D-Day: The Greatest Generation and Casualties of the Great Depression

The D-Day landings shown in Saving Private Ryan are often cited as gripping realism, including the heavy, waterlogged packs that often dragged bleeding men to their watery doom even before they hit the beach. It's an amazing sequence as we follow Tom Hanks's Captain Miller from Omaha beach to his inland death. What is not, and probably cannot be shown in a movie, is the previous emotional baggage that so many men carried with them into combat. Most of the soldiers in the film, as in the real war, clearly were young men of working-class origin, humping not only entrenching tools and weapons but the psychic burden of the great depression in which they grew up.

Today, we glibly speak of the thirties or the depression as distant categories like the 17th-century thirty years war or the black death. Yet that bruising time, from 1929 to 19 41, is near enough to us for millions of Americans still to be alive as scarred veterans of what probably is the country's greatest trauma of the 20th century. The boys who later became the "greatest generation", of Tom Brokaw's phrase, that fought the second world war were the ones who somehow survived the manmade smashup.

 

I'm one of them, but was lucky enough to be just a few days too young for D-Day and the battle of the bulge, for which I was trained. My neighbourhood pal, "Aaron", was not so lucky to be sent to front line infantry. We'd grown up bonded as corner rat boys, as the local grandmothers called us. We were dismally average academically and athletically, neither of us "sensitive" or "artistic", except for Aaron's sole passion in playing the clarinet in the high school symphony. Tootling Mozart's clarinet concerto on his pawnshop-bought instrument, he fantasised the impossible, a career on the concert stage as a classical musician. In a way, it was what he lived for.

 

Back then, most of us boys lived in stuffy one rooms sometimes sharing a bed with one or two others, the alleys stank of garbage, and in the backroom, there was often a wife and mother or grandmother, the true depression victims, sitting in the dark in a kind of depressive shock. But we children, knowing no better, sloughed off much of our pain or deafened ourselves with denial.

 

On D-Day plus one Aaron had the playing fingers of his right hand shot off in a skirmish, and that was the end of that. He came back from the war seemingly unaffected by his wound, got a job with the government, married – but ended in a mental instititution. Private Ryan couldn't take time to tell us about people like Aaron or delve into the back story of the plebian characters like Horvath, Mellish and Caparzo in Miller's second ranger battalion. But most of them would have suffered a penetrating injury long before coming into the army. We couldn't talk about it because there wasn't then, and isn't even now, a vocabulary to cover PTSD from an economic collapse.

 

In America, the depression – no jobs, no money, foreclosures and evictions – lasted at least a dozen years, from the late "roaring" twenties until Pearl Harbour (when my mother finally found factory work sewing army uniforms); in Britain, it took even longer. Schools closed, kids were malnourished; you scrounged or you starved; pellagra was rife in rural areas and TB in the cities. Thousands of families – like the Joads in John Ford's adaptation of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath – and hundreds of thousands of young people, as in Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road and Scorcese's Boxcar Bertha, roamed the country in jalopies and boxcars looking for work, food, mercy.

 

The war came as a blessing to many such families including mine.