[From
2016 to 2024, I worked on and off on a huge project. I called it “The Letters Project” because it
concerned the 1945 correspondence between my future mother and father from just
after they met until just before their wedding almost exactly a year later. It was the end of World War II.
[The collection contains 182 pieces of correspondence, and on 18 February 2024, I wrote up the last two letters in the collection. Now, ten years after I started the project, I’ve decided it’s finished. I’ll be posting the result on Rick On Theater in installments, starting today.
[On 23 March 2024, I posted a kind of preview of this series, “The Letters Project,” in which I wrote, “In one respect, I had two contrasting reactions simultaneously. It was fascinating and strange at the same time.” I think readers will now see what I meant.
[There are some surprises and revelations in the letters, often little items that illuminate a time and place that few of us here now were around to witness. Some of that was history, of course, such as the deaths of President Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, for example, and the surrender of Germany. Most of it, though, was just life in 1945.
[Near the end of that preview post, I also wrote, “These are the voices of my parents, after all, and I’m eavesdropping on them from [over] 80 years in their future.” Remember that, readers, please.]
LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945
Introduction
[On 12, 15, and 18 June 2015, I posted transcriptions on Rick On Theater of some letters my father wrote to my mother in September and October 1962. I called the three-part post “Home Alone” because the letters were from the time my dad was in Germany starting on his job as a Foreign Service Officer before my mom joined him. Mom had saved Dad’s letters, but Dad hadn’t returned the favor—or they hadn’t survived the decades since.
[Now I’ve worked through another, older collection of letters—this time from both correspondents. These are the letters my future parents exchanged in 1945, between their first meeting and their wedding a little over a year later. The period covered by the correspondence included Dad’s deployment to Europe at the end of the war against Germany and the end of his army service. I call the post “Letters from the Fronts” because, while Dad’s letters are mostly from the European combat zone, Mom’s are from the home front.
[The letters run from 8 January, a week after Mother and Dad met, to 2 December 1945, two days before Dad was released from military service. Mom had graduated from college on 1 September 1944 and was working for the American Red Cross during the period of the correspondence. She was 21 when she met her future husband; my father-to-be was just 26.
[Dad had entered active duty with the army on 19 March 1941 and embarked for Europe on 27 February 1945, arriving in France on 11 March. On 22 August, he departed for the U.S., arriving on 7 September. He was separated from the army on 4 December and returned home to New York City.
[Of course, I’ve read the letters more than once, the first time many years ago—I was probably in my early teens or younger. For the past several years, though, I’ve wanted to compose a post for ROT based on the letters.
[It’s not that I think they’re so remarkable—well, they are from a personal and family point of view, but I know that many wartime couples have similar collections of letters—but that I find my parents’ letters fascinating not just because of the affection expressed in them, but the little clues about the life and death going on around them: the home front in Mom’s letters to Dad and the battle front and its repercussions in Dad’s letters. Needless to say, I’m biased; I guess we’ll see if anyone else finds the letters as engaging as I do.
[(A note here about my transcription of the letters and other correspondence: I’ll be summarizing parts of the letters, but I’ve tried to be true to my parents’ writing where I’ve transcribed their prose, even the idiosyncratic and incorrect bits, except where it interferes with comprehension. This includes not only vocabulary, but spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Where I think it’s necessary, I’ll insert comments or explanations.
[(In some instances, things my folks told me or that I know from experience throw revealing light on something the correspondents have written, and I’ve provided that information peripherally. As my future mother admonished my father—though she might have also been addressing me!—in an early letter, “Good Lord, don’t go looking for poor sentence structure, and rotten spelling!!!”
[(I also haven’t intentionally omitted remarks my future parents made that today are embarrassing or politically incorrect. Let’s keep in mind, shall we, that these letter-writers were pretty young and living in a different era.
[(They also didn’t know that we’d be kibitzing on what they were saying to one another! While Cecily Cardew—of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—may have declared that her diary, “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions,” was “consequently meant for publication,” I somehow don’t think my parents ever figured their wartime letters would be consumed by the public from a perspective of eight decades in the future!)]
My mother, the former Judith Carol Freedman (b. 7 April 1923) died on 26 May 2015 at the age of 92. She’d been a widow since 6 February 1996, almost 20 years. My father, Eugene Monroe K***** (b. 5 November 1918), died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at 77 and he’d been non compos mentis for a year or more before his death, so he had no idea that the previous 6 January had been his and my mother’s 50th wedding anniversary.
(I posted a tribute to my mother, simply called “Mom,” on Rick On Theater on 1 November 2016, and one to my father, entitled “Dad,” on 20 June 2010, which was Father’s Day that year.)
(A battery in the artillery is the equivalent of a company in the infantry or a troop in the cavalry and air cavalry. Camp Hood was 158 miles south of Dallas and 194 miles northeast of Houston. The nearest big town was Waco, 65 miles northeast.
(During World War II, the army’s artillery units were divided into two corps: the Field Artillery Corps, Dad’s branch, armed with mobile artillery pieces used to support armies in the field, and the Coast Artillery Corps, which was responsible for coastal, harbor, and anti-aircraft defense of the United States. In 1950, the Coast Artillery was merged with the Field Artillery, and in 1968, the Air Defense Artillery Branch was formed to conduct anti-aircraft warfare operations with rockets and missiles.)
Mom was also born in New York City but her family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, when she was little (see “Horsman Dolls,” posted on ROT on 14 February 2017). Since graduating from college in September 1944, she was doing social work out of the Trenton Chapter of the American Red Cross with servicemen and -women who were far away from their homes.
At one naval base in New Jersey, she met a young WAVE ensign named Clarice, known as Kris, who also came from New York. Kris and my mom were only a month apart in age, and they became friends. My mother-to-be had turned 21 on 7 April 1944.
Kris was assigned to Skillman Airport in Ewing Township in West Trenton, Mercer County, with duty at the nearby General Motors Inland Fisher Guide Plant, which in 1941 converted from manufacturing auto body parts to making the Navy’s Avenger torpedo bomber as part of GM’s newly formed Eastern Aircraft Division. Kris (b. 1923) died on 9 February 2017 at 93. She had a U.S. Navy honor guard at her funeral.
(The WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, were the women’s reserve of the U.S. Navy during World War II. An ensign is the lowest-ranking naval officer, the equivalent of an army second lieutenant [pay grade: O-1]. The carrier-based Avengers were test-flown at Skillman Airport, later returned to civilian control and renamed Mercer County Airport and now Trenton-Mercer Airport.)
Mom’s parents, Harry (1895-1967) and Valerie (1900-74) Freedman, were married on 1 January 1920, so they held a combination New Year’s Day/anniversary party every year. It was mostly for my future grandparents’ friends, but Mother was encouraged to invite a friend of her own so she wouldn’t be the only young person in the house.
Mother invited Kris. A few days before the party, Kris called her friend and explained that her big brother was home from the army and had nowhere to go on New Year’s Day and asked if she could bring him to the party.
My mother and her parents gladly agreed and when Kris arrived at my grandparents’ house on Fisher Place in Trenton, she was accompanied by a nice-looking young man with blue eyes and wavy blond hair (although, being on active duty at the time, he probably had his hair cut pretty short).
Do I have to say that Kris’s brother, Gene, was, in fact, my future father? That party, Monday evening, 1 January 1945, my future grandparents’ 25th wedding anniversary, was when my parents met.
That’s not the whole story, however. My dad-to-be proceeded to get drunk at the party and fell asleep on a sofa in the living room of my grandparents’ home. He refused to leave, he declared, until he got my mom in his Christmas stocking. Well, that didn’t happen exactly, of course, but they got him to a bed in my grandparents’ house while my mother spent the night at her friend Natalie Cohen’s house.
(I’m not certain who Natalie Cohen was—she comes up frequently in the letters—but it’s clear she and Mom were close at the time. Next to Kris, with whom Mom remained close the rest of their lives, Natalie Cohen seems to have been Mom’s other best friend.)
According to the story of my parents’ meeting, my dad was extremely contrite the next morning—not to mention hung-over as well—and he returned to his parents’ home in New York. I imagine the two spoke on the phone over the next days; I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t come back to Trenton and that Mom didn’t travel into the city, but they apparently spoke occasionally by phone until Dad left on Sunday, 7 January, to return to duty in Texas.
Almost immediately, Dad began writing to the girl he’d just met—and Mom replied. This began a year‑long correspondence that continued when Dad was sent overseas and even while he was fighting across western Europe, through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany until V-E (Victory in Europe) Day (8 May 1945) and upon his return to the States after V-J (Victory over Japan) Day (15 August 1945).
Dad came back to the States in the fall of 1945 to muster out of the army at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and he and Mom were married in Trenton on 6 January 1946. (I arrived 11½ months later in Washington, D.C.)
I don’t know exactly when, but sometime in the early years of my parents’ marriage, Dad took the two caches of letters and had them mounted and bound in two large, leather scrapbooks—one for Mom’s letters to him and the other for his letters to her. (I don’t know this, but it’s fun to imagine that Dad presented Mom the bound letters on their first anniversary—the “paper” anniversary.)
“Letters of Judith C. Freedman, January to December 1945” was gilt-debossed on the navy-blue leather cover of one and “Letters of Eugene M. K*****, January to December 1945” on the ruby-red cover of the other.
They kept the two volumes, housed in a fitted blue fabric-and-leather slipcase, in our home, taking the books with them whenever they moved, including their sojourn in Germany with the United States Information Agency (USIA) in the ’60s and back to Washington.
(USIA was the federal agency responsible for “public diplomacy,” including propaganda, principally of a cultural nature; it was folded into the Department of State in 1999. For more about this and that stay in Germany, see “An American Teen In Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013, and “Home Alone,” referenced in the introduction.)
Eventually, Mom brought the letters with her to the assisted-living residence in Bethesda, Maryland, which was her penultimate home, and when she died, among the first things I made certain to safeguard in my own apartment in New York (where I’d moved following my release from my own military service in 1974), was the two-volume set of bound letters.
Dad apparently called Mom Sunday morning, 7 January, from New York. Though it was 11:30 a.m., he woke her! Nevertheless, she told him “a long distance call is always pleasant.” (In those days, even a call just from New York City to Trenton, New Jersey, all of 67 miles away, was long distance! The caller needed an operator to place the call—direct dialing and area codes hadn’t been invented yet.)
Dad left from New York City’s Pennsylvania Station on a train to central Texas. I gather he had to change trains in Washington, D.C., about four hours south by rail, and then he overnighted in St. Louis, Missouri, about a day’s ride further west.
8 January – 24 January 1945
The first letter in the collection is from my father, written on Monday, 8 January, a week after he and my mother had met. He was at the “New Hotel Jefferson” (as declared on the letterhead of the stationery on which he wrote) in St. Louis—“Queen City of the Mississippi,” according to Dad’s inscription.
The letter was little more than a shot at making contact, but it begins to demonstrate the transportation problems the country was having, especially in the civilian sector, during the war years. Apparently there were some weather problems of which he complained, but he contemplated flying to Texas.
Dad hadn’t waited to hear back from Mother: he wrote again from Texas on Thursday night, 11 January, and recounted his transportation woes. He’d arrived in St. Louis at 12:30 on Monday afternoon to find that the city was in the midst of a snowstorm.
Despite the weather, Dad reported, the airline confirmed that it was flying, so he “decided to take a chance” and flew out of St. Louis Monday night, arriving in Dallas at 3:00 the next morning. (Commercial airline passenger service had only been inaugurated in the U.S. in 1926.)
He still had to get to Camp Hood, just under 160 miles by road from Dallas, and he found that the only transportation available was “an interurban trolley” to Waco that didn’t leave until 5:30 a.m.
(The Texas Electric Railway was a historic interurban railroad that operated from Dallas to Denison, Corsicana, and Waco. It began operation in 1908 and became the largest interurban railway operator in the southern U.S. before its demise in 1948.)
Dad “wandered around for two-and-a-half hours in the deserted streets, feeling very frustrated.” He “finally” arrived in Waco, still 65 miles from his post, at 8:30 “and was once more confronted by the lack of transportation problem.”
Out of desperation, Dad called the military police station at the camp and learned that they had a car going out to Camp Hood, so, though “as a general rule,” he pointed out to Mom, “I have nothing to do with M.P.’s,” he caught a ride. He made it to Camp Hood at noon on the 9th—“only a day and a half late.” “Everybody was overjoyed to see me,” Dad reported, “so we had a party that night.” I presume he was being a little facetious—that would have been my dad as I would come to know him.
In her 11 January reply to Dad’s first note, Mom asked “what sort of hot water” he’d gotten into for reporting to duty late, but in Dad’s answer on 14 January, he acknowledged, “Nothing at all seems to be forthcoming” for the delay. He added, however, “If you’d have been in Washington”—where I gather he’d had to change trains for the trip west and was stranded for many hours in the city where, coincidentally, he and his new bride would be moving in a little over a year—“I’d still be AWOL, I fear”!
Dad signed the note “G”—for Gene. (My dad’s name was Eugene; his mother was a fan of the poetry of Eugene Field [1850-95], he told me once.) Mom, incidentally, opened her response to Dad’s 8 January note: “Greetings to my favorite drunkard!”—confirming the family lore of the circumstances of my parents’ meeting.
My future father addressed his second letter on the 11th to “Dearest Rusty,” a nickname for my mom he seems to have made up. (Mom’s name was Judith; everyone called her Judy.) No one ever called her Rusty before to my knowledge—at least no one’s ever copped to doing so—and as far back as I can remember, Dad didn’t continue to call her Rusty after they were married.
(“Rusty” suggests that Mom had red hair—or reddish maybe. But she was a brunette all of my cognizant lifetime (until it turned gray and then white). I turned out to have red-brown hair and Mom’s sister had reddish hair—but not my mother. I have no idea where the pet name came from—and I never asked either of my parents when I had the chance. Later in the correspondence, in his letter of 22 July, below, Dad does explain the nickname.)
Now, my dad had a nickname in college (“Doc”) and only his old schoolmates used it—though we knew about it. After Dad died and his obit appeared in his college alumni magazine, there were some old schoolmates who wrote to offer condolences and admitted they hadn’t known Dad’s real name!
But Dad’s name for Mother was pretty certainly a private (and short-lived) pet name because in her next letter, dated 15 January, she signed herself, “Ever ‘Rusty’” and then added a little note with an arrow pointing to her “signature”: “I like that.” Mom, in her turn, usually wrote to “Gene”—except, of course, that first letter.
Apparently Dad called Trenton again on Saturday evening, 13 January (it seems that letters between New Jersey and Texas took only two days), but Mom was in New York City and missed the “long distant call.”
Mom added that the call “came thru to the tune of a very ‘southern’ accent”—probably actually a southwestern accent, from a Texas long-distance operator. (How many of you remember when you needed an operator to place a long-distance telephone call? Hell, how many of you remember operators?)
She was sorry to have missed Dad on Saturday, but happily he called again the next day, ending the weekend, Mom declared, “with a big bang!” A visit back east to “dear old New Jersey” was hinted at, but, noted Dad on 14 January, “For reasons of security I can’t say anything.”
It seems Mom had had a Saturday evening out in New York with Kris and Natalie Cohen, on the 13th (when Dad had called), seeing a movie (possibly The Hairy Ape with William Bendix and Susan Hayward [United Artists, released in June 1944], based on the 1922 expressionistic play by Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953]) and having a “swanky” dinner at “the Sherry-Netherland’s officers club” (on 5th Avenue at 59th Street); Kris was a WAVE officer, you’ll remember.
(The Sherry-Netherland Officers’ Club was a space in the famous luxury hotel, turned over to the Officers’ Service Committee to operate, that offered military officers in the city of New York a place to go for lunch or dinner, drinks, a game of cards, or where they could meet other officers or friends and socialize at reasonable prices. It opened in 1943 and remained in operation for the duration of the war and into the mid-’40s.
(The OSC was a volunteer organization that offered assistance to visiting officers in New York City in finding a place to stay, eat, or have a drink and also to offer movie passes and theater tickets for their entertainment.)
Then Mom paid her first visit to Kris’s (and my dad’s) parents’ apartment on Lexington Avenue near 23rd Street, where the young women “giggled and gossiped for many hours” until they “dropped off to slumberland long after 3:00 A.M.” Mom reported that the “family album” was trotted out and everyone uttered “ooo’s and ah’s” over the snapshots of Dad as "an adorable baby”! (I have some of those photos—including the traditional naked-baby-on-the-rug shot. It’s all right: I have one of my mother, too.)
(A word about my dad’s family’s home: the residence, in a small apartment building on the southwest corner of Lexington and 23rd, was above my future Grandpa Jack’s pharmacy on the street level. The two premises had different entrances and house numbers: the residence was at #18 and the Peerless Drug Store was at #20, but it was the same structure. The building no longer exists; a modern high rise sits on that corner now.)
I get the impression that this period wasn’t very active militarily at Camp Hood because Dad wrote on the 14th that he’d been assigned “quite a number of tasks,” but they seem to have been make-work jobs. On the 16th, Dad wrote that he’d completed “the chores assigned me,” and he took to staying out of the way so as not to be on anyone’s “list of available workhorses.”
He stayed out of battalion headquarters and spent his time at the dispensary—a common army term for the infirmary or the medical officer’s office—where he and the “Doc” had become buddies and would “drink fine coffee and discuss the topics of the day.” It sounds a little “Sergeant Bilko” to me!
(The Phil Silvers Show was a sitcom which ran on the CBS Television Network from 1955 to 1959. It was colloquially known as Sergeant Bilko for its lead character, Master Sergeant Ernest G. Bilko of the United States Army, played by comedic actor Phil Silvers [1911-85]. The show centered on the soldiers of the post motor pool, who seemed to spend little time performing their duties. Bilko, the NCO in charge, especially spent much of his time trying to get others to do his work for him.)
Evenings at Camp Hood seem to have been devoted to socializing. Dad mentioned parties or dinner with comrades-in-arms and then drinks and dancing at “the club,” obviously the post officers’ club. Most of the officer corps at Camp Hood seems to have been married and accompanied by their wives; Dad wrote on the 21st that he “generally makes up a group of five, but we don’t seem to suffer any ill-effects from the odd number.” (Many of Dad’s photos I have of that period show his fellow officers and their wives.)
Commenting on Mom’s first meeting with her future in-laws, Dad affirmed that his parents were “pretty much fun” and, in reference to the family album, that “they’re . . . pretty doting.” He was “afraid,” though, that “my going to war is going to be more trying for them than for me.”
I bet there were a lot of GI’s with the same fear. Soldiers stateside may not have known exactly what awaited them, though by 1945 there must have been many officers and NCO’s at places like Camp Hood who’d been rotated back to the States from battle fronts, just as in my day there were men at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I started active duty in 1969, who’d seen combat in Vietnam.
(Although I was a military intelligence officer, I was at Knox, home of the U.S. Army Armor Center and School at the time, for the armor officers’ basic course from December 1969 to February 1970. For those not up on military taxonomy, armor is the branch of the army that uses tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships. In that last category, the ’copters were piloted mostly by warrant officers.
(Warrant officers are experts in specific fields—in this instance, combat helicopters—and were sometimes commissioned in the field and then sent back to the States for officers’ basic. There were several newly commissioned former warrant officers in my class at Fort Knox—and they had stories to tell.)
The Allies had been fighting in North Africa since 1942, Italy since September 1943, and western Europe since 6 June 1944 (D-Day); fighting in the Pacific had been underway since Pearl Harbor was attacked on 7 December 1941.
Men like my father surely had an idea that they were going into harm’s way, but their families, especially once the men had left U.S. territory for the war front, would be left to imagine what their sons and brothers and husbands were facing. I imagine everyone knew at least one Gold Star family. Getting any kind of mail out from a combat zone was problematic and must have only heightened the anxiety of the families back home.
(I recall a family story about my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was a World War I vet—the grandfather whose anniversary was the reason for that New Year’s Day party at the beginning of this account. In a time when long-distance communication was almost 30 years more primitive than it was in my dad’s army days, it was obviously harder to get information from the battle fronts to the families back home.
(Grandpa Harry was wounded in combat and the army sent his parents in New York City a telegram: “Harry Freedman shot in buttocks,” it said—according to Freedman family lore. Well, those great-grandparents weren’t newcomers to these shores—my mother’s family had been in America for several generations already—but the word ‘buttocks’ was apparently not familiar to them; or maybe it was the geography of France.
(My grandmother—who, of course, didn’t know Harry yet, I don’t think—told me that his parents and sisters pored over a map of France—which is all they knew about his whereabouts—looking for a town called Buttocks! My post “Horsman Dolls” includes some brief biographical details about Pop-Pop H.F.
(From what I’ve been able to piece together regarding my grandfather’s World War I service, he was an infantryman in Flanders, Belgium, and Cambrai, France, from 17 May to 26 December 1918. According to his military records, he was “severely” wounded on 29 September, which corresponds either to the Fifth Battle of Ypres in Flanders, 28 September-2 October, or the Battle of St. Quentin Canal near Cambrai, France, 29 September-10 October.
(If the sequence of Private Freedman’s overseas service is the same as the notation in his record, it’s unlikely he would have received his wound in Flanders and then gotten sent to France, so I assume he served in Belgium first, then was sent to northern France, where he was wounded, probably on the first day of the Battle of St. Quentin Canal.)
Furthermore, security provisions, such as the ones my father alluded to in that 14 January letter, prevented soldiers, sailors, and airmen from telling their families what they were doing, or even where they were stationed in many cases or where they were going when they were reassigned. (“Loose Lips Sink Ships” was the reminder on posters all over military posts, defense plants, and many streets and public places in the civilian quarter.)
In the 21 January letter, Dad repeated, “I can’t say too much in violation of military security,” and then hinted that a change might be forthcoming. Then he made a broad hint about the potential trip east: “I have no intention of having you anticipate ‘fanciful things’ with no possibility of realization,” Dad wrote, implying that what he’d suggested earlier wasn’t “fanciful.” “I don’t render opinions or pass on rumors,” he continued. “This should give you something to work with—and very shortly, too.”
Though I imagine that Dad’s family and my mother-to-be could guess the purpose of the implied move—his battalion was being sent into combat in Europe; if the battalion were going to the Pacific, they’d most likely be sent to the West Coast, not New York—but I notice he never actually writes the words. In fact, aside from two remarks about his “going to war,” Dad never wrote directly about that prospect—until he was actually in it. It must have been, however, the elephant in the room for everyone.
When Mother wrote on Friday, the 19th, a new topic came up. Not new for Mom, but new in the correspondence; I presume she’d told Dad about all this during the New Year’s week when he was in New York.
After some chit-chat about her daily doings and her work at the “R.X.” (Mom’s abbreviation for “Red Cross”), Mom wrote about “another great temptation lying in my path.” As you’ll recall, Mom was a Red Cross social worker on area military posts (that’s how she met Kris, after all) to help out GI’s, especially ones who were stationed far from their homes, who needed a sympathetic ear or help with “marital and financial problems.”
She’d “been fighting like fury” to get a post overseas and had apparently been showering the “National” Red Cross with so many letters “they must have a single file for my letters alone.” She’d been turned down repeatedly because they deemed her “too young” (Mom was probably barely 21 when she started applying; in a later letter, written on 13 June, she explained that the Red Cross had some kind of minimum age requirement for overseas assignments), and finally “gave up in despair.”
Now she said her “chapter has received a wire [i.e., a telegram] . . . stating there’s a dire emergency & need for Home Service R.X. workers for overseas work.” So Mom “couldn’t resist the temptation to start the nagging all over again.”
What my mother had told me about her wartime plans before she met my father fills some of this in. Mom started at Elmira College in upstate New York in the fall of 1941; she was on track to graduate in May 1945 if her college tenure had followed the traditional path.
Mom, however, took summer courses at New York University in 1944 to attain credits to transfer to Elmira so she could graduate early, and she got her degree on 1 September 1944. (According to the Elmira College Bulletins of 1943-44 and 1944-45, Mom majored in sociology-psychology—and graduated as a “Scholar of the Second Rank” with an 86-89% grade average. I never knew either of those factoids.)
Her goal was to join the Red Cross and go overseas as an ambulance driver in a combat zone. Hence the cascade of letters about which she wrote Dad. Now, Mom was just 21 in September 1944, barely out of her minority in those days (society didn’t recognize 18-year-olds as adults until several decades later—for instance, 18-year-olds couldn’t vote in federal elections until July 1971, when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified) and her father simply forbade her to go abroad.
As readers know, she was serving as a Red Cross social worker in the Trenton area at the time of this occurrence. Ironically, had Mom gotten her original wish and gone overseas in 1944, she might never have met my dad since it was through Dad’s sister Kris that they were introduced, and Mom got to know Kris through her work on stateside military posts in the area of her Trenton home.
Curiously, my father supported Mom’s “ambitions and desires to go overseas.” Dad expressed the same wish, which he wrote on 24 January he’d had “for years now.” (Dad had enlisted in 1941, shortly after he graduated from college—he told me that word of the fall of France to the Germans came the day of graduation.)
I can picture him writing letter after letter requesting assignment to the front, like Lieutenant Roberts in the 1948 play and 1955 movie Mister Roberts, until he makes his CO, Captain Morgan, angry. I’m certain my father didn’t actually do that; it’s just the image I get from his letter to Mom.
(Dad’s college commencement ceremony took place on 7 June 1940. Germany had begun its invasion of France on 10 May and by the end of the month, had defeated most of the forces of France and its British allies. The Wehrmacht didn’t occupy Paris, however, until 14 June, and the armistice between France and Germany didn’t take effect until 25 June.
(A brief note about the start of my father’s military service: it wasn’t quite straightforward. He enlisted in the army in March 1941—but he had actually served in the navy for about five months before that. I won’t go into his reasons for the branch transfer, as it’s called—the army and the navy are different branches of service—and I have no information on his naval service. I have only one photo of Dad in his white swabby suit, annotated “Panama City, Oct. 1940”—but I don’t know if the location was Panama City, Panama, or Panama City, Florida, both of which were navy towns.)
Dad added that though he hoped Mom would “make it very shortly—but not before I get to see you at least once more.” Then he continued, “That, incidentally, is the one mental drawback to my present proximity to going to war. Why couldn’t it have happened either six months ago or six months hence.”
Oddly, that would have meant, again, that he and Mom might not have met! I don’t think he thought of that. Or maybe he did—and would rather have never met Mom than face the possibility of not seeing her for God-knows-how-long. (The war would end in September, but no one could have known that in January. And we know that Dad survived combat intact and came home to marry Mom—but in January 1945 no one could have known that, either.)
Also in his 24 January letter, Dad informed Mom that he was trying to counsel an NCO in the battery he used to command. The sergeant, “an excellent soldier and a competent man,” was “undergoing great mental anguish” because his wife back home was pregnant with their first child and her doctor “anticipated trouble.” The NCO had gotten “two conflicting telegrams” from the Red Cross and “the poor boy is completely in the dark about what has or is happening.”
The sergeant sought Dad out, and my father was worried because the man was “very hot headed” and might “take matters into his own hands”—by which I think Dad meant he was afraid the guy might go AWOL—the result of which “would be catastrophic.” (I suspect Dad was considering that AWOL during wartime could be construed as desertion, the penalty for which can be execution.)
Dad had asked the Red Cross to try to get more detailed information, but any answer wouldn’t arrive before the next day (Dad was writing at night), and he hoped that he’d been able to calm the man down for the night at least. At the end of this report, Dad quipped, in response to Mom’s remarks about her Red Cross work, “You see dear, you aren’t the only one serving as a confidant and ‘father confessor.’”
(Unfortunately, Dad never wrote Mom about the outcome of the sergeant’s problem. In 2½ weeks, Dad would arrive back in New York City preparatory to shipping out for Europe and the war at the end of February. He may have told Mom on the phone what transpired—though she didn’t mention it in her next couple of letters—or told her when they saw one another in New York where he was briefly at liberty before confinement to his temporary post. I presume, though, that the excitement of transferring to temporary quarters and then to the transport ship drove all other thoughts from both Dad’s and Mom’s minds.)
[That’s the beginning of a year’s exchange of letters, notes, cards, and the occasional telegram. As you can see, my mother- and father-to-be wrote back and forth every few days—and that even remained essentially true when Dad was deployed to the European Theater of Operations and rolled across Western Europe from France into Germany with his artillery battalion.
[I
haven’t worked out a schedule of postings for “Letters from the Fronts,” but
since there will be about 20 installments, I won’t be posting them consecutively. I’ll probably post an installment about once
or twice a month. I’d estimate. (After
each new installment is posted, I’ll go back to the previous one and insert a
link to the new one.)]
