The union lasted just eight months and ended abruptly when he discovered she had been a Gestapo informant during the war. While undergoing treatment, he met a half-German, half-French woman called Sylvia Welter and they were married within weeks. “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” he told his daughter Margaret.Īccording to Kenneth Slawenski, one of Salinger’s biographers, the traumatised young soldier was sent to hospital at the end of the war, for what would now probably be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. He was present during the brutal and bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944. Salinger served as an infantry man and in counter-intelligence and participated in the assault on Utah Beach as part of the D-day landings. “I have survived a lot,” he said, although he never talked publicly about what he had seen at a concentration camp.
The Second World War was a defining experience and the horrors he witnessed left him with mental scars for life. In the spring of 1942, Salinger was drafted into the US army.
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