The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative History

By Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant and Mark Edele

What happened to veterans of the nations involved in the world wars? How did they fare when they returned home and needed benefits? How were they recognized—or not—by their governments and fellow citizens? Where and under what circumstances did they obtain an elevated postwar status?

In this sophisticated comparative history of government policies regarding veterans, Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant, and Mark Edele examine veterans' struggles for entitlements and benefits in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, and Australia after both global conflicts. They illuminate how veterans' success or failure in winning benefits were affected by a range of factors that shaped their ability to exert political influence. Some veterans' groups fought politicians for improvements to their postwar lives; this lobbying, the authors show, could set the foundation for beneficial veteran treatment regimes or weaken the political forces proposing unfavorable policies.

The authors highlight cases of veterans who secured (and in some cases failed to secure) benefits and status after wars both won and lost; within both democratic and authoritarian polities; under liberal, conservative, and even Leninist governments; after wars fought by volunteers or conscripts, at home or abroad, and for legitimate or subsequently discredited causes. Veterans who succeeded did so, for the most part, by forcing their agendas through lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing public support. The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century provides a large-scale map for a research field with a future: comparative veteran studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501751646

Book preview

THE POLITICS OF VETERAN BENEFITS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY

MARTIN CROTTY, NEIL J. DIAMANT, AND MARK EDELE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Victors Victorious

2. Victors Defeated

3. Benefits for the Vanquished

4. The Politically Weak

5. The Politically Powerful

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have all acquired debts of gratitude to others in the research and writing that have led to this book, most separately, but some collectively as a triumvirate.

Martin wishes to thank the staff at the National Library of Australia, where much of the primary research for the sections on Australia was undertaken, and the Australian Research Council and the University of Queensland for funding portions of this research. Neil offers his gratitude to Dickinson College’s Research and Development Committee, the University of Queensland, and the University of Melbourne for providing travel funds to Australia, as well as to David Gerber, a pioneer in the comparative study of veterans, and the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo for the opportunity to discuss some of the preliminary findings of this book. He also acknowledges Shuto Sekoguchi for his research assistance, Alex Bates for help with translation, and Sam Albert for brewing many excellent cups of coffee while writing at Crazy Mocha. Mark gives his thanks to Brigitte Edele for helping to remember Ernst Jandl and to Debra McDougall for finding the lost volume of his poetry, to Rustam Gadzhiev, who provided research assistance, and to Oleg Beyda and Fallon Mody, who helped with editing. He also acknowledges the assistance of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140101100).

We would all like to thank Emily Andrew, senior editor at Cornell University Press, for her enthusiastic embrace of our proposed book; Michelle Witkowski of Westchester Publishing Services for her skillful and kind shepherding of the manuscript through production; the anonymous readers for their thoughtful and constructive criticism; and Angel Alcalde of the University of Melbourne, who read the entire manuscript and provided detailed feedback and advice on further sources, which led to various last-minute changes to our text. And we are all appreciative of the support offered by partners and families. They tolerated our absences and kept the home fires burning while we did battle with archives that were reluctant to reveal their secrets, or drafts that resisted taking the shape we wanted them to—and put up with the fits of absent-mindedness that afflict all scholars inclined to mull over ideas at inopportune times.

Perhaps self-indulgently, we’d all like to thank each other too. The writing meetings in Canberra, Melbourne, Carlisle, and Brisbane have invariably been fruitful as well as fun, and we have all benefited enormously from exposure to each other’s ideas, insights, and inspiration.

Earlier versions of sections in chapters 2 and 4 were first published as part of Martin Crotty and Mark Edele, Total War and Entitlement: Towards a Global History of Veteran Privilege, Australian Journal of Politics & History 59, no. 1 (2013): 25–31. We thank Wiley Publishing Global for permission to reuse some of the material here.

Introduction

Veterans in Comparative Perspective

Six soldiers returned from a war: an Australian, an American, a Chinese, a Russian, a German, and a Brit. Each said, in their respective languages to their respective governments and societies: War was hell; we sacrificed; we deserve compensation and respect. Governments considered these requests. Of these six, however, only three—the American, the Australian, and the German—received levels of compensation that came close to restoring what they had lost through their war service. Their Chinese, Russian, and British counterparts received very little. They were pushed aside with arguments ranging from Civilians suffered too, to What you did was what was expected and nothing more, to On the battlefield you may have been a hero, but here you are just like everyone else. What explains such wide variation in postwar outcomes for veterans? Where and under what conditions did veterans emerge from the largest wars in the twentieth century with significant material recompense and higher status than their civilian counterparts? These are the questions this book seeks to answer.

Finding answers will not be easy—soldiering and then veteranhood were experienced very differently across space and time. Surveying the broad landscape of military engagements in the twentieth century, we can find soldiers in cutting-edge fighter aircraft at thirty thousand feet, in submarines, in tanks and armored personnel carriers, and most commonly on their feet or bellies in Malayan jungles, Ukrainian steppes, and North African deserts. Aside from troops engaged in combat—a distinct minority in all modern forces—soldiers also served as aircraft ground crew, postmen, chaplains, mechanics, intelligence officers, cooks, quartermasters, doctors and medics, trainers, recruiters, transport logisticians, and engineers and in hundreds of other noncombatant roles. Wartime service varied considerably in time as well: some soldiers served from the commencement of hostilities to victory or defeat; others, such as those picked off by rifle fire in the Australian boats approaching the Gallipoli shoreline in World War I, or recently arrived reinforcements caught in the preemptive Soviet artillery barrage while assembling for the German assault at Kursk in World War II, were cut down immediately on entering the fray. How soldiers returned home also varied widely. Some were unscathed, unscarred, and even improved by experiences that expanded their mental and professional horizons and boosted their confidence. Others were far less fortunate, returning with wounds physical and mental, visible and invisible, ranging from light to severe.

Homecoming and veteran experiences also varied widely. Some returned to undamaged countries with well-functioning government agencies and grateful societies. They received financial compensation, preferential access to at least some employment, cheap homes, subsidized or free education and training, free and comprehensive health care, and ritual recognition through, for example, medals and parades. For such veterans, the experience of war might represent a short blip in an otherwise smooth life course, or even accelerate postwar professional success if they managed to acquire useful skills and contacts. These were the most fortunate ones. Other veterans returned to homelands that had been devastated by war, to societies that viewed them with suspicion and nations that wanted to forget. The most unfortunate returned to desolation: families and friends killed, homes obliterated, and rulers who showed them no gratitude. War robbed them of their physical and mental health, loved ones, aspirations, and the purposes and ideals they considered core to their identity. Some even lost their homelands. Readjustment to peacetime life was painful, long, and unrewarding.

We could drill down even deeper and examine individual biographies of veterans across all combatant nations, multiplying the meanings of the word veteran in the process. Yet we have written this book to do the opposite: locate similarities and patterns among the widely divergent postwar experiences of demobilized soldiers. Part of the reason, we expect, may have been curiosity—after reading the introductory paragraph of this chapter, weren’t you, reader, curious about why Americans, Australians, and Germans were fortunate and Chinese, Russians, and Brits were not? We were. But there were other, perhaps more scholarly, reasons. First, extensive research on veterans around the world—spanning China, Russia, and Japan to Germany, Canada, and the United States—has found that despite experiential differences in war and macro-level variation in how they returned home, veterans often faced similar challenges. Nearly universally, they had aged, matured, and acquired a distinctive set of experiences that made them feel different from those who did not serve.¹ Even if a veteran’s home country had not felt the physical impact of war, cities, towns, and even neighborhoods had changed, and these demanded adaptation to new circumstances. Skills that were once important might not be valued anymore; fiancées or wives might have found other partners; and civilians who remained at home during the war might have gained status at veterans’ expense. Across space and time, the soldiers who had widely different war experiences shared similar worries once home: Who will hire me? Will I be able to find a partner, or get along with my spouse? Many also had new concerns and worries regarding their physical health (Who will help me with my disability? How much pension will I receive?), upward mobility and status (Will I be compensated, honored, or at least treated with respect?).

Around the world, veterans also asked questions beyond their individual circumstances. Many found some sense of shared identity and camaraderie with other veterans, viewing their individual challenges as connected. Their status and power in their country’s civilian hierarchy was a common concern because it had direct implications for many aspects of their individual well-being and life chances. Among veterans who had fought for states that ceased to exist because of war, or for regimes that committed extensively documented war crimes, or simply on the losing side, this issue raised particularly vexing questions. Why would a government and society reward millions of former soldiers who fought for a state or regime that no longer existed or for a discredited cause? Why direct resources to those who had been defeated?

But perhaps the broadest similarity between veterans—bridging both wartime and postwar experiences—has been the roles of government and society in both drafting them for war and dealing with their problems afterward. Given veterans’ numbers, and the potential mayhem they could cause having been exposed to military-style organization and, in many cases, organized violence, it was difficult for state officials to avoid an activist role in veterans’ reintegration. After World War II, for example, and including only the principal combatant countries of Germany, Japan, China, Italy, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States, there were some ninety-two million men who had served in the armed forces and survived.² In the former Soviet Union alone there were twenty-five million veterans of the Great Patriotic War, constituting 15 percent of the population.³ Even in the absence of mass wars after World War II, veterans’ numbers have made them a force to be reckoned with. In the United States, in 2012 there were 21.8 million veterans of various wars, most of them male (with 1.6 million women). Roughly 1.3 million of them served in multiple wars (837,000 in Gulf Wars I and II in Iraq; 211,000 in the Korean and Vietnam Wars; and 147,000 in World War II and Korea).⁴ Their numbers are in decline as veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam pass on (the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated a 2019 veteran population of a little over nineteen million), but they still represent a sizeable portion of the US population and demand serious financial resources for purposes such as veteran health care.⁵ For the 2020 fiscal year President Trump requested $220.2 billion from Congress to provide veterans, their families, and survivors the benefits, care and support they have earned through sacrifice and service to the Nation.⁶ In Russia, only one million of the twenty-five million Soviet veterans of the Great Patriotic War were still alive in 2004, which declined to about a quarter of a million ten years later, but their status and benefits far outstrip those of the rising number of demobilized soldiers of the undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, not to mention the new military intervention in Syria or the not-so-secret war in Ukraine.⁷ In China, between three and six million soldiers have been demobilized from the People’s Liberation Army since 1978, adding to the millions of veterans from conflicts from the 1940s through the 1960s (including both civil war and foreign wars). Official Chinese sources cite a total number of fifty-seven million veterans in 2017. In a pattern quite unusual for countries during peacetime, China is frequently shaken by veteran protests.⁸ Even Australia, a relatively minor player in the armed conflicts of the twentieth century and a nation of only twenty-five million today, produced over a million veterans from its efforts in the world wars, and hundreds of thousands more returned from post–World War II operations.⁹ As impressive as some of these numbers are, states have not always been concerned with veterans’ individual welfare and at times have restricted their ability to organize and to press their claims. Historically, governments have been better known for strategically resettling them (and thereby reducing their threat) by setting up colonies, providing land grants, using them to settle underpopulated or strategically important frontier areas, and employing them in large numbers as part of a state’s security apparatus, patterns that appeared as far back as ancient Rome and China.¹⁰

But veterans have refused to go away. The dramatic rise in their prominence as a political force, without which a book like this could not have been written, was clearly correlated with the advent of mass warfare and total war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹¹ It was in this period, but particularly between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, that veterans emerged as a major social and political force in many countries. By 1950, almost all North American, European, Asian, and British Empire nations—and many others besides—had experienced major armed conflicts that produced substantial veteran populations whose demands for material recompense and symbolic recognition required the state to fashion a coordinated response.

As the veteran population grew, veterans also became an object of academic study. Social scientists took an interest in veterans in the interwar period, when they were recognized as a social category in their own right.¹² Over the subsequent decades, scholars across many fields produced substantial research focusing on the challenges veterans faced reintegrating into postwar societies and the myriad factors that played a role in their ability to adapt. Our previous studies on Australia, the USSR, and China, respectively, can be included in this literature. However, in this book we are going for something entirely different and new to this field: a comparative study synthesizing the existing literature into a higher-level analysis of veteran politics. The need for such a synthesis, more than anything, is why it made sense for us to write this book.

As we individually and collectively reviewed this large body of scholarship, several things puzzled us. First, while there have been many studies of the world wars that have adopted a comparative, and in the case of World War II even a global, perspective,¹³ the scholarship on veterans’ postwar demobilization and readjustment by historians, psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists has overwhelmingly focused on individual countries.¹⁴ Second, despite the true-by-definition fact that World Wars I and II were global affairs, the major European powers and the United States have received the lion’s share of attention. Third, because World War I veterans and their organizations were seen as culprits in the rise of Nazism and fascism, researchers have devoted disproportionate attention to the interwar years.¹⁵ To the extent that a comparative scholarship exists, it mainly brings together two, or at best three, cases, again mostly drawn from Western Europe and North America.¹⁶ Fourth, an entire subsection of the literature focuses on disabled veterans, treating them as a category apart from veterans as a whole.¹⁷

What we have undertaken here is a more expansive framework of analysis, treating disabled veterans as one group among a larger category. Disabled veterans frame their claims and mobilize in ways roughly similar to those of other veterans, and it is the political aspects of veterans’ experience that form the core problematic of this book. While it makes sense to retain the individual country as the main unit of analysis because states have almost always been the primary managers of veterans and their problems, and their policies created both inertia and vested interests in maintaining the status quo (known as path dependency), the expansion of scholarship on veterans in Asia and the Soviet Union, as well as lesser-known cases in Europe and Australia, has made a comparative study with more than the usual two or three cases not only feasible but critically important to suggesting new research questions.¹⁸ This book is the first to draw on a wide variety of primary and secondary source materials in multiple languages (including Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, and French) to engage in a multicase analytical comparison including oft-neglected cases from Asia (China, Taiwan, and Japan), the Soviet Union, and Australia, a non-European military power that fought in most of the large wars in the twentieth century and whose veteran community has been both powerful and extensively documented.¹⁹ In addition to this comparative approach, we expand a nascent literature exploring the roles of international politics and the transnational linkages and transfers of institutions and ideas about the role of veterans in politics, and between veterans’ movements and veteran bureaucracies.²⁰ After large-scale demobilizations, many governments and societies drew on historical and comparative examples of right- and left-wing veteran political activism to warn about potential dangers should they fail to reintegrate into society. State officials sometimes sought out solutions by looking overseas, and veterans themselves created international associations and networks—sometimes including former adversaries—that allowed them to find out how their counterparts were faring.²¹ As we shall see, however, these forces always played out in domestic political contexts. In some cases, such as Taiwan, the USSR, the United States, Japan, and Poland, international politics had a significant impact on domestic politics, but in others—most notably China, the United Kingdom, and Germany, state officials were little interested in nondomestic organizations or ideas and policy inertia largely prevailed. The absence of international links or the failure to learn from the experiences of other countries is as important to the transnational story we tell here as are instances of connection and transfer.

Taking on our question of where and under what circumstances veterans attained an elevated postwar status in this expansive framework would not have been possible had each of us worked in isolation. The usual distractions of academic work, particularly administrative responsibilities, and the sheer size of the task make multicountry comparisons difficult for individual scholars. We also needed each other to get a better picture of the world beyond the countries of our primary research (Australia, China, and the Soviet Union, respectively). Over the course of several years, we met face-to-face in Australia and the United States, Skyped, WhatsApped, and learned about veterans outside of our immediate specialization: Crotty read on the United States and the United Kingdom, Diamant on Japan and Taiwan, and Edele on Germany and Poland. We compared our findings and tested explanations. But we also cut some corners either because of space (with almost the whole world embroiled in World War II and much of it in World War I, we decided to not write about Italian, French, Bulgarian, New Zealand, Canadian, Korean and many other veterans), because of the paucity of secondary sources in languages we understand, or because a region was too far beyond our expertise. Africa, a continent with many wars, millions of old soldiers, and lively veteran politics, and Latin America are such cases.²² Nor do we deal with those who contributed to the war effort but were not uniformed, such as various resistance, guerrilla, or partisan forces. Auxiliary forces, such as the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Australia, have also been excluded. Since the focus of this book is on the veterans of major combatant countries in the two world wars, we have not discussed those of border wars, anticolonial conflicts, civil wars (except for Taiwan), and insurgencies, but in the conclusion we suggest why the veterans of such conflicts might be useful subjects of further research. Because of these omissions, we strove to write this book not as a global history of all twentieth-century veterans but rather as the first large-scale, empirically grounded map for what we hope will become a new research field: comparative veteran studies.

In addition to compelling one another to think more broadly about our veterans, the long gestation of this project encouraged us to stretch our minds to learn some conventions and concepts from disciplines that were a bit out of our comfort zones. Indeed, we see interdisciplinarity—a term more popular in theory than in academic practice between the humanities and social sciences—as critical to fulfilling the promise of our agenda. Crotty and Edele are both historians, who brought to our table (in Australia, full of flat white and long black coffees and Tim Tams) an appreciation for the role of individual leaders and their personalities, zest for the telling detail, and a congenial narrative style. Diamant arrived with a background in historically oriented political science and comparative politics, fields that typically prefer the application of concepts and theoretical frameworks on cases to telling richly colored stories about them. Merging these discipline-based styles was often challenging but hopefully produced an approach that can serve as a useful model. In this book we refer to several concepts—mostly drawn from a subfield of political sociology called collective action theory—sometimes explicitly but more often operating in the background like software, pushing one fact into greater prominence than another. Aside from path dependency mentioned earlier, our short concept list includes (1) framing, which refers to the way in which social movements, and their leaders in particular, make public claims about their goals and interests; as a tactical choice, such claims can succeed if they resonate with public opinion and then mobilize people to action; and (2) political opportunity structure.²³ Attributed to Peter K. Eisinger in the American context but developed in a broader comparative framework by Charles Tilly in From Mobilization to Revolution (1978), the political opportunity structure is essentially a variable referring to the opportunities created and offered within a political system (either formal, such as constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech or assembly, or informal, such as a culture of tolerance) that could explain a social movement’s success or failure.²⁴ For example, in authoritarian regimes the political opportunity structure for successful collective action might be described as narrow to nonexistent, whereas in robust democracies it is typically more open or wide. The political opportunity structure is not something fixed in space and time: governments of all regime types can open or close them depending on the circumstances (for instance, even in democracies, striking for better wages was not easy during World War II). Furthermore, social movements can create openings where none existed. These, in turn, can create precedents that help future social movements. In other words, a political opportunity structure is a dynamic concept that must be studied longitudinally in concrete contexts.

Interdisciplinarity shaped this project in other ways. Given the historical research on the development of the welfare state and given political scientists’ natural inclination to focus on politics, we agreed it was essential to focus on the role of government. For better or worse, state bureaucracies have become the primary resource for veterans after war, whether in terms of financial expenditures on health care, pensions, and other entitlements or state-sponsored rituals and anniversaries. We also recognized that what we call the state should be seen in disaggregated terms: beyond national politics, veterans are also affected by the capacity and willingness of local government officials to initiate policy, implement law, or provide support.²⁵ In later chapters, we describe the relationship between veterans and the state as their vertical status. We also agreed that it was critical to examine the role of entities beyond the state such as city councils, religious organizations, chambers of commerce, charities, veterans’ organizations, and spouses and the family. In some instances, these played an important role determining who was considered worthy of state benefits through the vote, the formation and mobilization of public opinion, or behind-the-scenes lobbying. We describe the relations between veterans and their fellow citizens as their horizontal status. Because these forms of status do not necessarily work in tandem (for example, favorable government policies and high levels of symbolic recognition could be matched by hostility from fellow citizens, or vice versa), researchers should strive to consider both. However, given the broad scope of this study and the relative ease of access to archival sources about government, we have placed greater weight on the vertical plane, while doing our best to include material about the horizontal dimension of veterans’ status.

So, what do we have to show for all of this? In a famous scene in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, the athlete played by Cuba Gooding Jr. impatiently demands, Show me the money! Having told you about WhatsApping, tasty Tim Tams, travel, interdisciplinarity, and the importance of comparative veteran studies, you would be justified in asking something similar of us. Without our divulging so much that you would not be inclined to read on, the three major findings of this comparative study are (1) that veterans around the world tended to face similar challenges after demobilization, raised similar demands, and framed these in mutually recognizable ways but had widely varying levels of success in having their claims met; (2) that across time and space, positive outcomes for veterans were most directly correlated with their ability to organize and willingness to adopt the tactic of going to the mat against politicians in the postwar period; and (3) that in a domestic and international political environment steeped in anti-Communist or, in the case of the Soviet Union, anti-anti-Communist insecurity, such lobbying could establish beneficial veteran treatment regimes or weaken the political forces that supported policies that did not work well for them.²⁶ To state this more bluntly, we argue that what mattered most in the end was politics: a domestic and international struggle over the allocation of power, resources, values, and status. As with all political struggles, the outcome of this process was highly contingent, and the contexts could vary widely and in unanticipated ways. To our own surprise, we found veterans who secured benefits and status after wars won or lost; within democratic and authoritarian polities; under liberal, conservative, and even Leninist governments; after wars fought by volunteers or conscripts, at home or abroad; and for legitimate or subsequently discredited causes. For the most part, they did so by compelling governments to concede to at least some of their demands through lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing public support. In a few instances, such as Taiwan and Japan after World War II or the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s, veterans benefited from government initiatives responding to other problems that could nonetheless be exploited by veterans for their own ends. International politics and transnational exchanges often played a major role here.²⁷ But in all our positive cases the critical ingredient was robust engagement in the political process. This gave veterans the opportunity to gain recognition and benefits as compensation and reward for their war service, as well as a greater voice in politics.

But how did we arrive at this conclusion? What hypotheses did we begin with? And how did we move from hypothesis to result? Our study was primarily guided by the form of comparative case study analysis that J. S. Mill, the nineteenth-century British political economist and philosopher, called the Method of Agreement. In this approach to comparison, researchers use multiple cases to find, generally through process of elimination, the variable that appears common in all those with a shared outcome. For example, if we took ten countries that all shared a high GDP per capita over a ten-year period and found that all had adopted an export-oriented growth strategy even though they differed in many other ways, we could make a case for a correlation (not causation) between this strategy and growth in these cases. However, in a nod to Mill’s Method of Difference (also known as the scientific method, which Mill did not think was appropriate to the social sciences), we also compared the existence of our organizational factor in states with similar regime types (China/USSR; Australia/UK) or in the same state in different periods (World War I/World War II in the US), where the absence of any veterans’ organization, or an excessively quiet one, led to a decidedly negative outcome for veterans.²⁸ Despite this social science–like perspective underpinning our comparative analysis, our treatment of the cases owes as much to historians’ interest in particularities and the empirical details that bring them to life. Hence, we use a mixture of archival and secondary sources to tell the story of veterans’ experiences in national contexts, while trying to keep our eyes focused on more generalized patterns.

The story behind our hypothesis was a bit more complex. Since this is the first book to examine more than two or three cases of veteran treatment, and with so many variables (argh!) already out there—some of which we proposed in previous work—there seemed fewer well-established guideposts. Hence, we began with a hypothesis that seemed both intuitive and appropriate given the collective action framework that we employ: military victory, we thought, should make it much easier for veterans to gain support for their claims for postwar privilege. Why should there be such a link between victory and postwar status? First, from a political perspective, victory can incentivize politicians to reward those who sacrificed for it as a form of joining-the-bandwagon credit-taking. It would also make it significantly easier for politicians to persuade the public that veterans deserve benefits that other groups might not enjoy and thereby avoid a public backlash. In other words, victory would foster a favorable political opportunity structure for veterans. Second, we thought it would be easier for the public to agree to bear the considerable cost of veterans’ benefits, or at least not vociferously complain about them, if a war was successfully prosecuted. Third, we reasoned that the defeated combatants of total or near-total wars would be much less well positioned to provide the benefits that veterans sought; they would be more preoccupied with restoring war damage. Finally, we figured that military victory would make it easier for individual veterans and veterans’ organizations to frame their demands in such a way as to mobilize political, social, and even cultural support. Patriotically claiming that we defeated the enemy who threatened our way of life would be an effective rhetorical tactic in the public sphere, allowing veterans to gain material benefits and symbolic recognition in the form of commemorative activities, museums, music, and art.

As we expected, we found support for this hypothesis, but only in a few cases: Australia after World War I (and to a lesser extent after World War II) and the United States after World War II, the subjects of chapter 1. In these countries—which we consider the best-case scenarios in terms of veteran outcomes—veterans fought on the winning side and were generously rewarded by politicians. They also were widely respected by the societies to which they returned. That is, most enjoyed significant boosts to their vertical and horizontal status. Victorious soldiers rewarded by grateful nations—it seems relatively straightforward.

In chapter 2, however, we look at cases that complicate any simple correlation between victorious wars and veterans’ high postwar status. Examining the United States