The Pittsburgh Press (February 7, 1944)
I DARE SAY —
World malady
By Florence Fisher Parry
A plague is sweeping the world; its virus is spreading all over the war front, the home front, striking down strong men and brave women, and diseasing the nerves of our combatants.
I am speaking of homesickness. It is the worst sickness on earth.
Have you ever been homesick? I mean in that utter, absolute way? If you do not know its suffering, then I am afraid you do not understand war.
Three times I was homesick, and I would not give up the knowledge that those terrible attacks gave me. Once was when I was a very young girl, ashamed to admit I was homesick, and so had to spend a Christmas away from home. I remember lying with my face to the wall and with fists clenched trying so hard to swallow and to keep the crying, not able to eat, not able to speak.
The next time was when I had to leave my babies and go to France to help find the grave of my brother, killed in the First World War. That awful, frantic desperation that seized me when we couldn’t get passage home, I shall never forget.
Then there was that third time. I was alone in San Jose, Costa Rica. I had lost my money, identification, ship’s passage, everything, and for a while I could not find anyone who spoke English. I knew then the collapse of morale that can overtake a human being with all his known background torn away.
War is homesickness
Yes, homesickness is the most terrible of all sicknesses. And it is a major problem in this war. The U.S. Army and Navy are doing what they can to help this malady. They try to get their men home after a certain term of service. But there is no plan that can be employed that does not seem to be discriminatory and unfair.
There is nothing on earth as unfair as war by its very abnormal nature. It is bound to operate unjustly, and there is no way, no way at all, for an equitable plan to he worked out for all.
War is hell; but more than that, war is homesickness, and there is no cure for that. But there are, I think, a few palliatives. There are, I think, a few measures that could be taken that would make the malady more bearable, keep it from impairing and often destroying the nerves of its sufferers; some plan provided that would save men from the awful collapse that follows a withdrawn leave.
If a man doesn’t expect to go home, if a furlough or leave is not held up to him, if he is not encouraged to build it up, then he is spared the shock of sudden withdrawal. A furlough denied, a leave cancelled, is a very part and parcel of the fortunes of war. Yet there is no way to reconcile a soldier to being cheated of his leave if it has been held out to him as a definite reward for service rendered.
The letdown
Let us take the Air Force. In England when a flier has completed 25 missions, he is considered to have spent both his luck and nervous endurance. In North Africa (where the casualty percentages are half as high) 50 missions. In the Southwest Pacific, 100 missions. That is the number of sorties decreed as being all that a flier may be expected to make; and at the expiration of that term, he is given a leave of 20 days, an added two weeks at a reclassification center, six months in a non-combat area, before he is considered physically and nervously restored.
Ernie Pyle has told you to what a pitch a nervous suspense these fliers are geared, and the almost unendurable tension of their last few combat missions.
Their suspense, their tension, is not due to combat fear. It is simply that they have worked themselves up to such a point of expectancy that toward the last their nerves become so taut that when the missions are finally over, their letdown is devastating.
There is only one thing then in their minds. It’s time to go home. They can at last see their wives, their folks. What they’ve been dreaming about all these months, yes, years of training, has at last come true. They’re going home! And when suddenly that prize is jerked away from them, never mind why, then is when the virus of homesickness gets in its deadly work, playing havoc with the masterly nervous control their training has given them.
Homesickness that has been promised assuagement only to be cheated, is the worst possible disease that can afflict our men in combat. And I say it is far better to promise them nothing, to hold out no reward, then to let them build up to this complete collapse.