The cost of the invasion in matériel and lives lost was enormous, but Allied troops were now planted on French soil. To guard against undue optimism that the war in Europe would soon be over, the war correspondents stressed the difficulties that lay ahead. “On the German side in Western Europe,” Ernie Pyle told his readers on June 22, “we face an opponent who had been building his defenses and his forces for four years. A great army of men were here waiting for us, well prepared and well equipped.”

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The Americans pushed inland through the bocage, a landscape of fields or pastures, divided by immense hedgerows, weeds, bushes, and trees. It was difficult for tanks to move forward and for infantrymen to get past or detour around German machine-gun positions and snipers in the trees. It would take until the end of July to break through. The total number of U.S. Army casualties from June 6 to July 24, 1944, reached 63,360, with 16,293 deaths. These figures did not include the additional 25 percent to 33 percent of men who were removed from the front lines with “combat fatigue” and sent off to “exhaustion centers” established by “divisional neuropsychiatrists.”

J. D. Salinger landed on Utah Beach and then moved northward with his unit. In “The Magic Foxhole,” he tells the story of Lewis Gardner, the company point man, who, looking for shelter, jumps from foxhole to foxhole, finding in each of them a ghostlike soldier.

By the end of August, Paris was liberated. Fifty-five percent of Americans surveyed now believed victory would come before the year was over.

The story was never published, perhaps because it was too grim for the home front to bear.

Years later, Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, recalled that her father, remembering his time in Normandy, “spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one in particular, ‘All those big strong boys’—he shook his head—‘always on the front line, always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them,’ he said, his hand flat, palm out, pushing arc-like waves away from him.”

Allied troops continued to meet heavy and often unexpected resistance from the Germans as they extended their front lines. Still, their progress, made easier by supremacy in the air, appeared inexorable. By the end of August, Paris was liberated. Fifty-five percent of Americans surveyed now believed victory would come before the year was over.

On September 5, 1944, in preparation for the arrival of peace in Europe, but not in the Pacific, the War Department released the preliminary plans for demobilization it had been working on for almost two years. “Prior to the defeat of Japan,” demobilization would be “partial.” Only soldiers considered “non-essential” would be released to civilian life.

Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the Republican nominee for president, criticized the administration for planning a delayed, gradual, and partial demobilization, instead of bringing the troops home “at the earliest practical moment.” The Democrats, he warned, were “afraid to let men out of the Army,” because they feared that the rapid demobilization of millions would result in mass unemployment. To prevent this impending disaster, Dewey asked voters to elect him, instead of giving Roosevelt a fourth term.

The president did not respond to Dewey’s charges, but cabinet members and chief aides did. “There are only two things that will affect the speed of demobilization,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a Republican, declared at a Washington press conference. “One is the military necessity of retaining sufficient troops in service to quickly and permanently defeat Japan. The other is available shipping. Except for those limitations, the Army is arranging to return those eligible for demobilization as quickly as possible. No economic or political factors enter into that planning.”

In early September,” General Omar Bradley recalled in his memoirs, “most men in the Allied high command believed that victory over Germany was imminent.” They were quickly proved wrong.

In September, on their way into Germany, the Allies were defeated in Operation Market Garden in Holland, with seventeen thousand battle losses in nine days, then bogged down in the Hürtgen Forest, just east of the Belgian-German border, for a full three months. “The enemy had all the advantages of strong defensive country,” Eisenhower would later write in his war memoir. “The weather was abominable and the German garrison was particularly stubborn.”

Of the 120,000 Allied troops who entered the forest, more than 30,000 would be killed, wounded, or captured. Thousands more, exhausted, panicked, disoriented, not knowing if replacements were on the way or how long they would remain under enemy fire, broke down and had to be pulled off the front lines.

On September 27, Joseph C. Harsch reported in The Christian Science Monitor that “all the news of events on the Western Front and all the estimates, official and semiofficial, of their meaning combine today into a conclusion that the early defeat of Germany has ceased to be a reasonable expectation and that in all probability victory is to be achieved not this autumn, but next spring and summer.”

“Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”

The toll of German resistance and counterattack on the Allied combat units was enormous. General George Marshall, army chief of staff, was so disturbed by the growing number of men who had to be withdrawn from the front lines that in late September he forwarded to Generals Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, and Mark Clark a memorandum from the army surgeon general which suggested that the longer men remained at the front, the greater their susceptibility to psychiatric breakdown.

Eisenhower distributed the memorandum “to all commanding officers down to the regimental level in the European Theater.” Secretary of War Stimson, on reading the memorandum, confided to his diary that it “gave a rather appalling analysis of what our infantrymen are confronting in the present war in the way of psychosis.”

The report highlighted what the enlisted men and officers in the field already knew. “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat.’ . . . Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Thus psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.” The number of casualties could, however, be reduced by providing soldiers with “a break” from combat and the “promise of an honorable release . . . at a definite time.”

Recommendations that limits be put on the number of days GIs and marines spent in combat were eminently sensible; none of the commanding generals in the field disagreed with them. Unfortunately, it was too late in the war—and replacements in too short supply—to make any substantial change in rotation policies.

The consequences were far-reaching. Overburdened infantrymen who had been on the front lines for months, some since the Normandy landings, remained there for weeks and months on end. Their effectiveness declined the longer they were in the field; they became irritable or unresponsive, unable to sleep or communicate, angry, snappish, tearful, sometimes violent. The need for replacements was extreme and exacerbated as battle casualties in the European theater increased from 31,617 in October 1944 to 77,726 in December and non-battle casualties from 28,364 to 56,695.

In mid-October, Roosevelt, in a message to Churchill, acknowledged what was now obvious. “All of us are now faced with an unanticipated shortage of manpower.” By mid-December, even before the German counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge, General Omar Bradley would recall in his memoir that he was most “preoccupied” not by the “possibility of an enemy attack through the Ardennes but rather an alarming crisis in manpower. Not only were we short of divisions, we were also critically short of manpower within the divisions. Particularly riflemen.”

The manpower shortages compelled the War Department not only to rethink its policy of barring Black GIs from combat, but to cut back the number of servicemen stationed stateside, retaining only those disqualified for overseas duty by age or physical condition. Privates and noncommissioned officers were culled from stateside divisions, trained as riflemen, and sent overseas.

Those who returned home having come close to death would find it difficult, if not impossible, to leave the war behind them and readjust to civilian life.

Dave Brubeck, already an accomplished jazz pianist, serving in a military band at a Riverside, California, base, was reassigned, trained, then shipped overseas as a replacement infantry rifleman. The Army Specialized Training Program recruits, among them Henry Kissinger and Kurt Vonnegut, were reassigned to infantry divisions bound for Germany. Because he spoke perfect German, Kissinger was attached to an intelligence unit. Vonnegut was not so fortunate. He was thrown into combat in the Battle of the Bulge and taken prisoner on December 19, 1944.

The Allies had been caught by surprise by the German counteroffensive. In little more than a month of combat, nineteen thousand Americans had been killed, forty-eight thousand wounded, more than some twenty-three thousand taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge.

There were 550,089 young men wounded or killed in battle in the last and bloodiest year of the war in Europe. Many more were removed from duty, sent off to receive medical care, and evacuated with non-battle injuries and illnesses. Those who returned home having come close to death would find it difficult, if not impossible, to leave the war behind them and readjust to civilian life.

It was not only the soldiers who would find it difficult to adjust; those on the home front had also been changed by the war. Wives, girlfriends, and mothers, whose lives had been turned upside down when their husbands, boyfriends, and sons were inducted and sent into harm’s way, would face their own struggles when their loved ones returned from overseas.

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Excerpted from The Wounded Generation: Going Home after World War II by David Nasaw, Copyright (c) 2025 David Nasaw. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.