There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.
—General William Tecumseh Sherman, in a speech to the Grand Army of the Republic Convention, August 11, 1880
Like most great old soldiers, General Sherman knew whereof he spoke in his gut hatred for war: Sixteen years before he made his starkly poignant appeal to future generations, he had been supreme commander of the Union army in the West, and it was he who had slashed and burned a fiery swath across Georgia, sacked Atlanta, and marched on to the sea with an indomitable brutality that sealed the triumph of the North in the U.S. Civil War.
But how it must have pained him to know what he had done, to have seen the blood spilled and the devastation wrought at his own orders; how he must have ached, as he revealed to those boys a decade and a half later, that posterity should grasp, and heed, his heart-felt horror of war.
Indeed, Sherman stands in a long line of military leaders whose battle scars would yield a profound understanding of human belligerence and all its attendant atrocities. And the most important thing experience teaches these thinking warriors—from fifth century B.C. Greek naval commander-turned-historian Thucydides on down the millennia—is the ancient truth philosopher George Santayana articulated so well at the beginning of the twentieth century: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
War Letters helps us all remember and learn from the wars of the past, seen firsthand and described here in the words of a broad cross section of American men and women. Covering the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the interventions in Somalia and Bosnia, each of the letters in this remarkable volume is published here in its entirety for the first time. Inclusions were carefully culled from the more than fifty thousand pieces of American wartime correspondence editor Andrew Carroll amassed over the last few years in his search for what he calls “this nation’s great undiscovered literature.”
The objects of his quest were not politicians’ grandiloquent exhortations unto the breach or jingoistic calls to arms, but personal letters affording authentic, unfiltered glimpses of the realities of war. What Carroll wanted to get across is the notion Confederate cavalry hero John Singleton Mosby—echoing General Sherman—expressed in his 1887 memoir of the Civil War, that “War loses a great deal of romance after a soldier has seen his first battle.”
Fans of Rambo-esque exploits will have to look elsewhere for chest-thumping: War Letters instead presents a series of moving testimonials from both ordinary and celebrated men and women—impassioned evocations of love and sacrifice, duty and honor, fear and confusion, courage and perseverance, rage and the intimations of mortality that spark it. A number of these letters were written not from the battlefield or barracks, but the homefront; others offer the unique perspective of the combat journalist or the nurse in the trenches. Taken together, these messages make for a powerful look at the eternal mystery of man’s impulse to reach for arms rather than the wisdom of the Golden Rule.
The earliest letters date from the start of the Civil War, when a moment of truth was upon the nation as never before or since. Enraged by the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, who had vowed not to permit any territory that allowed slavery to join the United States, seven southern states seceded from the Union, formed the Confederacy, and elected their own president—former senator from Mississippi Jefferson Davis—all before Lincoln even took the oath of office on March 4, 1861. A month into his administration, Lincoln faced a fateful decision: The federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor—then under the authority of one Major Robert Anderson—was running so short on supplies the post had to be either restocked or abandoned at once.
The Union army’s then commanding general, Winfield Scott, favored withdrawal, a move the nation’s new president considered acceptable, provided it would inspire the loyalty of the border states. But anti-Confederate sentiment was building in the North, where pulling out might have been taken as a sign of weakness, so Lincoln boldly decided to reinforce Fort Sumter instead, leaving Anderson—surrounded by hostile Confederate forces, but undaunted—to hunker down and protect the American flag and all it represented.
Overnight, Anderson became a symbol for the fight to preserve the Union. Letters poured into the stronghold at Charleston, thanking the garrison leader for his grit and grace under the tremendous pressure to surrender. Particularly encouraging words came in a moving missive from the former governor of Massachusetts, Marcus Morton, written just days before Confederate General Pierre G. T. de Beauregard began pounding Fort Sumter with some four thousand shells. “At a moment when the hearts of all true friends of the Union were heavy with apprehension,” Morton wrote, “when distrust in the efficiency of Republican Institutions seemed about to settle upon the land; and men began to doubt whether the coming day would dawn on a people enjoying the blessings of Constitutional Liberty or a people drifting into disorder and anarchy, the intelligence of your self-reliant, wise and patriotic conduct in the harbor of Charleston, as it flashed from point to point, reanimated their wavering hopes, restored their waning confidence, and gave reassurance that they still possess a national Government.” Morton continued, in the letter included here, that “[t]his is not the time nor the occasion to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the unhappy controversy which menaces the Republic; nor to enquire upon whom rests the responsibility for the perils which environs us. Your heroic action admonishes us that our first thoughts and efforts should be devoted to the maintenance of the Union as it was founded by our wise and patriotic Fathers and bequeathed to us, that we, in our time, may transmit it, in all its integrity and glory, to our successors.”
The Civil War, which began when Anderson reluctantly surrendered Fort Sumter after two days of relentless Confederate bombardment, exacted the most staggering loss of human life in our nation’s history: More than 370,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, while another 275,000 of the former and 100,000 of the latter went home maimed. The appalling bloodshed on both sides left many wounds, some of which still have not healed. Yet as Governor Morton noted so eloquently in the letter presented here, with our freedom comes the obligation to preserve and protect the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution for future generations—no matter the cost, or how deep the lasting scars. For all its terrible consequences, it is important to remember that Anderson’s steadfastness at Fort Sumter was in two of history’s noblest causes: the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery in America. “Sometimes gunpowder smells good,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson averred. “Now we have a country again.”
The very loftiness of those ideals that sustained the United States through its direst crisis also informs perhaps the most telling theme in this collected correspondence. In general, the letters from the Civil War and the two world wars have an upbeat and optimistic ring, and are more often than not brash with good-natured confidence. By contrast, the GIs of the Cold War era, from Korea to Vietnam and beyond, sent home accounts fraught with doubt and confusion and openly questioning whether risking death in a Chosin Reservoir crater or on a Mekong Delta rice paddy made any sense, or did any good, for Old Glory or anything else.
Although most of the letters collected here bear the obscure signatures of regular folk, quite a few were penned by figures of note. Editor Andrew Carroll’s celebrity selections include such luminaries as Civil War nurse Clara Barton putting her thoughts down by campfire light on the cold still December night before the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg, legendary cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer recounting to his sister a hair-raising reconnaissance mission against rebel troops in Virginia, and a prepacifist General William T. Sherman gloating to friends about the burning of Atlanta. War Letters also turns up written proof that during World War I General John “Black Jack” Pershing vigorously advocated equal treatment and rights for African-American servicemen, and reveals how Benjamin O. Davis Sr., our nation’s first African-American general, found inspiration in the eloquent words of Abraham Lincoln during World War II.
Social worker Jane Addams is represented in a letter she wrote to President Woodrow Wilson on October 29, 1915, in her capacity chairing the Women’s Peace Party, criticizing his administration for starting a military buildup aimed at preparing America for war. In one startling letter General Douglas MacArthur lashes out at whoever might be behind the “campaign of vituperation” he insisted was mounted against him after the People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War. There are even a few personal missives sent by then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf after the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, and a surprisingly powerful denunciation of McCarthyism from none other than public TV’s festive “French Chef,” Julia Child. Before becoming a gourmet icon, the then Julia McWilliams had worked in both clerical and low-level policy positions at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. War Letters portrays a side of Child her cooking shows never did. In a gallant March 12, 1950, letter she wrote to a fellow Smith College alumna to protest McCarthyite red-baiting witch hunts of liberal-leaning professors at her alma mater. “In this very dangerous period of our history, where, through fear and confusion, we are assailed continually by conflicting opinions and strong appeals to the emotions, it is imperative that our young people learn to sift truth from half-truth; demagoguery from democracy; totalitarianism in any form, from liberty,” the future French Chef declared. “The duty of Smith College is, as I see it, to give her daughters the kind of education which will ensure that they will use their minds clearly and wisely, so that they will be able to conduct themselves as courageous and informed citizens of the United States.”
The most affecting of War Letters’s big-name epistles is the heart-breaking note former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a family friend shortly after his son, Quentin Roosevelt, was killed during World War I. Thanking Mrs. Harvey L. Freeland for her condolences, Roosevelt admitted: “It is hard to open the letters from those you love who are dead; but Quentin’s last letters, written during his three weeks at the front, when of his squadron on an average a man was killed every day, are written with real joy in the ‘great adventure.’” The grieving father continued: “He was engaged to a very beautiful girl, of very fine and high character; it is heartbreaking for her, as well as for his mother; but they both said that they would rather [he] never come back than never have gone. He had his crowded hour, he died at the crest of life, in the glory of the dawn.”
The letters that follow also detail a few wartime incidents—or reactions to them—that place readers in the front row of history. One such tale unfolds in a letter Army Cpl. Robert S. Easterbrook penned to his parents from the bedside of Japan’s ex-premier, Hideki Tojo, after the enemy leader made a failed attempt at suicide. Written in grisly diary form, Easterbrook chronicled to the exact minute, every detail of Tojo’s blood transfusions, apparently for posterity. “In my next letter I’ll send a piece of his shirt,” the corporal promised his mother. “It has blood on it—but don’t wash it. Just put it away in my room.”
This peculiar note turned up in a bundle of old photographs, postcards, and news clippings that Debra Beyerlein bought for a dollar at a yard sale in June 1982. Sixteen years later, after reading a “Dear Abby” column about Andrew Carroll’s Legacy Project, Beyerlein mailed him the bundle. Now, thanks to War Letters, precisely what happened to Tojo after he tried to kill himself is part of recorded history.
It makes for a delightful subtext to this volume, not just that Carroll discovered these letters at all, but that “Dear Abby” helped him do it. Consider, for example, that until Abigail Van Buren’s syndicated column on Carroll’s search appeared in his newspaper, Horace Evers had given but scant thought to the historical value of an old letter he kept in a trunk in his mobile home in Florida. When Carroll received it, any doubt about the keepsake’s value disappeared, and not just because then Army Staff Sergeant Evers had written it on a sheet of Hitler’s personal stationery he had procured firsthand from the Führer’s Munich apartment on May 2, 1945, only days after the Nazi leader killed himself in his Berlin bunker. Indeed, it is what Evers reported back home on this stationery that makes it so remarkable—his account of what he had seen at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. “In two years of combat you can imagine I have seen a lot of death, furious deaths mostly. But nothing has ever stirred me as much as this,” Evers recounted. “The first box car I came to had about 30 what were once humans in it.—All were just bone with a layer of skin over them…. Bodies on top of each other—no telling how many—Filthy barracks suitable for about 200 persons held 1500. 160,000 persons were originally in the camp and 32,000 were alive (or almost alive) when we arrived.—There is a gas chamber and furnace room in one barracks.—Two rooms were full of bodies waiting to be cremated…. How can people do things like that? I never believed they could until now.”
War Letters is full of searing first-person accounts that leave it clear just how much some principles are worth fighting for. What makes this book so poignant, however, is its constant echo of a melancholy note, previously published, that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote home one night in April 1944, just weeks before the D-Day invasion. “How I wish this cruel business of war could be completed quickly,” he confided in it to his wife, Mamie. “Entirely aside from the longing to return to you (and stay there) it is a terribly sad business to total up the casualties every day—even in an air war—and realize how many youngsters are gone forever. A man must develop a veneer of callousness that lets him consider such things dispassionately, but he can never escape a recognition of the fact that back home the news brings anguish and suffering to families all over the country…. War demands real toughness of fiber—not only in the soldiers [who] must endure, but in the homes that sacrifice their best.”
Though hewn of pretty tough fiber himself, Eisenhower would remark that the hardest part of his job during World War II came on Sundays, which he set aside for the mournful chore of signing the thousands of condolence letters that had to be sent to the families of GIs killed in the European theater. To soothe the pain of putting his name to these starkly bureaucratic letters—government casualty certificates, really—Ike looked to the classics of war poetry, from Homer’s Iliad to World War I-era Siegfried Sassoon.
For Eisenhower understood that however gripping the battle stories, nothing can capture the rending agonies of war as good poetry can, especially when it’s written in a foxhole as artillery fire screams overhead. It was one thing, Ike’s long experience had proved, to read in a textbook that more than 116,000 American soldiers died in World War I—and quite another to take on the question British war poet Wilfred Owen raised in his posthumously published “Anthem for Doomed Youth”: “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons.”
Sadly Owen never got to learn that he had penned some of the most celebrated verses to come out of World War I: He was killed in action on the Western Front a week before the armistice. A similar fate had claimed another Ike favorite, Alan Seeger, an American who had joined the French Foreign Legion when the Great War broke out. Seeger was killed in 1916 fighting the Germans in France, shortly after writing his great poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” the chorus of which begins, “I have a rendezvous with Death / At some disputed barricade,” and ends, “And I to my pledged word am true, / I shall not fail that rendezvous.” It was Seeger’s poem that inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,” and was later adapted by President John F. Kennedy for his demand that the United States put a man on the moon within a decade.
The personal papers collected in War Letters conjure the same emotions as the likes of Owen and Seeger in a plainer poetry of their own. Whether the author is Union surgeon William Child writing home after the ferocious Battle of Antietam to ask rhetorically who permits such bloodshed or Staff Sergeant Daniel Welch describing the surreal scene of carnage he saw along the coast road as he passed Kuwait City up in flames, the letters here haunt the soul the way good war poems do, perhaps out of the same awareness of knowing what the authors did not: that, in Owen’s memorable line, so many of their eyes would soon “shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.”
It seems appropriate that so much of this volume draws from “last letters” written by servicemen before being killed in action—and that they were, so many of them, just teenagers suddenly tossing not baseballs but hand grenades at other, equally innocent kids—recalling Herman Melville’s observation in his 1866 book Battle Pieces that “[a]ll wars are boyish and are fought by boys.”
That’s what makes it so hard, and so worthwhile, to read the sweet letter Richard Cowan wrote to his mother on his twenty-second birthday, before going off to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. By and large Cowan’s is a fairly sophisticated meditation on mortality, but his youthful exuberance can’t help but burst through in the end. “Pretty convinced I’m grown up, ain’t I, Mom?” he teased. “Well, I still count on you tucking me into bed when I get home.”
Another point War Letters underlines is the incredible range in human relationships, as seen in the contrast between Cowan’s note home and the one Kate Gordon sent her son, stationed overseas during World War I, urging him to “live,” unless God willed otherwise, in which case he should “die with courage.” And then there is the powerful last letter of Dean Allen of Delmar, New York, who was drafted into the Army, put through Officer Candidate School, and sent to Vietnam in 1969. Writing home to his schoolteacher wife, Allen confessed his fear of losing any of the men in his platoon. “Being a good platoon leader is a lonely job,” he explained. “I don’t want to really get to know anybody over here because it would be bad enough to lose a man—I damn sure don’t want to lose a friend.” Four days later Allen was killed after stepping on a land mine.
Yet for all the horror in these pages, it would do their authors a disservice to dwell on the lamentations rather than on their playful good cheer, even under the most harrowing circumstances. After all, most were responses written in the glow of youthful vigor boosted by the latest news from home affirming that life was still normal there—that Dad was still boasting about the tomatoes bursting ripe in his backyard garden, that Little Brother had smacked his first stand-up double, or that Sis had been accepted at the local university. Indeed, there is comfort to be found in the mundane details of everyday life back in the United States—the score of a Friday night football game, the cut on a smart linen dress that was such a steal at the Salvation Army store—these simple bits of news have always been the rare joys of soldiers far from home. In truth, for every Dear John letter giving notice to a GI that he had just been dumped by his best girl, a thousand others served as warm reminders of Mom’s cooking up a storm for the holiday picnic under the oak tree down by the pond—and it is in the same home-and-hearth spirit that the Yanks, Johnny Rebs, doughboys, GIs, and grunts who fought our wars always wrote back, and still do.
Indeed—one of the purest, gentlest, and most old-fashioned evocations of mom-and-apple-pie patriotism in this book appears in one of its last entries. Written from Bosnia in September 1996, Major Tom O’Sullivan’s birthday letter to his little boy concludes thus:
There aren’t any stores here in Bosnia, so I couldn’t buy you any toys or souvenirs for your birthday. What I am sending you is something very special though. It is a flag. This flag represents America and makes me proud each time I see it. When the people here in Bosnia see it on our uniforms, on our vehicles, or flying above our camps, they know that it represents freedom, and, for them, peace after many years of war.
This flag was flown on the flagpole over the headquarters of Task Force 4–67 Armor, Camp Colt, in the Posavina Corridor of northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, on 16 September 1996. It was flown in honor of you on your seventh birthday. Keep it and honor it always.
Love,
Dad.
In the end, it is the sort of warmth that radiates from Major O’Sullivan’s note to his son that makes War Letters so extraordinary. For much of the correspondence collected here is the simple exchange of assurances of caring and support, mother to son, brother to sister, husband to wife, friend to friend. And it is in this communication among loved ones that those lofty ideals of liberty that make America great are passed on. As shown here, every American generation from that of the Civil War to the Bosnian intervention has wanted its progeny to know that war is cruel and to be avoided at any cost—except, that is, when conflict is the only way to preserve the integrity of our constitutional values and democratic principles. As the inscription on a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in Washington, D.C., notes, quoting a speech he delivered in St. Louis shortly after General Robert E. Lee’s glorious surrender, “The legitimate object of war is a more perfect peace.”
—Douglas Brinkley
Director, Eisenhower Center of American Studies and Professor of History at the University of New Orleans
January 1, 2001