‘My Dearest Love’

War Stories and Love Letters from the Front

- “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.”

-author and historian David Brinkley

Want to know what war is all about, what it’s really like? Try reading hundreds of personal letters written by soldiers over the years to their loved ones back home.

That’s what Andrew Carroll, Director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University, did in 2001 when he started collecting war letters. He published them for the first time in a revealing and often heart-wrenching book titled War Stories: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (Scribner, 2001).

From the Civil War to Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, Carroll offers rare insight by American men and women who answered their country’s call and then shared their experiences on paper. The fear and heroism, the longing for home, and the seemingly random fate that ultimately decided who made it home and who didn’t — it’s all there in black and white.

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This came from 2nd Lieutenant Francis M. Tracy, writing to his wife Gertrude from the fields of France on September 1, 1918:

This is Sunday night, and just outside my billet, some of the dear boys of my platoon are singing love songs about honest to God women, back in the ‘land o’ dreams.’ Small wonder then, that I should think of you…. My one prayer is that I may be privileged to have one more opportunity to try to make you happy. I trust it will be granted to me…. My girl, my girl, how I do miss you.

The opportunity to reunite never came. Carroll writes in a post-script that one month after writing those words Lieutenant Tracy was killed by shrapnel from enemy artillery. A colonel in the same platoon later wrote Tracy’s wife telling her that it all happened in a flash. He said Tracy never felt pain or knew what hit him.

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For many the battle scars ran deep. June Wandrey, a nurse serving in Europe in World War Two, poured out her soul to her parents back home in Wisconsin after the loss of a patient she had grown fond of and written about in previous letters:

Dearest family,

Despite Sammy’s desperate battle to live, he slipped away just as morning broke. It broke my heart. Desperately tired, hungry, and sick of the misery and futility of war, I wept uncontrollably, my tears falling on poor Sammy’s bandaged remains. Later this morning, our long overdue ambulance came to retrieve us. I couldn’t bear to leave Sammy; I sat on the ambulance floor next to his litter and held his corpse as we bounced over the pockmarked roads on his last trip to Graves Registration. When he died, part of me died too. His magnificent singing voice was stilled forever, but ’til the end of my days, I will still hear him say, “Nurse, you have a smile like a whooooole field of sunflowers.”

So sadly, June

June Wandrey made it back home safely after the war and lived a long and happy life.

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Then there was an unusual letter written to President Franklin Roosevelt in March of 1942 by a young man imploring the president to let him serve in the armed forces. In part, it said:

Everybody in the world today must answer to himself which cause they will serve. To free people of deep religious feeling there can be but one answer and one choice, that will sustain them always and to the bitter end.

I am one of many, but I can render service to this great cause and I have a life to give that it may, with the help of all, triumph in the end.

I most respectfully assure you, Mr. President, that as in the past I would do my utmost in the future to be worthy of the great honour I am seeking through your kind aid, in the sure knowledge that my endeavors on behalf of the great principles of Democracy will at least bear favourable comparison to the activities of many individuals who for so long have been unworthy of the fine privilege of calling themselves Americans.

The man so wanting to join the fight was William Patrick Hitler, and yes, he was the nephew of Adolf Hitler. (William’s father was Adolf Hitler’s half-brother.) Following a thorough background check by the FBI, he was inducted into the U.S. Navy in 1944. He never saw combat, but he did serve in the Navy for two years and was honorably discharged in 1946. After that, Carroll notes, Patrick Hitler quietly faded into obscurity.

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Korea came next. But the realities and inflamed passions of war stayed the same. In a letter to his father in Texas in 1950 Sergeant John Wheeler had this to say about the Communist enemy he was fighting:

They claim that they want to help the “worker” — all they want to do is to help themselves. Mass murder, rape, torture, and starvation is the rule and not the exception with them. They have proved it here as well as everywhere else. I could see nothing more fitting for a young man to do then to devote his entire life to killing every one of them.

Wheeler’s father received two more letters from his son before the correspondence abruptly stopped. It was later learned that John had died as a POW in North Korea.

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The longer it went on, the more the war in Vietnam seemed to raise more questions than answers. Take, for instance, this letter in 1967 penned by First Lieutenant Dean Allen from Pompano Beach, Florida. In a long missive to his wife Joyce he said:

But many times like tonight — I am out on ambush with eleven men and a medic — after everything is set up and in position I have nothing to do but lay there and think — why I am here as well as all the men in my platoon — age makes no difference — there are very few kids over here — a few yes but they grow up fast or get killed. Why I have to watch a man die or get wounded — why I have to be the one to tell someone to do something that may get him blown away….

Some letter, huh! I don’t know if I have one sentence in the whole thing. I just started writing. Writing like that doesn’t really do that much good because you aren’t here to answer me or discuss anything.

Four days after writing that letter Dean was killed when he stepped on a land mine while on a “search-and-destroy” mission.

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And so it goes, one war after another, one story after another. So many lives and raw emotions laid bare in these pages it’s hard to fathom the cost. It is left for us now to remember the sacrifices made on our behalf.