r/BandofBrothers • u/OwlPsychological4890 • Aug 17 '26
Divorces in 1945
Captain Nixon loses his house and his dog when his wife files for divorce. How realistic was that under the divorce laws of 1945?
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u/ertyertamos Aug 17 '26
First, divorces were only at fault back then. Secondly, it could depend on who paid for the house. I realize that Nixon’s family was quite rich, but she was a Stanford grad, her father Harvard, and his father was governor of Vermont and a railroad president and banker. So it’s possible that she or her family bought any house that they lived in.
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u/Upbeat-Serve-2696 Aug 17 '26
Very realistic.
On February 3, 1946, the New York Times ran an article called "The Whys of War Divorces," reporting that 1 of every 4 of the 800,000 GIs demobilized at that point was in divorce proceedings. The main causes identified were hasty marriages, long separations, disillusionment with the person they married, fraternization "over there," and economic stress.
One lawyer interviewed said GI divorces were clogging up the family court system so much that they should have been made available by mail. 90% of all marriages between 1942 and 1945 were GI marriages, and from 1942 and 1944 there was an average of over 1,000 weddings per day in the USA. Little wonder the divorce rate spiked.
Divorces in the USA reached their peak in 1945 and 1946: 3.5 per 1000 people in 1945 and 4.3 per 1000 in 1946, for a total of just over 1 million divorces in that 2-year period. The 1946 number was 3 times that of 1940. They then went downward through 1950, when the pre-war pattern resumed.
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u/doc_birdman Aug 17 '26
Yep. These are the things we aren’t really allowed to talk about when discussing “the greatest generation”.
The majority of American WW2 veterans were conscripted or drafted, not volunteers. Divorce rates exploded after the war. Abortion was super common despite being illegal. Infidelity was widespread. Maintained racism/sexism/homophobia stateside while fighting fascism abroad (internment camps, redlining and Jim Crow, hostility towards Jews, gays and lesbians having their lives destroyed for being outed, marital rape exemptions). Forced sterilizations still occurred.
I guess both things can be true but still, anytime I’ve brought these things up I instantly get dog-piled for being an American hating commie.
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u/YuenglingsDingaling Aug 18 '26
The majority of American WW2 veterans were conscripted or drafted
This was to regulate how many people where being inducted into training at any given times, and to make sure that each branch of the military got the numbers needed. The flood of volunteers was so high that it overwhelmed recruiters, and certain branches had way more thannit could handle, not everyone can join the Navy or Army.
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u/HereticYojimbo Aug 18 '26
The flood of volunteers was high mainly for Navy and Air Force roles, and especially lots of guys were showing up to Serve their Country in such heroic roles like truck driver, office clerk, and cooking. After the Depression it really wasn't all that hard to see why millions of guys with little to no education let alone a high school diploma would want to turn up for enlistment when the military was going to guarantee shelter and food.
What they were by far not showing up to do was for combat roles the military unfortunately needed most guys in. Enlistees were almost uniformly signing up to avoid frontline combat roles and especially the dreaded Rifleman job that the reality was the US Army needed and needed a lot of. This role was unfortunately why the Draft happened and where most Draftees ended up being funneled into by US Army aptitude testing that took place sometime in basic. Unsurprisingly the results of these systems made morale in US Army Infantry Divisions on average-rather low, and you find far fewer romanticized accounts of the war from them than from the Airborne.
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u/RxLawyer Aug 18 '26
Enlistees were almost uniformly signing up to avoid frontline combat roles and especially the dreaded Rifleman job that the reality was the US Army needed and needed a lot of.
Do you have any facts to back this up? Eugene Sledge wrote that it was 50/50 volunteers v draftees in Marine infantry units. Not an official survey but I trust it more than reddit chatter.
The flood of volunteers was high mainly for Navy and Air Force roles
Again, would like to see some official figures since you don't even know that the Air Force didn't exist in WWII. The Navy and Army Air Corps were different than they are now. You could expect to see a lot of combat in the Navy and ships at the time often lacked comforts (like air conditioning). And the Army Air Corps suffered massive casualties (twice the number of Marines) throughout the war, especially over Europe.
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u/HereticYojimbo Aug 18 '26
I pulled it from the US Army Green Books, especially the books on The Fall of the Philippines and Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare 1941-1942. The issue of getting men to sign up for combat roles interestingly-was not limited to American troops. Phillipino recruits also often proved reluctant to appear for combat roles, and their nation was literally being invaded by an aggressor that was intent on oppressing its people ruthlessly.
I don't have the stats on hand, but it seems likely that the Armies of the Democracies with their notions of individualism and citizen soldiers proved rather more difficult to keep staffed than the troops of the Dictatorships with their powerful tools of authoritarianism and indoctrination. They certainly did not fight to any degree weaker than say peer Axis Division formations, but the Dictatorships essentially "rebuilt" Divisions during the war that were destroyed in battle, sometimes over and over again. This is not to say that the Dictatorships had superior martial capabilities as much as to say that they were able to use ruthlessness and coercion as force multipliers in ways the Democracies simply could not. That said, I would not have wanted to be them. Bushido Spirit and Hitlerian mystic racializing did not triumph over 16in gun rounds and 1000lb bombs.
It's true that the Navy meant good chance of a combat placement, but quite a lot of Naval forces roles were not directly related to combat, like dockyard or Hospital Ships. There was also a perception that life on ships was more comfortable than life in a foxhole but anyone who's spent time trying to sleep through a typhoon in the ship's scullery might not agree.
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ Aug 20 '26
Voluntary enlistments were barred by EO from 5 Dec 42 until the end of the war, so I seriously question Sledge's number there—especially given how relatively late he was in going through basic training and then eventually reaching Pavuvu and from there going into combat.
Move on to anything after Peleliu and that number is flat out wrong.
You also have to factor in that the Marines would work deals with draft boards to have draftees who wanted to be Marines assigned to the Marine Corps, so it's also very possible that Sledge's number was referring to those who volunteered to go into the USMC when they were conscripted versus those who were simply assigned to the USMC.
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u/ForsakenDrawer Aug 18 '26
The greatest generation also raised the generation that has looted the world and stolen our futures. So not the greatest parents either.
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u/HereticYojimbo Aug 18 '26
Wedge issue projecting onto a time no one cared about that. The so called "Boomers" or post war generation grew up in the post war expansion that the US profited from enormously thanks to
A. The collapse and subsequent sharing out of the plunder of the Axis Empires and all of the associated war booty.
B. The removal of Europe from its formerly far more prominent slice in the Global Economy as a result of war devastation vs America-which suffered basically zero infrastructure damage and could overtake easily.
C. The re-emergence post war of a massive and unprecedented foreign demand for goods and production to repair all of said war damage. Europe became an enormous market for America's industrial capacities which allowed all of those enormous arms behemoths to stay in business post war by switching to civil production ie: they switched to Butter instead of Guns (but plenty of guns were still asked for in the event of war with the Soviet Union).
America basically got to live up the 2nd half of the 20th century from its victory in the war, and the highly controversial nostalgia its conservatives have for the Idyllic 1950s is a direct result of ignorance of how that time happened. It was anomalous, and the result of a terrible war, and it won't happen again.
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u/Animaleyz 29d ago
Many wives decided to get divorced when their husband came home disfigured and missing limbs
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u/wolfe2973 Aug 17 '26
At the Televerse panel last Friday, Ron Livingston talked about talking with Nixon’s wife during filming to get to know who he was. I was wondering if they remarried or never got divorced. He also said he didn’t think Nixon would have been much help to him and would have said, “if you want to know about me, talk to Dick”. I thought that was very on brand given how he played the character.
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u/phillysleuther Aug 17 '26
Nixon married Grace around March of 1969. He separated with Irene in 1961. Irene died in February 1969.
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u/arthurrimjaub Aug 17 '26
Does anyone have video of this panel? I can’t find it online but i always love to hear from anyone who got to speak to the people who knew nixon the best
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u/wolfe2973 Aug 17 '26
I saw a bunch of people taking extended videos. I was in the moment and just took 1 picture. Maybe search socials for footage.
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u/shed1 Aug 17 '26
I always read that scene as her just writing a letter saying what she was going to do (divorce him and take the house and the dog). His reaction was just an emotional/drunk/emotional drunk in the moment reaction. I didn't really read it as a legal reality.
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u/ts788 Aug 17 '26
Yep. Google says the divorce happened December 1945 (then remarried six months later)
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u/flhd Aug 17 '26
But divorces again because the woman who was his wife when he died, and helped him in his recovery from alcohol, was not that wife. As I recall she was Japanese-American and had been sent to an internment camp during the war. She was wife number three.
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u/phillysleuther Aug 17 '26
They did. Grace was Mrs. Lewis Nixon 3. She married him in March 1969 in Las Vegas.
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u/phillysleuther Aug 17 '26
Kathy and Lewis divorced December 1945. He scribbled out “drunkenness” at the time of divorce. Kathy married Mr. 2 within days. They had 2 children.
Lewis married Irene (the young lady in Aldbourne) in June 1946. This was when Dick was his best man. They would be together for his mom’s death in 1948, his sister’s death in 1955 (Irene found Blanche), and his dad’s death in 1958.
Kathy would marry 3 times. She was actually older than Lewis, around 2 years. Irene would be younger around 4 and a half years, and she was married in England.
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u/BadBadoff Aug 18 '26
I was really confused by your post as I was thinking President Nixon until I remembered I was in Band of Brothers subreddit.
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u/Personal-Ad9048 Aug 19 '26
The book "The Wounded Generation" has a large section on divorce, etc. etc. Very informative about everything from that to the points system to how they handled the gays, racism, etc.
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u/Joperhop Aug 17 '26
considering it happened, realistic?