In the film "White Christmas", one of the plot lines concerns a General from WWII. There is a point made that post-WWII, lower ranking military personnel were welcomed back with fanfare and job opportunities, while Generals were not. Can someone provide context to this plot line?

I can't believe it's happening! My undergraduate thesis in history was the post-war Hollywood Musical's evolving understanding of the war and American society. So, full disclaimer, I will be approaching this answer from the perspective of artistic commentary on American events, as opposed to a military history perspective. As such, I will not be able to answer questions such as "what percentage of post-war generals are represented by the character of General Waverly," but rather, I will delve in to why this character exists, the context in which he was written, and why a tough-on-his-luck ex-general is culturally significant in 1954.

The first thing to note about the post-war Hollywood musical is that it wasted no time in profiting off of the genre of the war-movie. The Second World War was nearly all-consuming in American media, with American cinema in particular leading the charge on supportive, patriotic, and star-spangled content. Films such as Yankee Doodle Dandy and This is the Army are prime examples of this.

With the conclusion of the war, the war-films remained, but their tone shifted. You look at movie musicals like Anchors Aweigh (1945) or On the Town (1949) and there is a certain melancholy and sense of transition. Both films depict American soldiers or sailors coming back to the states for "just one night." These films spoke to an American public that was anxious about GI reintegration and a GI fear of a changed world. These films featured sexually forward working women and a public that revered the GI, but wasn't quite sure what to do with them.

This posthumous understanding of the Second World War continues throughout the 1950s, including in 1954's White Christmas. The cultural resonance of this film rests in two of its central messages: its nostalgia for the wartime, and the bemoaning of postwar integration. Again, this film features the narrative of the soldier coming home, but makes the struggle of this integration explicit through the character of General Waverly, an embodiment of the romantic melancholy many Americans felt towards the wartime. I mean, you look at the final scenes of this film -- an old army division is reunited in full uniform and recommit themselves to their war friendships by singing on a stage literally designed to look like a bombed-out army camp. This is then immediately followed by "Gee, I Wish I was Back in the Army," a song that scorns the complacency of "modern day" life and harkens back (with rose-tinted lenses) to a simpler time of unity and common cause against an external threat. There is a beautiful dichotomy in Michael Curtiz' (the director of White Christmas) two films: Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. The early war film Yankee Doodle Dandy biographically follows an eager young civilian who helps the effort in anyway he can, while White Christmas shows two ex-GIs helping an old general relive his glory days.

All of this is to say -- from a cultural standpoint, General Waverly is used in the film as a way to reminisce about the past. As a way to say, "wouldn't it be great for us to go back." Being an officer, he is uniquely equipped to represent the older generation, the older way of life, the older more simpler times when we were unified by simple stratified commands.

I will also add that this depiction of GI success and officer failure is fairly unique, at least within postwar media. The very year after White Christmas in 1955 came It's Always Fair Weather -- a dreadfully melancholic "comedy" about GI reintegration at the end of the Second World War. The film depicts 3 American GIs who come home with big dreams -- to be an artist, a master chef, and a lawyer. When they reunite 10 years later, they hate one another and have become disillusioned -- one is now a cartoonist for advertisements, one a hot-dog cart vendor, and one a gambler/fight-fixer. They rekindle their friendship only in a final "battle" scene against a collection of henchmen, another way to reminisce about war-time friendships and community through fighting.

I am adding this comparison to show that the middle 1950s was a time of self-reflection in which many Americans wished they could go back to the simple patriotism and unification that was felt during the Second World War. Because of this, the melancholic modern soldier who feels lost and alone in the world became a stock character.

If not a direct answer to your question, I hope you found this response interesting as cultural context for the film White Christmas. The character of General Waverly is employed in the film as a callback of nostalgia, appreciation, and love for the Second World War, and acts as a stand-in for all those who felt power and agency during the war, but felt left-behind and powerless a decade later. Let me know if you have any questions about the hollywood musical and the second world war! This is my first ask historians response, so I hope I have done it correctly!

Some selected secondary sources:

Adams, Michael C.C. The Best War Ever: America and World War II. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Bodnar, John. The “Good War” in American Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 169.

Carnes, Mark C. The Columbia History of Post-World War II America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood, 1946-1962. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 274.

Jane Mersky Leder, Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II (London: Praeger, 2006), 160.

Neil A. Wynn, “The ‘Good War:’ The Second World War and Postwar American Society,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 3 (Jul., 1996): 463.