Perhaps you are using "Godsend" rhetorically, but it was hotly debated and even opposed by members of Congress who felt that the class of people who physically fought the war had no place in institutions of higher education [1].
Some members of congress opposed it on the grounds that it could in theory help African Americans:
"On March 24, the Senate passed the G.I. Bill unanimously, but the House continued to debate the unemployment and education provisions for another two months. Rankin, chair of the House veterans committee, had evolved into one of its sharpest critics. An unrepentant segregationist, he worried that African-American veterans would use the benefits to avoid work and live off the government. Rankin also didn’t see the need to give African Americans the same benefits as whites." [2]
In the end, ways were found to exclude African Americans from the benefit even after the bill passed [3]. The generational knock-on effects of that are well documented.
But the tremendous value added to the economy because of government support (however unequal) of regular "non-genius" people is pretty well demonstrated by the successes of the GI Bill.
1. https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/celebrate/gi-bill.pdf
2. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-t...
3. https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-ben...
The US military budget is a back door for all sorts of social programs with really twisted incentives (twist may vary by program, GI Bill being among the most harmless). Because the social programs are buried in a military budget, the extent to which those programs are inclusive of those on the receiving end depends largely on the size of the receiving end (e.g. was military action taken?) and the extent to which the people on the receiving end deserve any consideration at all (e.g. language around accommodating victims of war will likely be more effective than no language around accommodating customers of weapons conducting their own wars).
By and large, neither extreme is especially beneficial to those on the receiving end of being outside our borders, unless we have a fairly lax immigration posture… which, is a laughable concept at this point. And the concept of burying social programs in a military budget laughs right along with that.
I think it’s deserving of the term ironic to point out that other historical examples of programs which work this way are largely prefixed “Soviet”, or at least were aligned that way.
Defeating the Nazis was just and invading Iraq was unjust, but we should not differentiate how we treat those whom we sent to do the fighting, as long has they have served honorably.