You keep reading/hearing about how young everyone was who fought in WWII (my dad did, in the 8th Air Force) but when you look at footage from war zones—I’m watching Ken Burns’s “War” now, but it goes for ALL documentaries I’ve seen—the men don’t look like they’re 18 or even in their mid-twenties. many of them, easily more than 75%, to my eyes, in fact look as if they’re in their early 40s or even older.
And it’s not just the men who are unshaven and dirty, either. Soldiers, sailors and airmen alike all look they haven’t seen their teens for a decade or more.
Even my in father’s own crew pictures the men, AND my father, look at least 30, even though I know my father was only 22.
What gives? None of them looks babyfaced; not like, for example, troops in Vietnam, who mostly do look like they’re in their early 20s.
Speculating. I think it’s the level of contrast and the shadows which make them look tired - and older. Shadows under the eyes become very pronounced. A lot of these guys’ve been in it for a while by the time the pictures were taken, too. And a lot of them probably grew up with manual labor as an everyday part of life. That leaves its’ mark.
Additionally, there’s what I’ve dubbed the “hat effect” in my mind. I just ran through 20 or so pictures of WWII infantry. All the soldiers wearing hats, caps or helmets seems older. Not sure why, though hairlines and forehead smoothness are usually good visual indicators of youth, I guess.
One reason is that many of them were older. When the draft was passed, in 1940, men from ages 21 to 36 had to register. It wasn’t until Nov 11 1942, that 18 year olds had to register, and on the upper end they raised the age to 37 (though that couldn’t have helped too much as almost all 37 year olds would have already been registered). They also had an oldest first policy.
About half of those examined in the first year were rejected for poor health or illiteracy. By the end of the war 34 million men had registered and 10 million had been inducted
Echoing Gukumatz, I think you should ask yourself just what characteristics make a person in a photograph look “old” to you, and whether those are truly accurate indicators. Maybe you’re seeing a lot of outdated haircuts that your mind associates with old people, for example.
The average age of US soldiers in WWII was older than in later wars, soldiers spent more time on the line and away from home, and medical care and nutrition was worse.
The average age of soldiers in World War II was only three years older than the average age of those in the Vietnam War - 26 as opposed to 23. The perception that people looked older back then applies to more than just soldiers. Here’s a thread from 2004 in which we discuss this. There’s no general agreement as to why people looked older back then:
I don’t know if this is factual, but I always had the impression that young adults in days past, let’s say: before the 1960s, either strived to look mature or it was the social role that they accepted.
For the benefit of those not listening to top 40 in 1985, then stuttered “n-n-n-nineteen” was a reference to a song by Paul Hardcastle.
I found this on a site called The Skeptics:
They note that the average age of a KIA was 23, and this is often cited to back the position that 19 is probably wrong. The median of KIAs was 21.
There is some debate as to whether KIAs are a representative sample of combat soldiers, and what precisely “combat soldier” might mean.
Either way, part of it is going to be that soldiers in Vietnam were much younger.
People aren’t even done growing at 18, and I suspect there are some visual cues in the proportions of a not-quite-fully-grown person that still tickle our “That’s a child” response. So an 18-year-old looks like a kid, while a 22 year-old looks like an adult.
There’s also the simple reality that WW2 vets grew up during the depression. Many of them had hard lives, poor nutrition, and spend a lot of time working outside. To give one famous example, the woman in the “Migrant Mother” photograph was 32 years old at the time. If I saw her on the street today I’d guess she was in her 40s, but I’m used to seeing people who spend most of their time indoors and use sunscreen when they spend a lot of time in the sun.
I had three uncles who all went to WWII, who were born from 1905 to 1909, all of whom would have been at lest 33 in 1941, and 37-40 by time they came home. My dad tried to enlist, but was 41 and they wouldn’t take him.
As I recall, men of all ages from 18 to 39 were rushing down to enlist, representing a pretty broad age cohort.
Nearly all the websites I’ve consulted say that the average age of the soldiers in the Vietnam War was somewhere between 22 and 23. The one you cite, SpyOne, is an outlier. I don’t, of course, know for sure what the real age is, and I don’t know how to find a truly definitive source for the real age.
Yes, of course I know where “n-n-n-nineteen” comes from.
This, sort of. We’re used to young people looking more different to older people these days, through hairstyles (there is a little leeway in the modern army) or way of wearing clothes (even uniforms), even body language, and in the 40s that wasn’t really the case. WWII soldiers look even “older” when they’re out of uniform and so people in general prior to the late 1950s at least, when the teenager thing really took off.
That’s probably a significant factor too.
Also, people do often look older in black and white photographs (unless they’re artistic ones done with nice lighting and possibly some old-fashioned airbrushing), and they look older when they have a serious expression.
My vote is a combination of facial expression, stress, hair cuts/mustaches and photographic limitations. What we think of as an “old man” cut, is what those guys had as young men. Same with the old-timey Clark Gable mustaches and stuff.
He was 28 or 29 at the time- probably one of the oldest men in the photo. He doesn’t look too old, other than the annoyed expression on his face, and some of the other guys look positively young by comparison.
