On the hangar deck of USS Enterprise in the autumn of 1945, men slept shoulder to shoulder in a space built for airplanes. They were Pacific veterans going home. Others waited overseas because their units were needed for occupation duty, because ships were scarce, or because someone else had more points. Coming home was a journey, and for many families it was also the beginning of a long adjustment.

Two victory days

Victory in Europe was announced on 8 May 1945. In London, crowds filled Whitehall and Piccadilly Circus, and Winston Churchill waved from the balcony of the Ministry of Health. In the United States the celebrations were more subdued, because the war against Japan continued and many families expected their sons to be sent to the Pacific. In Halifax, as the Canada chapter describes, celebration turned into rioting. Victory over Japan came in August, after the atomic bombs and the Soviet declaration of war. President Truman announced Japan’s acceptance of surrender on the evening of 14 August in Washington, and Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast reached Japanese listeners at noon on 15 August; Britain and much of the Commonwealth celebrated V-J Day on the 15th.

The celebrations were public, loud and sometimes chaotic, and they are among the most photographed scenes of the war. They were not universal. Families who had lost a son or husband often stayed home. Japanese Americans released from the camps were returning to West Coast towns where their homes and farms had been sold or vandalized. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, workers who had just learned what their plant made celebrated in Jackson Square, while the Knoxville Journal headline read simply that the war had ended. The bombs they had helped build are described in the Manhattan Project collection.

The voyage home

The U.S. Army used a points system, the Adjusted Service Rating Score, to decide who could leave first. Points were awarded for months of service, months overseas, combat decorations, campaign stars and dependent children under eighteen. Men with the highest scores went home first, while others were transferred to units bound for the Pacific or for occupation duty in Germany and Japan. The Navy’s Operation Magic Carpet converted warships, including aircraft carriers such as Enterprise, into troop transports. By October 1945 more than 700 vessels were involved in the broader repatriation effort, and in December nearly 700,000 people from all services were brought home.

Frustration grew as the pace slowed. In January 1946, after the War Department announced a slowdown in discharges, soldiers demonstrated in Manila, Paris, Frankfurt and other cities, and families at home flooded Congress with letters. The armed forces shrank from about 12 million people in mid-1945 to under 2 million within two years. While they waited, some service members studied. The U.S. Army ran a university at Shrivenham in Berkshire, England, from August 1945, where soldiers awaiting transport took college courses taught partly by American professors.

Some families had never lived under one roof. The War Brides Act of 28 December 1945 eased entry for foreign spouses and children of U.S. service members, and tens of thousands of British, Australian, French and other women crossed to the United States in 1946. Canada’s Department of National Defence recorded about 47,800 marriages of Canadian servicemen overseas, most of them to British women; the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 counts 43,464 war brides and 20,995 children admitted between 1942 and 1948. U.S. racial immigration restrictions still kept many Japanese wives out until later legislation changed the rules. The trip from a harbor to a new household was also a journey through immigration law, language and a stranger’s idea of home.

What the GI Bill offered

Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act while the war’s outcome was still being decided. Lawmakers remembered the economic shock that followed the First World War and the Bonus Army’s march on Washington in 1932, and they planned for millions of people to leave the forces at the same time. The American Legion drafted much of the bill and campaigned for it. Roosevelt signed it on 22 June 1944. It provided money for education and training, guaranties on loans for homes, farms and businesses, an unemployment allowance of $20 a week for up to 52 weeks, job counseling and placement, and more hospitals. For the main benefits a veteran generally needed at least 90 days of service and a discharge other than dishonorable.

Education became the bill’s most famous benefit. The VA could pay tuition, books and fees, generally up to $500 a year under the original program, plus a monthly living allowance. Colleges were overwhelmed: veterans made up about half of all college students in 1947, according to the National Archives. Far more veterans used the bill for other kinds of training than for college. The Department of Veterans Affairs counts about 2.2 million veterans in colleges and universities, about 3.5 million in vocational and technical schools, about 1.4 million in on-the-job training and nearly 700,000 in on-farm courses, about 7.8 million in all by the time the program ended on 25 July 1956.

The loan guaranty reshaped American housing. In 1944 the VA could guarantee half of a loan, up to $2,000, which reduced the risk to a private lender and made low or no down payments possible. The VA reports that it backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for World War II veterans between 1944 and 1952. Suburban developments such as Levittown on Long Island were built for veterans’ families. The guaranty was only as good as the local lender, builder and neighborhood that would accept it.

Who could use the benefits?

Black veterans earned the same federal benefits, but segregation shaped which colleges would admit them and which lenders and developers would do business with them. Historically Black colleges took in thousands of veterans and turned many away for lack of space. In much of the South, local VA offices and employment services were run by white officials who steered Black veterans toward unskilled work, and racial covenants and lending practices shut Black families out of most new suburbs, including Levittown. Some Native American veterans could not use loan guaranties on reservation trust land. The Rescission Acts of 1946 sharply restricted benefits for Filipino veterans who had served under U.S. command.

Homecoming could be dangerous. On 12 February 1946, in Batesburg, South Carolina, Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr., still in uniform and on his way home from discharge, was taken off a bus, beaten by the local police chief and blinded. An all-white federal jury acquitted the chief. The case helped move President Truman to create a civil rights committee in 1946 and, in July 1948, to order the desegregation of the armed forces. Mexican American veterans in Texas faced similar exclusion; in 1948 the physician Héctor P. García founded the American G.I. Forum in Corpus Christi, which gained national attention in 1949 when a funeral home in Three Rivers refused to hold a wake for Private Félix Longoria.

Japanese American veterans came home to a different injustice. Nisei soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Military Intelligence Service had served while their families were incarcerated, and some returned to towns where shop signs still refused service to Japanese Americans. Their record became a central argument in the long campaign for redress that ended with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The United States chapter tells the story of the camps.

What families carried after the war

Wartime clinicians spoke of combat fatigue and combat exhaustion. Post-traumatic stress disorder entered the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual in 1980. In homecoming accounts it is possible to read about nightmares, drinking, silence and strained marriages and still leave a veteran’s diagnosis open. Families also remember laughter, caregiving and work, sometimes in the same interview. A January 1946 law created the VA’s Department of Medicine and Surgery and let it hire doctors outside the civil service and affiliate its hospitals with medical schools.

The Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, a former prisoner of the Japanese, described a homecoming followed by nightmares and heavy drinking. His wife Cynthia persuaded him to attend Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade, and he understood his conversion to Christianity as a turning point. His daughter Cynthia Garris later recalled a difficult early period; his son Luke remembered his father nursing two sick pet rats back to health. Their recollections connect public testimony about faith and recovery with the small acts by which children knew their father. Divorce rates in the United States, Britain and Canada rose sharply after the war and then fell back.

Other armies came home too. British servicemen received a civilian “demob” suit and returned to a country still on rations, with bread rationed from July 1946. Canada’s Veterans Charter offered education, land settlement and re-establishment credits. German and Japanese soldiers came home to ruined cities, often years late; hundreds of thousands were held as prisoners in the Soviet Union into the 1950s. For many families on every side, the war ended not in 1945 but when a letter, a returning soldier or a final notice arrived.

The war on screen and in memory

William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) follows three veterans returning to one American town: a former bombardier who cannot find work, a banker who comes home to a changed family, and a sailor, played by the double amputee Harold Russell, who faces others’ reactions to his disability. It was made so soon after the war that many in its first audiences had just welcomed people home, and it won the Academy Award for best picture. Half a century later, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (1998) popularized a tribute to the Americans who lived through the Depression and the war. Read side by side, the two works show the distance between a period portrait of difficult adjustment and a later generation’s remembrance.

Families who want to record their own history can start with an object: a discharge paper, a graduation photograph, a mortgage envelope, a union card, a ration book. Ask what happened in the first week back, who helped and what took longest to talk about. Record names, dates and places with the speaker’s permission, keep their own words beside the documents that confirm details, and mark what remains uncertain. The Library of Congress Veterans History Project collects eligible accounts, and the National WWII Museum publishes an interview guide. For a model of a family archive read with care, see Bert and Dot Finch in the Ardennes collection, and for the collection as a whole return to the Home Life hub or the previous chapter on other home fronts.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

Victory and homecoming

Sources and further reading

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