One thing that is vastly different now is that it took quite a while
to get home, and no one was released from the service for some
months. My father never made it to combat -- he was on a train to
leave from Jacksonville, FL for Europe with the first B-29s when VE
day cam along, and never did get transhipped for the Pacific, war was
over there before he got new orders.
Some family friends who were in North Africa, itally, and S. France
didn't get home until sometime in the late fall of 45, even though
their enlistment was up (they went in in 1939). Took quite a while,
and they said that trip on an converted aircraft carrier wasn't much
fun.
This meant, of course, that one didn't get dumped into civilian life
16 hours after a helicopter picked you up from a firefight in the
DMZ in Nam. That actually happened. Some poor draftee gets done
with his time while in Nam and the next day is sitting in his parents
living room!. Crazy. Whole units were rotated, and losses were made
up with personnel who stayed with the unit more or less permanently,
unlike Nam and later when individuals rotate in and out of units.
The guys stayed with their combat buddies until the left the service,
which is a whole different thing that what we do now.
Not that there weren't problems. Qutie a few divorces, family
problems, etc, but on the whole a much better outcome. Service time
was usually MUCH shorter than it is now, the majority of service men
in WWII only put in a couple years, and most of that was not combat.
A few units were in it from 1943 in North Africa all the way through,
but combat in Europe was June 44 to May 45. Pacific had horrible
events, but nothing like being blown up day in and day out like Nam
or Iraq.
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