When the Boys Came Marching Home

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Wicks has long mined the profitable vein of wartime recollections, and
this book, clearly intended to appeal primarily to a British readership,
is his most recent such effort. What did the World War II experience do
to the family? How did men, women, and children cope with the enforced
separations (some for five or more years), the uncertainty, the shock of
death and wounds? By using the letters he has collected, Wicks gives no
definitive answers, but suggests that people coped in their own ways.
Many soldiers overseas were quick to find female companionship; many
wives at home took lovers, and large numbers had children with them. The
tensions such (understandable) behavior created can be imagined. There
were also the children who grew up without fathers. If Dad returned
home, the family then had to adjust to a man who was often much changed
by his military experience.

This is not scholarship, of course (though it is the basis for serious
study). But it is a moving testimony to war’s impact—and not only on
those who fight it at the front.