Movies may have been slow to pick up on it, but "battle fatigue," "shell shock," "war nerves," and "PTSD" go back a long way.
I think that the first large scale casualties occurred during World War I. That was one of the first wars fought with nitrate based high explosives and enormous numbers of artillery pieces. It also saw the largest armies deployed up to that time. This combination led to millions of men being exposed to hours of continuous heavy bombardment, and months of dreary, repetitive fighting. This was a huge sea change from previous wars that involved weeks of maneuver followed by a short, vicious fight, and then more weeks of maneuver.
The conditions on the battle field coincided with the early development of psychology. The medical community was just beginning to learn about the mind and the brain in which it resides. Suddenly, they had hundreds to thousands of casualties who could not return to the battlefield and even had difficulty returning to civilian life, whether or not they had visible wounds.
By the time of World War II the doctors were beginning to write texts on the damage that war does to the mind of men. Now, in this new world conflict, more than 12 percent, 16 1/2 million American men went to war. Nearly the entire male population (as well as many females) of fighting age, officially 17 to 36 years old, much older if they had experience went into uniform. They now had millions of patients to study.
The Vietnam generation gave us the appropriate quotation, "All gave some, some gave all."
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