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This chapter elaborates the reasons why Australian veterans of World War I, American veterans of World War II, Taiwanese veterans, and even German and Japanese veterans managed to do well after the guns fell silent. It explains why and how Soviet veterans of World War II eventually transformed themselves from unrewarded victors into central pillars of the last Soviet sociopolitical order in the 1970s and 1980s. It also details several cases of successful veterans' movements, and veteran communities that piggy-backed off the veterans' cases. The chapter argues that the successes of veterans came about as a result of a constellation of forces, which can be broken down into three general areas: the veterans' organizational power and their skill in lobbying aggressively for their cause; the domestic environment they found themselves in; and the international constellation, within which both veterans and the elites they confronted in their domestic political system moved in.

This chapter presents a comparative history of minority communities, in this case the impact of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the GI Bill of Rights). It addresses the reasons why Japanese American World War II veterans were able to make greater use of the benefits offered by the law to broker their group's postwar social advancement, while black veterans were restricted in their enjoyment of its advantages. In addition to more potent discrimination against blacks in areas such as housing, one salient distinction between the groups that the chapter points to is their differing educational preparation, which led to comparatively greater use by Japanese Americans of the college benefits available under the bill.

After World War I, struggles over black veterans’ benefits served as a milestone in the broader civil rights movement, turning veterans’ personal readjustment to civilian life into a collective racial struggle for social justice. By forcing the federal government to offer (limited) protection of black veterans’ economic and medical rights, the struggle over veterans’ benefits served as the opening gambit of a civil rights strategy that would gain momentum throughout the twentieth century as the movement focused on enlisting the federal government as an ally, rather than viewing it as a foe, in dismantling Jim Crow. Every disabled black veteran who secured hospitalization or compensation was celebrated for achieving a minor victory in the overall campaign for equal rights, helping these men avoid feeling emasculated by their dependence on government aid. The civil rights movement thus inadvertently helped ensure that one of the major goals of federal veteran policy, the quick reabsorption of veterans into civilian and community life, was achieved.

This chapter look at cases that complicate any simple correlation between victorious wars and veterans' high postwar status. It examines the United States and the United Kingdom after World War I, the United Kingdom after World War II, Soviet veterans after both world wars, and China. It also elaborates how victory did not prevent many former soldiers from feeling betrayed by their governments, and often by society as well. The chapter discusses American World War I veterans that point to some gains after a limited contribution to the war effort and after many years of agitation. It describes the United Kingdom, long-suffering frontoviki in the USSR, and China's veterans that languished in obscurity for decades despite having paid a far higher price for their victory.

Chapter Four examines how federal efforts to rehabilitate disabled African American veterans led to new forms of racial knowledge and racial labor control in postwar America. A key agent in this process was the Federal Board of Vocational Education (FBVE), which was charged with rehabilitating the citizen-solider into the citizen-worker. Through the stages of diagnosis/benefits, training, job placement and hospitalization, FBVE officials struggled to determine whether they could, or even should, mend broken black bodies often seen as defective by definition, often accusing black veterans of trying to “unjustly profit from their innate inferiority.” Black veterans rejected these characterizations, arguing for their right to rehabilitation as soldiers, citizens, workers and men. The FBVE’s efforts to salvage black veterans for work in the postwar labor force revealed a key attempt to frame social policy along biological lines, and to rationalize racial labor hierarchies as a constituent part of the republican body politic.

This chapter examines the historical development of Liberation Day in the Northern Mariana Islands, along with the various commemorations created by Americans and Japanese in a place dubbed “the land without heroes.” Liberation Day, celebrates not the invasion of American military forces on June 15, 1944, but the release of civilians from Camp Susupe, Saipan, where Chamorro and Refaluwasch families lived under the rules of the American military government. Unlike celebrations of American liberation in Guam, most reminders of the war in the Northern Mariana Islands invoke feelings of apathy and loss. This chapter first recounts the “liberation” of Camp Susupe before considering how several Chamorros from Saipan sought to impart a sense of cohesiveness and certainty in terms of indigenous perceptions of war, memory, and history. It also discusses attempts to express Chamorro loyalty to America, the Chamorros' cold reception of some American veterans in the Northern Mariana Islands, and the making of the American Memorial Park in Garapan.

This chapter focuses on the GAR and defines it as an interracial social organization—as thought by its members both black and white. Since black and white soldiers had served together in the Civil War, African American veterans joined this organization, and they were able to do so because most white veterans believed that their organization should include these men. African Americans participated in the political life of the organization at the state level. They spoke at annual meetings about matters profound and mundane and held elective office. No explanation is needed for why white veterans, who came of age in a society that accepted race-based slavery, sometimes rejected black veterans. This chapter, therefore, examines why most white veterans accepted black soldiers as their political equals, a status that no other organization granted black Americans in this era.

This chapter describes how African American veterans' associations, their auxiliaries, their sons and daughters, and other elements of the African American GAR circle fought the efforts of those who would forget slavery and the black military experience in the Civil War. Black veterans and their associates used their membership in the GAR to contest Civil War Memory on the local, state, and national stages. Locally, the African American GAR circle participated in a number of activities that commemorated various aspects of the black freedom struggle, such as Emancipation Day celebrations and Fifteenth Amendment commemorations. Nationally, African American posts took part in patriotic celebrations such as Fourth of July observances, centennial celebrations, and integrated parades at annual GAR meetings.

This chapter looks at the challenges faced by progressives in veterans organizations, the labor movement, national politics, and the 1948 presidential election in the U.S. The impact of domestic communism and anti-communism commands a prominent place here. The anti-communist affidavit required of union officials by the Taft–Hartley law of 1947 was an early warning sign of the tidal wave of anti-communism starting to wash over American political culture. No matter how the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) acted, dealing with communist influence in its unions would divide the federation. However, the problem of communism in American public life went far beyond the confines of organized labor. It erupted most visibly in the Hollywood film studios and the broadcasting industry. Conflict within the American Veterans Committee (AVC) makes for an especially illuminating case study. The chapter then considers the fate of Harry Truman's “Fair Deal” program during his second term.

The chapter assesses the government-sponsored periodical Carry On, which frequently used the term “spirit” not just to describe the resilience of individual disabled veterans, but also the intellectual and artistic capabilities that distinguished Anglo-Americans from other races and ethnicities. In its run from 1918 to 1919,Carry On showcased the federal government’s new rehabilitative and vocational services by implicitly and explicitly drawing on evolutionary frameworks to show that only Anglo-American men were capable of transforming a prosthetic into a soul-enriching, civilization-advancing device. To make this point clearer, the magazine features several disabled African American soldiers, whose evolutionary stagnancy renders them unable to make prosthetics spiritually transformative instruments. Their depicted deficiencies are similar to the articles’ renderings of German primitiveness and brutality. In this light, the magazine shows just how slippery and manipulative racial codification could be in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter evaluates the gains won by black military service in the Civil War. Black soldiers won formal citizenship that was undermined by pervasive white racism, which impacted the ways in which laws related to citizenship and black rights were administered and interpreted. It looks at the relationship that black service created between black veterans and the US government, as well as between African Americans who came under direct federal purview and the federal government. It explains why African Americans considering serving the US in subsequent conflicts have faced the same dilemma that black men faced during the Civil War – why fight for a country that mistreats members of your community?

This chapter deals with black activists’ post-war campaign to convince federal officials to encode black citizenship and political rights in law. Black military service during the Civil War served as a linchpin in African Americans’ post-war arguments for black rights and citizenship. This chapter explains the dynamics of the Reconstruction period that led Congressional Republicans to pass the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. This chapter also covers the downfall of Reconstruction and the process by which, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, white Americans undermined the rights and citizenship that African Americans possessed in theory.

The introduction lays out the structure of Hymns for the Fallen in broad strokes, noting the chronological scope of the study (35 war films made after the close of the Vietnam War), the subgenre (prestige combat films) and the book’s larger approach to film sound and film music. The three elements of the soundtrack—dialogue, sound effects, and music—and their relationship analytically within the book are also introduced. The book’s larger analogy between serious war films and war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is drawn by comparison of scenes from Hamburger Hill (1987) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The formative impact of the Vietnam War on Hollywood combat film production is also noted. The figures of the American soldier and veteran are presented as central both to combat film narratives and to the target audiences for these films.

This chapter describes President Harry Truman's outrage toward the prevalence of racial violence and discrimination in America. After discovering that African American veterans had been murdered in several southern states, he declared, “I can't approve of such goings on and . . . I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause.” This statement reveals a larger executive commitment to civil rights than Franklin Roosevelt was ever willing to advocate. In creating a Presidential Commission on Civil Rights and issuing his 1948 executive order to ensure “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services, without regard to race,” Truman demonstrated an unprecedented presidential interest in the rights of African Americans.