The long echo of WW2 trauma

World War One and Vietnam are the wars most closely associated with post-traumatic stress - but it was also a huge problem for the combatants in World War Two, and one that may still be affecting their children and grandchildren today.

At the end of the 1962 film, The Longest Day, a young American paratrooper shares a cigarette somewhere in Normandy with a British fighter pilot, played by Richard Burton. It's a meeting of innocence and experience. Burton's character has been fighting since the Blitz but has finally received a wound that will end his war. For the hapless Pte Arthur "Dutch" Schultz, on the other hand, it's all just beginning. After landing in a tree miles from his intended drop zone, he's spent his first day of combat searching for his unit, walking towards the sound of fighting, but never reaching it. He hasn't yet fired a shot in anger.

The real Dutch Schultz's D-Day bore little comparison. It's true he was dropped in the wrong place, but after making contact with other wandering soldiers he soon came under fierce mortar fire and witnessed the mercy killing of a horribly wounded US soldier. By evening he was engaged in a bitter battle for control of a bridge near the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, which continued for four days until German forces eventually withdrew.

In the Netherlands in September 1944, Schultz frantically prayed with his rosary as his company commander died in front of him. For two weeks that winter he was treated in hospital for pneumonia; when he returned more than half his regiment had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge. The horrors culminated in the liberation of the Wöbbelin concentration camp, where he later said "it was difficult to distinguish the living from the dead".