Was the book Johnny Got His Gun based on a true story?

Answer 1

"No. It's a novel written by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. He also wrote and directed the film version released in 1971."

Actually, yes - it was.

"Trumbo was inspired to write his antiwar book during the 1930s after learning about two severely injured WWI veterans: a British major who had been so mutilated that the army reported him as missing in action to his family, and a Canadian soldier left dismembered, blinded, deafened, and tube-fed by the conflict. As Trumbo described the latter's story: "In the mid-thirties, the Prince of Wales visited a military hospital in Canada. At the end of a hallway, there was a door marked "No Admittance." "What's in there?" he asked. "We'd rather you not go in there,' they told him. But the Prince of Wales insisted, and when he came out of the room, he was weeping. 'The only way I could salute, the only way I could communicate with that man,' he said, 'was to kiss his cheek.'"

-from The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, by Martin F. Norden, RutgersUniversity Press, September 1, 1994.