Nothing I had ever seen, or read, or been told about war, prepared me for the letters I was about to receive. I had braced myself for graphic descriptions of bloodshed and stories of brutality and suffering, and I suspected there would be intimate letters to wives and girlfriends written by forlorn soldiers who, in so many cases, later died in battle.
What caught me off guard were the personal messages enclosed with every war letter.
Three days after Abigail Van Buren announced in her November 11, 1998, column that a new initiative, the Legacy Project, had been created to honor American veterans by seeking out and preserving their wartime correspondence, our tiny mailbox in a neighborhood post office was flooded with the first of fifty-thousand letters. I was thrilled by the deluge and hoped that, within these bins of mail, I would discover gripping, previously unpublished accounts of Gettysburg, Meuse-Argonne, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Khe Sanh, and Desert Storm—all written at the time these dramatic events were unfolding.
But after tearing into the envelopes, I was stunned to find deeply moving letters addressed to me. Many described the bittersweet experience of rereading these wartime correspondences, especially those by family members who were killed in action—or, if they did survive, had come home permanently changed. Attached to a handful of correspondences from Vietnam, for example, was this note: “Dear Sir, Please accept these letters that my brother had written to my mother. My brother is missing (not a POW). He was never right after he returned home and one day he was just gone. I hope to make his life worth something. I miss him very much.”
Fastened to a bundle of yellowed World War II memorabilia was a brief letter, penned in barely legible handwriting; “I am a widow 85 years old and my husband and only son have passed. My husband served in Patton’s Third Army. There is no one I can give these my husbands letters to so you may have them. Please remember him.” There was no return address. A similar package was sent in by a woman whose husband was still alive but afflicted with Alzheimer’s. She feared that when she and her husband died, all of his correspondences would be thrown away. Along with his letters were photographs of the two of them, strikingly beautiful, taken when they were probably no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. Almost sixty years had passed, and the handsome young private who mailed passionate letters to his fiancée was now an elderly man incapable of recognizing his wife at all.
“[My grandfather] passed away in the late ‘70s when I was a child and was such a curmudgeon when I knew him,” noted Karren Reish, who contributed several letters by her maternal grandfather, Walter Schuette. “I found these letters as a teenager and they made me cry.” Indeed, Schuette’s wartime letters are poignant expressions of love addressed to his wife and their infant daughter, Anna Mary (Karren’s mother). “You will never know the joy I knew when I received word that you had arrived,” Schuette wrote to his baby girl from England a week after she was born. “Should God decree that you never know your father I want you to have this sample of my handwriting…. I place you now in the hands of God. May He care for you and love you. May He see fit that we shall see one another very soon and keep us together into eternity.” Schuette returned home alive and was able to read his letter to Anna Mary personally. But the tender, homesick correspondent was not the man Karren Reish knew. Like others who saw combat, he did not talk about the war with anyone—not his friends, not his children, not even his wife. While a self-imposed humility prevents many veterans from recounting their war days, there is another reason for their reticence: What they saw, what they lost, and what they endured was horrific beyond words. A tempest of painful memories rages behind many gruff exteriors, and the only way for them to bear this anguish is not to discuss it. I began to understand this silence once I started focusing on the war letters themselves.
“All along the beach, men were dying of wounds. Maybe you will think this is cruel, but I want you to know what it was like,” Pfc. Richard King wrote to his parents in 1945 about the fighting he experienced on Saipan and Okinawa. “Mortar shells dropping in on heads, and ripping bodies. Faces blown apart by flying lead and coral…. Shells would hit, and bury you, or blow you out of your foxhole. The Catholic Chaplain was killed as he was blessing each foxhole. An artillery shell cut him in half at the waist.”
France, 1918. Writing to his wife from a hospital bed after the St. Mihiel Offensive, 1st Lt. Ed Lukert listed the close friends he had lost in the war: “Lt. Gamble, killed. Lt. Airy killed by a shell. Lt. Horton, who used to live at the Dyer House in Chickamauga Park, killed by shell fire. His clothing was blown off his body, and his body was minus all limbs, but right arm. Lt. Jones, B Company (the funny fellow you liked to hear talk) shot thru the head by a machine gun. Lt. Boatwright, same.”
Sgt. John Wheeler, fighting in Korea, told his father about the day he was shot: “I found out that I got hit twice that day. The first was a bullet that went through part of my right temple, through the right ear and out the back of my head never going all the way into my head, but grazing it leaving quite a scar and a hole in the ear. Good thing it didn’t go all of the way in, or I would have come home sooner than anticipated, in a pine box.”
I was three years old when U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, and no one in my immediate family has ever served in the armed forces. War had always been a remote, almost abstract concept to me. Even the fighting in the Persian Gulf, which I vividly recall watching live on television, seemed distant and unreal. When it was over, far from sobering me to the realities of warfare, Desert Storm only convinced me—at the time—that wars were won quickly, easily, bloodlessly.
Over a year earlier, just before Christmas 1989, a fire swept through my family’s home in Washington, D.C. Thankfully, no one was hurt (even Claude, our cat, bounded out safely), but almost all of our possessions were destroyed. As I walked cautiously through the burnt-out shell of our house several days later, it suddenly occurred to me that all my letters were gone. The clothes, the furniture, the books, just about everything else could be replaced, but not the letters. Admittedly I had nothing historically significant, only correspondences with high school friends traveling abroad and, alas, more “Dear John” letters than most overseas army divisions receive collectively. But it was crushing to realize that all of these personal letters were gone forever, curled up into ash and washed away. I was unaware of it then, but the experience of losing everything in the fire inspired in me a lifelong passion for letters and, ultimately, the Legacy Project, itself. For that alone, the fire was something of a godsend.
Ed Stoch heard about the Legacy Project in November 1998 and sent in a remarkable letter he wrote after he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. From his hospital bed in England, Stoch mailed a three-page letter to his parents back in Cleveland, Ohio, to let them know he was still alive. At the bottom of the third page, a handwritten postscript asked: “Say, how about that fruitcake you promised me, huh?” What is notable about the seemingly innocent appeal is that Ed Stoch did not write it. The censors did. Rather ingeniously, the mail handlers were soliciting care packages from the homefront and then pocketing the goodies on their way back. The soldiers didn’t know the requests were being made, and the parents didn’t know the food was being intercepted. It was the perfect crime. Stoch sent me a photocopy of the fifty-six-year-old letter and, still miffed, added above the forged handwriting: “The Rats!” As trivial as it may appear, this small spark of mischief in a tiny corner of the world brought war to life and humanized it in a way that was more personal and more powerful to me than any recitation of battle-related statistics or casualty counts.
Some of the most affecting letters are those by servicemen and women trying to downplay the horrors of combat. Writing to an old friend back in Dallas on May 13, 1944, S. Sgt. Bob Brown, a B-24 turret gunner stationed in England, described a recent dash through German antiaircraft fire: “That flak is really rough on your nerves—especially when you can hear it burst. Once I bent over to pick up my flak suit & a piece of flak knocked a hole 4 in. round in the exact spot that my head had just vacated—also a hunk of flak hit my ball turret while I was in it & bounced off—Gee, I was really scared. These Germans are really serious about this whole thing & if they aren’t careful they are liable to hurt someone.”
Lance Corporal Thomas P. Noonan articulated the madness of the Vietnam War in a brief, whimsical letter to his sister in New York: “Please disregard any small note of flippancy that might reveal itself in this letter,” Noonan wrote on October 17, 1968. “I try to avoid it, but when one is having such a good time it is hard not to be cheerful. I’ve thrown off the shackles of silly society. I’ve cast out my razor, divorced my soap, buried my manners, signed my socks to a two-year contract, and proved that you don’t have to come in out of the rain. I scale the mountains, swim the rivers, soar through the skies in magic carpet helicopters. My advent is attended by Death and I’ve got chewing gum stuck in my mustache.” These lighthearted bursts of spontaneity and levity become heartbreaking, however, when one recognizes the real dangers they were facing. S. Sgt. Bob Brown, twenty-two years old, was shot out of the sky only six days after he wrote to his friend in Dallas, and Lance Corporal Noonan was killed five months after writing to his sister. He was twenty-five.
Every effort has been made to transcribe the letters featured in this book exactly as they were written, mistakes and all. The intent is not to embarrass the correspondents but merely to capture their distinct personalities and nuanced writing styles. Certain errors also suggest the conditions under which these letters were written. Many correspondents wrote by moonlight in filthy trenches and flooded foxholes. One Civil War soldier resorted to using blackberry juice for ink. Punctuation and spelling errors abound because letters were written in haste, and certain words are indecipherable because rain or melted snow caused them to blur. Some of the servicemen, including George S. Patton, were dyslexic, and it is further evidence of how vital letters were to them that they would struggle for hours to write what would, in the end, amount to only a few pages. To clean up these letters or disrupt their natural pacing with one “[sic]” or bracketed notation after another, I believe, only diminishes what makes each letter so unique in the first place.
In the one hundred and forty years of warfare covered in this book, billions of letters, postcards, telegrams, V(ictory)-mails, and, more recently, e-mails, have traveled over continents and oceans to sustain the bonds of family and friendship. Although there are very few V-mails included here, they are referred to throughout the World War II chapter and represent the bulk of American correspondence during the 1940s. Created to handle the onslaught of letters overwhelming the U.S. postal service, V-mails were free and quick, but provided correspondents with only one short, preprinted page to express themselves. That page was sent through a machine to be photographed, and then negatives from thousands of V-mails were placed on a single roll of film and flown to a processing center, where they were developed and then forwarded to their recipients. At one point during the war, so many wives and girlfriends were kissing their V-mails before sending them off that the lipstick was building up and jamming the machines. It was known as the “scarlet scourge.”
Few themes run more conspicuously through every generation of wartime correspondence than the yearning for mail. Letters were one of the few, tangible connections to loved ones, and servicemen and women pleaded and pined for even a word from home. “Say you old slab of lop-sided tin-eared Jackass,” one World War I soldier wrote to his friend, Elmer Sutters, in the States, “what’s wrong with you anyhow. Got writer’s cramp or what? Pick up a pen for the Love of Pete and write to your old buddie in France.” Union private Columbus Huddle begged his father back in Ohio to write to him more frequently. “I have sent two letters to America and received no answer yet,” Huddle reminded his father on April 10, 1862, “it is such a pleasure to get a letter here in this foreign land.” (Huddle was in Tennessee.) Some soldiers were even more demanding. “You really giped me in your last letter,” a young private groused to his friend Tessie Greenberg back in Brooklyn.
A soldier looks forward to a letter as a means of relaxation and some consolation to a certain extent and to what is going on back home and last but not least, a friendly man to man talk. He doesn’t expect a quiz program, and he’d rather not hear about the troubles or sickness that the sender of the letter is having at the time. And before I stop bringing you down any further, how about writing so I can understand what the hell you are writing without having to put my eyes within an inch of the writing so I can make it out. Okay, I’m through. Boy, I’ll never hear the end of this.
Regrettably, Tessie’s response has not survived.
And herein lies the sense of urgency that fuels the Legacy Project. Throughout our country, old war letters are regularly being destroyed, misplaced, lost to fire and water damage, or thrown away. These letters are the first, unfiltered drafts of history. They are eyewitness accounts that record not only the minute details of war but the personal insight and perspective no photograph or film reel can replicate. And each one represents another page in our national autobiography. Millions of these letters—maybe more—remain tucked away in attics, basements, and closets in every community in America. It is exhilarating to think of what is yet to be uncovered. But it is equally as discouraging to consider, if these letters are neglected, what may be lost forever.
During a trip to London in the fall of 1999 to research American war letters at the Imperial War Museum, I encountered an elderly English gentleman who related to me how he and his countrymen prepared for war in the summer of 1939. Fearing massive bombings and a full-scale German invasion, English citizens in numerous towns and villages meticulously dismantled the stained glass windows of their churches and distributed the individual fragments throughout the community. The townspeople then hid the small pieces of colored glass in biscuit tins and bowls of sugar. After the war, the glass was collected and reassembled.
What struck me about the story was how analogous it seemed to this book. Individually, the war letters collected here are distinct, finely cut works of art, some more polished, some rougher around the edges, but each one exquisite in its own right. Together, they create a larger narrative: the story of Americans at war against themselves and other nations. It is a story of immeasurable suffering and astonishing violence. But it is also a story that encompasses tales of heroism, perseverance, integrity, honor, and reconciliation. The individual letters infuse the story with its humanity, while the collection as a whole demonstrates the story’s breathtaking size and scope.
There is another story these letters tell, but it is more obscure and harder to discern. Occasionally it reveals itself when a soldiers assures his mom or his wife that “everything’s fine” and not to fret. It is most evident in the relatively few letters that have survived by these mothers and wives imploring their loved ones to let them know all is well. This particular story is not about the men who fight. It is about the women on the homefront.
Theirs is a story largely unrecorded because the servicemen hundreds or thousands of miles away could not, for the most part, save their letters from home. They wanted to, and they tried, but ultimately it was impractical; there was no place to stash so much mail, and, even if there were, the letters were unlikely to outlast the jungles of Vietnam, the frozen mountains of Korea, the muddy battlefields of Europe, or the sweltering islands of the Pacific. Most letters from the homefront that have survived are correspondences marked “return to sender” because the recipient was dead. (The delay in wartime mail delivery also meant that letters by the deceased kept coming home days and even weeks after he had been killed in action.)
“I am just about frantic for fear you were in danger yesterday,” Alice House wrote on December 8, 1941, to her eighteen-year-old son, Paul, stationed at Pearl Harbor. “I walk around doing my work, ironing, doing the dishes, and everything else, saying my prayers…. I would be terribly grateful if I could get just one word from you, SAFE.” (Petty Officer House was onboard the USS West Virginia when it was struck, but he leapt into the flaming waters and was rescued.) In every war women like Alice House waited and worried, never knowing when to expect a visit from a military chaplain or a telegram beginning with that pulse-stopping first line: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that …” And if that notification did come, their lives were instantly shattered. “There are no words to describe how I felt. I was so empty,” Theresa O. Davis wrote thirty years after her son, Richard, was killed in Vietnam. “I pretended to be brave. But inside, the empty space just grew bigger.”
I have learned, through what letters of theirs have been preserved, of the private pain these women have carried with them over the years. There are, of course, millions of men who quietly grieve for lost brothers and sons and fathers and best friends, but I emphasize the women only because they are so often overlooked. The resilience and compassion of these women is extraordinary to me, and they have taught me and so many others the human cost of war and the internal scars it leaves behind. They are also the ones, I have discovered, most responsible for organizing, deciphering, transcribing, and saving America’s war letters. This book would not have been possible without the letters these women have held on to and safeguarded for future generations. They have kept these voices alive and ensured that the men and women who have served this nation will always be remembered. For their generosity, their sacrifice, and all that they have endured, this book is dedicated to them.