWII based themselves around heroic and steadfast figures, portrayed by people like John Wayne.
Compare this treatment to that of WWI and Vietnam. WWI is portrayed as a maddening experience wrought with emotional tortures in pieces such as "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", "Mrs. Dalloway", and "All Quiet on the Western Front". Even though PTSD wasn't fully understood at the time, these depictions are still able to capture a lot of what a soldier must endure. Vietnam is even more complex and nuanced in its portrayals, with films such as "The Deer Hunter", "Platoon", "Full Metal Jacket", and "Born on the Fourth of July" realistically and brutally depicting the horrors of combat and the debilitating effects of PTSD. We can see that film and literature had the potential to portray WWII realistically, but because of the rhetoric and heroic fantasy built around the war it was tacitly considered un-American to do so. When the Vietnam war emerged into the public mindset, Kurt Vonnegut and many other authors broke free from these restrictions and tried to show a truly realistic WWII soldier in their literature. Film, however, continued to lag behind reality. WWII films would still draw crowds and receive raving reviews, but if it was ever portrayed as a horror of human experience, those affected would be civilians or otherwise unrelated individuals. Even films like "Saving Private Ryan" which depict PTSD only do so with a untrained soldier tasked with cartography, preserving the other soldiers as steadfast and relentless patriots. It has only been in the past decade or so that film has been able to portray strong able-bodied individuals breaking and becoming emotionally crippled as a result of WWII, with characters such as Lynn "Buck" Compton in the fantastic miniseries "Band of Brothers".
Discussing these themes in class has opened my mind to whole new realms of thought about the progression and evolution of fiction and the effects of rhetoric on culture and the resulting delusion of historical reality. I would love to do more than the 20 minutes of research I did here to uncover things like if early realistic depictions of WWII era warfare never occured or have simply been forgotten, or why exactly there was and is such a refusal to believe WWII era soldiers were anything more than superheros that fought "the bad guys".
And it's easy to imagine how this general tide of praise and celebration of veterans as steadfast patriotic heroes might have made a returning soldier who was suffering from something like PTSD, who had memories that didn't fit this script, feel quite lonely. This was the generation that didn't like to talk about things like this, and historically, I think there was a likely a tendency, conscious or not, to use WWII to kind of "correct" or "erase" some of the ambivalence left over from the First World War: if that one was a quagmire with no clear winners or losers, and the participation of the US continued to be seen with skepticism, this war was framed as a clear morally just cause from the start. The traumatized returning soldier simply doesn't fit this narrative.
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