When General Patton and others landed on the beaches of Italy whole companies of U.S. soldiers died as they ran into machine gun nests along the way. Very often out of 100 men in an army company of U.S. soldiers 1 to 4 of them survived. This was also close to the time of the "Battle of the Bulge". So many American soldiers died in the Normandy Invasion and the Anzio invasion that the U.S. Government had to start taking men older than 26 and trying to "draft" them even if they were married. However, married men with children I don't believe they drafted if they were older than 26 even then. But, imagine whole companies of 100 U.S. men wiped out heading north from Anzio into mainland Europe towards Germany. My father talked to me a lot about this time and era because a very good friend of my mother's and fathers who was named Bruce was cut in two by a machine gun blast in the Battle of the Bulge when he was 18.
When I took my mother to Edinburgh, Scotland and near Glasgow where her mother mostly was raised after 12 when there house burned down in PHiladelphia they had to return to their family in Clydebank, Scotland. Around 1910 all my grandmothers brothers and sisters and their spouses moved to Omaha, Nebraska and most worked on the main Newspaper there. But, when I flew with my mother and then 10 year old daughter to Munich, Germany my mother never could deal with being in Germany because she hadn't gotten over World war II and losing her friend from Church Bruce when he was 18. My mother began to enter senile dementia then even though I didn't understand what "TRansfer Trauma" was then yet. So, basically my mother got into the motor home I rented for myself, my 10 year old daughter, my son and his friend (then about 25 years of age each) and she basically never left the motor home because of this "Transfer Trauma" I guess. So, through Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, she NEVER got out of the Motor Home even once which was really crazy to the rest of us because this wasn't normal at all!
But, I didn't understand that at age 80 she was slipping away from us mentally already. Then she told inappropriate stories to my daughter who was 10 also about her amorous experiences during and after world war II before she married my father. I knew something wasn't right but didn't understand what happens often to older people. She stayed alive until 2008 but by 2001 (two years later) I had to place her in "elder care" because she almost burned down her apartment and wasn't safe to live along (or even with other people then). So, from a liability standpoint in the U.S. I really had no choice at this point so she didn't burn down my house too.
Most of my understanding and the Great Depression and World War II came from my father and my mother and my grandparents because I was 2 years old in 1950. They always said I was so very very lucky to be growing up in the 1950s where people weren't starving or dying in war so much as in the 1930s and 1940s throughout the U.S. then.
It isn't really possible to compare life then to now or even to life in the 1930s and 1940s because people were different in EVERY way then. There really is no comparison at all to now!
Open mindedness and being well educated and even having any teeth at all past 40 was pretty unusual in the 1950s here in the U.S.
Girls often were either married or living with a man 18 to 40 years of age by age 15 in the 1950s, especially if they were middle class or poor. This didn't mean they were happy but it did mean that they saw men as a meal ticket more than anything else in the middle class and lower classes. So, finding a man was more like a job than anything else to middle class or lower class women then. It's still like this for about 5 billion women on earth today.
This is an important thing to realize if you live in a European country like the U.S. Canada or Australia or New Zealand. It isn't this way in European types of countries but is in most of the rest of the world.
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