Sunday, May 08, 2005

VE Day

They keep talking about VE Day itself, but I'd be more interested to hear about the aftermath. How did men who had spent perhaps their entire adult lives in combat zones go back to working in an office or a factory? What happened to women who needed to work to support themselves but had to give up their wartime jobs to veterans coming back home? What kind of long-term psychological effects did people who had been born in a war zone and spent their entire childhood in a war zone suffer? What happened to people who developed their political awareness as WWII broke out and grew up to be young adults whose entire political awareness had taken place during propoganda-saturated wartime? How did they transition from rationing to not rationing? What happened to prisoners of war? How did people in internment camps reintegrate into the rest of society? This would all be much more interesting to hear about than how everyone ran out of their offices and jumped on cars and looted liquor stores and partied.

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