The Politically Weak

This chapter investigates the cases of victory and defeat and explains what politically influential veterans were able to produce to secure benefits and rights. It focuses on China after its long period of war and civil war that ended in 1949, the United Kingdom after both world wars, the United States after World War I, and the USSR after World War II. It analyses the cases wherein veterans had little or limited success in securing meaningful social and political status. The chapter identifies factors that determine the veterans' status, where it is victory or defeat, or authoritarian versus democratic systems of government. It discusses the political process and the attempts to convert claims into entitlements in order to explain the negative outcomes for the veterans of victorious armies.

Conclusion

This chapter establishes qualitative or quantitative ways of measuring postwar success or failure in a broad comparative and historical perspective by reviewing the hypothesis and the cases. It confirms whether veterans are recognized as a special and distinct group, particularly from other citizens who have broadly similar needs or make similar claims on the state. It also analyses the extent that veterans are considered a special and distinct group. The chapter identifies governments that establish differentiated and exclusive bureaucratic structures, laws, and policies that provided for their needs. It examines veterans and their views on war memorialization and foreign policy.

Introduction

This chapter explains the wide variation in postwar outcomes for veterans. It discusses the conditions that veterans emerge from the largest wars in the twentieth century with significant material recompense and higher status than their civilian counterparts. It also surveys the broad landscape of military engagements in the twentieth century, such as soldiers in cutting-edge fighter aircraft at thirty thousand feet, in submarines, in tanks, and armored personnel carriers. The chapter describes wartime services that are varied as soldiers that served from the commencement of hostilities to victory or defeat. It examines individual biographies of veterans across all combatant nations while multiplying the meanings of the word veteran in the process.

Victors Defeated

This chapter look at cases that complicate any simple correlation between victorious wars and veterans' high postwar status. It examines the United States and the United Kingdom after World War I, the United Kingdom after World War II, Soviet veterans after both world wars, and China. It also elaborates how victory did not prevent many former soldiers from feeling betrayed by their governments, and often by society as well. The chapter discusses American World War I veterans that point to some gains after a limited contribution to the war effort and after many years of agitation. It describes the United Kingdom, long-suffering frontoviki in the USSR, and China's veterans that languished in obscurity for decades despite having paid a far higher price for their victory.

The Politically Powerful

This chapter elaborates the reasons why Australian veterans of World War I, American veterans of World War II, Taiwanese veterans, and even German and Japanese veterans managed to do well after the guns fell silent. It explains why and how Soviet veterans of World War II eventually transformed themselves from unrewarded victors into central pillars of the last Soviet sociopolitical order in the 1970s and 1980s. It also details several cases of successful veterans' movements, and veteran communities that piggy-backed off the veterans' cases. The chapter argues that the successes of veterans came about as a result of a constellation of forces, which can be broken down into three general areas: the veterans' organizational power and their skill in lobbying aggressively for their cause; the domestic environment they found themselves in; and the international constellation, within which both veterans and the elites they confronted in their domestic political system moved in.

Victors Victorious

This chapter focuses on Australia after World War I and the United States after World War II, which are considered the best-case scenarios in terms of veteran outcomes as they were generously rewarded by politicians. It highlights Australia and America's soldiers who were widely respected by the societies to which they returned, providing significant boosts to their vertical and horizontal status. It also considers cases where victorious veterans were compensated reasonably well for their wartime service and sacrifice, which challenges the intuitive or commonsensical notion that victory is a predictor of high status and generous rewards for veterans. The chapter talks about veterans who claimed that they had defeated expansionist German militarism, Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese aggression. It describes how the states, for which the veterans had fought and survived the war, could be held to the commitments they had made to soldiers.

Benefits for the Vanquished

This chapter places emphasis on issues relating to defeat, which is not exactly a positive frame within which to claim high status. It explores the cases of defeated Germany and Japan and further investigates the fate of the soldiers who retreated with the Nationalist Army to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. It also explains how losing a war does not necessarily mean losing the peace, that even in utter defeat, when causes have been discredited, and states collapsed, veterans were not discarded and might even enjoy a reasonably high quality of care. The chapter looks at the counterintuitive story of veterans of defeated armies who obtained generous benefits that outpaced those provided to other claimant groups. It argues that defeat and discredited wars have been more problematic for war memory than for the distribution of material and symbolic benefits.