The Letters Project, Part 3

 

[This is the third installment of my presentation of my future parents’ correspondence from January into December 1945.  If you haven’t read Parts 1 and 2, I urge you to go back to 19 September and 10 October to read them before going on to Part 3.  There will be about 20 installments, spread out from now through the end of October 2027 on an irregular schedule.] 

LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945 

[After a brief précis of my dad’s army service (with commentary and some comparisons with my own), Part 3 picks up with Dad at sea on his way to France.  It includes his only correspondence from aboard ship and then includes his earliest letters from the ETO (he was still in France).] 

27 February – 15 March 1945

Dad had begun active duty in the army in March 1941, so by this point he’d served just shy of four years.  He’d be discharged in February 1946, having served four years, 10 months, and 16 days in the Army of the United States.  (He did a brief stint in the navy before transferring to the army, as I noted earlier [see Part 1].) 

(The Army of the United States (AUS) was the temporary, wartime component of the service designed for citizen-soldiers who stepped up to serve just for the duration of World War II rather than as a career soldier.  Most AUS officers returned to civilian life once the war was won; a few became Regular Army, that is, career, officers.  The AUS was demobilized in 1946, reactivated for the Korean and Vietnam Wars, then disbanded in 1974.

(I was commissioned in the United States Army Reserve, or USAR, the component for officers mostly commissioned through ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] who served their contractual obligation—usually two years—and then reverted to part-time or inactive reserve status. 

(In my era [1969-1974], reserve officers were by far the largest contingent of officers in the active army—85% of the officer corps were USAR.  In World War II, officers like my dad, AUS commissioned through OCS—the so-called “Ninety-Day Wonders”—comprised 70% of active-duty army officers.

(A third component is the Regular Army, composed mostly of West Point grads and officers and enlisted personnel who applied for the designation and were accepted.  This constituted the permanent, professional, full-time core of the military who intended to stay in the service for a full career.  These officers use the designation “USA” [for United States Army].

(The distinction among the various components is minimal in practical terms, except as a matter of prestige and deference.  The initials formally appear after an officer’s name and rank in official records, orders, or the signature block of official correspondence, such as “Sherman T. Potter, Col., USA”; “B. J. Hunnicutt, Capt., USAR”; “Benjamin F. Pierce, Capt., AUS.”  [I’m just making up that last one; the scripts never actually said.])

Starting as a private (E-1) and holding almost every enlisted rank through first sergeant (the second-highest army enlisted rank at that time—he skipped staff sergeant [E-6] and technical sergeant [E-7]), Dad made captain (O-3) in about two years (he became a first lieutenant [O-2] on 27 November 1942 and was probably promoted somewhere between March and June 1944). 

By contrast, I served four years, two months, and 16 days on active duty between December 1969 and February 1974, starting as a second lieutenant, and it took me almost four years to make captain.  (And, no, it wasn’t because I screwed up, thank you very much.)  I was promoted to first lieutenant after a year in grade as second lieutenant, but it took three years for my name to appear on the captains’ list.

The difference?  Dad’s army service was entirely during wartime when promotions come faster, especially in combat arms like artillery.  My service began during a war—and when I started active duty, promotions to both first lieutenant and captain each came after one year in grade—but President Richard Nixon’s (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) “Vietnamization” plan meant that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Southeast Asia starting in 1969, accelerating in the early ’70s, and combat ceased for U.S. forces in January 1973. 

Fewer troops meant fewer officers were needed, especially in the combat support branches like Military Intelligence, in which I served, so promotions slowed down before I reached my second year of service in December 1971.  (The trade-off was that when the promotion to captain only required a year in grade, the officer had to serve another year in uniform to accept it.  I was promoted two months before I got out of the army.)  Still, three years to advance six grades (including OCS and a commission) as compared to four to rise two levels seems lopsided.

(Incidentally, when I was promoted to captain in December 1973, I asked the Berlin Station CO to use my dad’s World War II “railroad tracks” for the ceremony.  I had had Dad send them to me just for that purpose.  I still have them—a different style pin from the 1970s model and all scratched and scarred from age and, I presume, combat and outdoor bivouacking.)

In a letter on Tuesday, 27 February, Mom seemed aware of the reality that Dad would soon be leaving for a long time.  She wrote how she’d been “spoiling” Dad “terribly with all this mail” over the “last 3 weeks” and how that might change now because, she reminded him, “I once warned you, I’m not a very fine correspondent.”  As much as she’d miss him “constantly,” she explained, “I still may not get as many letters under-way as I should like to.”  Letters were inadequate to express “the thoughts and feelings” she had, anyway: “It’s like floundering around in the dark: searching for words and phrases to say what’s really in one’s heart.”

Then she reported that Kris called her early that morning to say that Dad’s father had gotten a letter from his son.  Mom immediately phoned home to find that she “had done the family one better by getting two” and left work “on an emergency ‘home visit’” to read them.  (I can only presume that these were Dad’s letters of 24 and 26 February because they’re the last two before embarkation in the collection.) 

After some of her usual complaints about work, Mom finished up with effusive regrets for not being able to see Dad “just once more, on one more pass” before he leaves.  It’s clearly a farewell letter, though it’s just as clear that no one knew exactly when the battalion was scheduled to leave.  (In the next couple of letters, dated in early March, Mom indicated that she still didn’t know if Dad had left yet or was just restricted to camp.)

Dad’s unit actually shipped out from the New York Port of Embarkation aboard the U.S.S. Argentina for what the army called EAME—the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign—on the morning of Tuesday, 27 February, the day after his last stateside letter and the day of Mom’s last one to him before Dad reached France.  He was “at sea” on Monday, 5 March, the date of his next correspondence, and arrived in France on Sunday, 11 March, three days before he wrote his first letter to Mom from abroad. 

(In his early letters from Europe, Dad never said exactly where in France he was, which, like the precise date of departure and other specific information, was probably classified.  Since his battalion continually moved forward (north) after arriving in the European Theater, I guessed he landed at Le Havre and the 529th bivouacked somewhere outside of the French capital—surrendered by the Germans on 25 August 1944.

(On 21 May, 10 weeks after his arrival in France—and the day censorship restrictions were lifted—Dad revealed that the unit did indeed land in Le Havre.  The Allies had liberated the port on 12 September 1944. 

(After I reached the 21 May letter, I decided to insert the details Dad disclosed post-censorship about his trans-Atlantic voyage and arrival in France.  In some instances, I’d already pieced together some deductions and guesses about the facts—I was even right on a lot of my surmises—and I’m including those conclusions as well.

(Other information revealed in that letter pertained to Dad’s then-current situation in Germany, so I’ve inserted it where it was applicable, as readers will see.

(I had figured the camp was probably east or north of Paris because less than two weeks after landing in France, Dad, his CO, and a small detachment from his battalion traveled north to Belgium; Holland; and Aachen, Germany, which are generally northeast of Paris.  Once again, Dad revealed the facts in the 21 May letter.)

After landing,

the battalion was taken to Camp Lucky Strike near Fecamp (the home of Benedictine [the herbal liqueur]).  This was a large tent camp occupying a former German airfield, and was used as a deprocessing area for units prior to their commitment at the front.  We stayed there just about a month.  Our time was utilized in unpacking equipment, drawing new equipment, putting our guns [namely, the howitzers, not their small arms] and tractors in condition, and consuming a monthly liquor ration. 

An artillery tractor or gun tractor was a specialized, heavy-duty vehicle used to tow artillery pieces.  In World War II, before the development of self-propelled artillery, the U.S. Army used both wheeled and tracked tractors in the ETO.

Camp Lucky Strike was one of several American camps ringing the port of Le Havre used for assembly areas for units entering combat.  They were known as Cigarette Camps because most of them were named for American cigarette brands such as Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, and Old Gold.

Lucky Strike was between Fécamp and Saint Valery-en-Caux, about 45 miles northwest of Paris along the Channel coast of France.  It could accommodate 58,000 troops.  We’ll see shortly that on its way back to Le Havre to depart France, the 529th was sent to another camp called Camp Washington, D.C., one of the City Camps that were a companion array for the Cigarette Camps.

Back home, Mother was once more complaining about the lack of mail from Dad, and I suspect that was due both to the fact that he was on a troop ship in the middle of the Atlantic for 12 days and the wartime logistics of delivering mail from the front. 

Mother wrote on Friday, 2 March, noting that it was “a week ago from a couple of hours from now” that Dad got his “surprise” pass.  It seems Mother and Dad had even made some elaborate plans for the following day (involving a “wonderful buggy ride”) that never came to fruition.  (When Dad wrote on that last Monday, he didn’t say anything suggesting he was on his way to Europe; he was already aboard ship by the time Mom wrote this letter.

As Mom said, it had been almost a week since she and Dad had seen each other and three days since she’d heard from him.  She reported that Dad’s sister Kris had been notified the day before that she’d been promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) in the WAVES (the equivalent to an army first lieutenant [O-2], one rank below Dad) and “is very proud of herself.”  So was everybody else, Mom wrote, and they planned to celebrate “in true & magnificent style” on Monday—“Probably a movie—or something similar, before or after a short ‘snort.’” 

In other family news, Mom’s father had arrived home on the previous Tuesday (27 February) from a trip to Mexico.  (It sounded like a business trip rather than pleasure.  Grandpa Harry may well have gotten doll parts or fabrics from Mexico.) 

His first question for his daughter was, “Have you been seeing the boy-friend – Has he left yet?”  (That’s the first time “boyfriend” has been mentioned in the letters, by the way.) 

Mother told her father that my father-to-be was “really on [his] way this time,” but my future grandfather responded, “But you’re not sure!?”  Mother wrote Dad she convinced her father, but he was also “a little sorry.”  “In the final analysis,” Mom added, “you did leave a sweet taste in his mouth!”  I guess my dad redeemed himself after his behavior at the New Year’s party! 

(By the time I was old enough to know what was going on around me, Dad and Pop-Pop H.F. certainly had an excellent relationship.  Not only did Pop-Pop get my dad a job after he married my mother—the movie theater gig in Washington, where my grandfather also arranged for an apartment for the newlyweds—Dad became a member of the board of Pop-Pop’s doll business, eventually helping to engineer the sales of the company, first in the 1950s and then in the ’70s.  [Horsman Dolls was sold, returned, and sold again; see my post on the doll company, already referenced in Part 2, for an explanation.]  By that time—Pop-Pop died in 1967—Dad was essentially the family representative on the board.)

Mom wrote Dad again the next day, 3 March, a week since she last saw my father and even then unsure whether Dad was still in New York or on his way to the war.  She complained, as always, about missing his letters and reminisced about an evening she and Dad spent in Trenton with some other couples, including Dad’s battalion-mate and friend Fred Morris, a while back. 

Photos of the evening had been taken and Mom promised to send some if any came out “decent”—but she’d “have to approve, first,” she insisted.  A sort of civilian form of censorship in action.  Mom wrote that she was getting “‘a Hell of a lot more sleep’ than during the weeks you were here,” but said “that if I had my choice I’d take the sleeplessness & you for all the shut-eye!!” 

Mother also wrote of skipping a gig “hostessing at an officer’s dance” at some local military post.  (She went to “a pretty good picture, instead: Winged Victory . . . .  Entertaining as well as being something of a tear-jerker in spots.”) 

I mention this bit of chit-chat—Mom’s letters especially, though Dad’s, too, to some extent, were full of gossipy small talk; it’s part of what makes the letters so interesting—only because it was at just such a social event, if I remember the story accurately, that my future mother met my dad’s sister. 

If it hadn’t been for Mom’s job at the Red Cross and her occasional call to act as hostess at social events for GI’s, where she’d be expected to socialize with servicemen and -women far from their families, my mother and father might never have met!  And where would that have left me?

(Winged Victory [Twentieth Century Fox, 1944; dir. George Cukor], by the way, is a curious bit of wartime Broadway and Hollywood lore.  Moss Hart [1904-61], the writer best known for the plays Once In A Lifetime, You Can’t Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner, all with George S. Kaufman [1889-1961]; the screenplays for Gentleman’s Agreement and the 1954 A Star Is Born; and his autobiography, Act One, was commissioned by the U.S. Air Forces to write a morale-boosting, patriotic play in 1943, and after traveling around the country observing pilot training at various air bases, wrote Winged Victory. 

(The play, with a cast of nearly 300, débuted in Boston that fall, becoming a huge hit and transferring to Broadway in November, where it ran for 212 performances before 350,000 spectators.  The New York production closed in May 1944 so that the entire cast could go to Hollywood to film the play; the movie was released just before Christmas 1944.  After the filming, the play went on tour around the country until August 1945, playing to 800,000 viewers in over 445 mountings. 

(Because of its immense cast and the indelible connection to the WWII era and milieu, Winged Victory is one of the biggest Broadway successes that’s never been revived anywhere after the wartime national tour.  Though the film is available on video, I don’t believe it’s ever played on television.)

On Monday, 5 March, Dad finally wrote.  He was aboard the troop transport Argentina on the Atlantic and the correspondence was a V-Mail, a tactic meant to help solve the problems with mail to and from combat zones I raised. 

(Dad didn’t identify his troop ship as the Argentina until much later.  A former ocean liner originally christened S.S. Pennsylvania, built in 1929 and renamed in 1938, the Argentina was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration and served as a troop transport from 1942 to 1946.)

V-Mail was a World War II development, used between 1942 and 1945, both to save space and weight that could be then devoted to shipments of war supplies, and to enhance security.  Because V-Mails (the V was for ‘Victory’) were single pages, they were easier to scrutinize by censors. 

The original pre-printed letter-size form on which the message was written was photographed and transported by ship or plane as thumbnail-sized microfilm images, taking up considerably less space in mailbags than full-sized paper letters.  (Thirty-seven mail bags weighing 2,575 pounds were reduced to one bag weighing 45 pounds, says the National Postal Museum.) 

V-Mail was also a faster way of getting word back and forth between GI’s abroad and family and friends at home—12 days as opposed to a month.  The V-Mail negatives were then printed (at a quarter of full size) at V-Mail facilities at the other end to be delivered to the addressees.  The photographing and printing processes also thwarted any effective use of microdots or invisible ink because such espionage techniques wouldn’t be reproduced by the photography. 

Oddly, the 5 March V-Mail my dad wrote—it was his only V-Mail in the collection—was on the paper V-Mail form, not a photo print, so I wasn’t certain it was even sent.  (Mom’s V-Mails were like small photostatic positives—as opposed to the white-on-black of the usual photostat.  Photostats, for those too young to remember the time before photocopiers, were an earlier form of making exact copies of documents.)  As I learned later, this turns out to be an erroneous interpretation of the facts.

Little more than a note, the one-page, single-sided V-Mail sounds as if Dad had been on board for several days (as, in fact, he had been).  “Monotony is the chief characteristic of this voyage,” Dad grumbled.  Aside from “the necessary chores to insure [sic] safety and maintain cleanliness,” his and his cabinmates’ principal activity “consist[ed] almost entirely of assuming an [sic] horizontal position practically all the time.” 

He reported that he and the five other captains who shared his “comparatively comfortable” quarters “are all very compatible.”  Dad’s bunkmates included his buddy from the 529th, Fred Morris, and the two young officers “gripe to each other to our mutual benefit.”  He closed the note by telling Mom that on deck “practically every night . . . I indulge in a wishfull [sic] myriad of thoughts all containing you.” 

That was my father’s only message from shipboard; in his 21 May letter, Dad revealed a little more about what he characterized as “a practically uneventful trip”:

There were several submarine alerts, and the escort dropped several ash cans [depth charges, an anti-submarine explosive] during the voyage, but other than that we suffered no alarm.  Two of the ships in the convoy did collide in the dark, and they turned back to the Bahamas for repairs. 

Dad’s next letter was dated 14 March, nine days later and three days after he’d landed in Le Havre (11 March), and annotated merely “France.”  From Mom’s letters, it looks as if Dad’s V-Mail from the ship hadn’t reached her—at least not yet; she hadn’t mentioned having received it so far.  In her next several letters, written every few days, she lamented not having heard from Dad for weeks. 

Apparently, Dad’s family received mail from him, but I don’t know when—I’m guessing not from shipboard—or how often, and Kris shared the news with Mom, but Mom was unhappy that she hadn’t gotten any letters herself.  The first letter she said she got was Dad’s first from France, written a little over two weeks after his last letter from stateside. 

Meanwhile, not having heard from Dad except second hand through Kris, Mom continued to write to him.  In a letter dated Tuesday, 6 March (but finished on Wednesday), she reported on that celebration of Kris’s promotion Monday evening, which had turned into an after-dinner affair.  It was “hardly ‘very showy,’” Mother affirmed, just “coffee & a gab” with the WAVES “and then apropos to the occasion,” the young women took in Here Come the Waves (Paramount Pictures, 1944), another wartime propaganda flick, this one a musical starring Bing Crosby as a crooning seaman and Betty Hutton as twin WAVES. 

Mom’s rating: “Really riotous—tho’ I’m not certain if it had that effect on me because the picture was that enjoyable, or because the fun derived, was ‘catchy.’”  Kris and her roommate, Blossom, “thought it was great—and couldn’t get enough of the ‘boot’ training portrayed—it reminded them so much of their younger days!!”  (You understand we’re talking about a bunch of 20-somethings here.)

“In honor of an occasion, as it was,” the ladies went for late champagne cocktails after the movie (“Flashy!  What?”) and “had an opportunity for a wonderful pickup!”  They “turned down the invitation,” Mom recounted, “in the style of true well-brought-up young ladies, or naval officers,” but she revealed that “2 gentlemen, one in the navy, the other 6 hours discharged, offered us ‘another round.’” 

The big news was that Mother decided on Wednesday to move in with Kris and Blossom for a while.  Mom’s parents had gone to New York City for “10 days-or-so,” leaving her “to fend for herself.”  I guess she was feeling bereft, so she went looking for company, “pawning myself off on anyone who’d have me.”  Mom arrived at her new digs late and discovered Kris “in Blue-jeans (what the farmers wear, you know) midst thousands of pots, pans, cutlery, dishes & food piled high—very much bewildering.”  Mom’s account of what came next reads like the stuff of farce (think Servant of Two Masters—or maybe a Lucille Ball routine).

Her very lovely intention was to have a banquet-like spread ready for Blos, who was to come in from N.Y. . . . and me, who was being sort-of welcomed!  Things apparently were not cooking up as they were expected to do—and she just had too many things to handle by herself.  However, at about 7:30 we were ready to sit down – Blos never came home in time for dinner, & so down we sat anyway & the dinner was . . . lovely.  Well, we did have fun.

I find Mom’s wry remark about blue jeans amusing, even though I take it as at least mildly sarcastic.  (She can’t really have thought my father didn’t know what blue jeans were.)  Jeans were common work pants, even for women, by the ’40s.  The navy work uniform for enlisted sailors was dungarees (which may well have been what Kris was wearing, bought at her base’s Ship’s Store, the navy’s PX).  By the time I was a little boy in the early ’50s, jeans were the usual outdoor play clothes for even us middle-class kids and by the ’60s, they were practically the uniform for teens like me. 

(We weren’t allowed to wear jeans—or any pants “with rivets”—to school when I was an elementary- and middle-schooler, but I went to a Quaker private school; we weren’t even allowed to wear loafers or sneakers—shoes had to be laced and leather; sneakers and tennis or basketball shoes were made of canvas in those days. 

(By high school, an all-boys’ prep school in my case, we wore jackets and ties and in my freshman and sophomore years of college, that was also the dress code—though, by then, below the waist, jeans and even mocs were tolerated.  That disconnect finally felled the dress requirements after my second year.) 

Mom wrote again on Thursday, 8 March, and expressed how much fun it was staying with the WAVES.  They did go to bed early, though, Mom affirmed, “10:00 the latest,” so she was getting lots of extra sleep—she couldn’t even read because the light would disturb her new roommates. 

“Being somewhat bored,” Mom reported, the young women went off on a jaunt “to Princeton for dinner (a hot dog in the street from a ‘vendor’) and a really good scary movie!”  She proclaimed the junket “great sport wasting the gas”—which, you may know, was rationed during the war—“and going on such a binge!”  Mom ended by saying how much she hoped Dad would send a letter “the minute you hit land” (which she couldn’t know would be in three days’ time).

(Princeton—12½ miles north of Trenton, a 25-minute drive—is an ironically prophetic destination.  In 1947, Kris married a Trentonian, my Uncle George, and settled in New Jersey’s capital city.  After raising a family there, Kris and George moved to Princeton in the late ’70s, where they spent the rest of their lives. 

(My cousin Bill and I both went to prep school in Princeton in the early 1960s, though I left after my sophomore year to finish high school in Switzerland when my father was posted to Germany as a Foreign Service Officer [see “An American Teen In Germany” (9 and 12 March 2013), and “Home Alone” (12, 15, and 18 June 2015) referenced in the introduction to Part 1].  Bill’s sister, Lisa, also went to high school in Princeton; brother Jim attended another prep school in nearby Lawrenceville.  Cousin Lisa still lives in the Princeton area with her family and Cousin Bill did as well until a recent move to Bucks Country, Pennsylvania—the area where my mother and her sister, as well as mu brother, went to prep school.)

Mom included a curious announcement in this letter—for which she never provided any further explanation.  The rationale for deciding to dash off to Princeton for “something new with lots of spicey variety” was that Blossom wasn’t “interested in doing the every-day sort-of-things.”  The cause for that, Mom tossed off, was that “she’d just been asked to christen a ship in Portland, Oregon”! 

I have no idea what that was about—and it never came up again.  It sounds like a pretty big deal, a little bombshell—especially considering that Blossom Willens, like Kris, was a pretty junior officer, and she was all the way across the country from Oregon. (Blossom was from Chicago, so she wasn’t local to Portland, either.)  I have the feeling there was more to this story, but there’s no one left for me to ask.

(I have learned, though, that Portland was the home of several shipyards of Kaiser Shipyards, which built hundreds of Victory ships, Liberty ships, and escort carriers during World War II.  Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser [1882-1967], entered the shipbuilding industry in order to help meet the construction goals set by the United States Maritime Commission for merchant shipping.

(The U.S. Navy frequently selected WAVE officers, even an ensign based on the East Coast, to sponsor and christen these ships to boost wartime morale, honor the contributions of women in the military, and publicize the WAVE program.)

In an undated letter following the weekend of 10-11 March (I’d guess it was written on Monday, the 12th, or Tuesday, the 13th), Mom said she’d spent the weekend in New York City, visiting with her “uncles, aunts, and cousins.” 

(My mother’s family moved to Trenton from the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1930s [see “Horsman Dolls”], but there were still a lot of relatives there—my grandfather, for instance, had three sisters who all had daughters around my mother’s age with whom Mom was very close—so my mom and her family often used to travel into the city, about a 90-minute train ride or two-hour drive, for entertainment, shopping, family events and visits, and holidays.) 

While in the city, Mom took the opportunity to take care of “something I’d wanted to do long ago”: buy Dad “a ‘farewell’ gift.”  She explained that she’d wanted to give Dad the gift in person, “but there were so many confusing mix-ups connected with your leaving I never was able to attend to anything.”  She elucidated:

I noticed you weren’t wearing one of those identification bracelets – because you didn’t like them or because you just never had one I don’t know.  However, I like them, & particularly the one I sent to you.  Too, you won’t hold against me my sentimentality, expressed on the back-side – please, sweet?  All in all, it’s merely a little remembrance I wanted you to have – and you will remember me because of it, won’t you? 

Well, here’s a little surprise—and the unveiling of a minor mystery.

Serendipitously, I found the little gift card that Mom had written to send with the ID bracelet; it was among some family keepsakes—graduation programs, diplomas and certificates, photos, letters, and so on—in a box of odds and ends Mom kept, but I never knew what it was until I reread that letter.  The envelope for the card was addressed to “Capt. E. M. K*****, 0-1165639.”  The note said essentially the same thing as Mom’s letter (except it didn’t say that the gift with which it was enclosed was the bracelet), closing with: “Lots of luck, sweet – Hope you don’t mind wearing this – Love – Me.” 

I don’t know if Dad wore the bracelet while he was overseas—he did confide in me years later that he didn’t really like wearing one and he didn’t during his and Mom’s marriage—but he kept the bracelet in his jewelry box, and I have it now.  It’s sterling silver and on the front, Mom had “GENE K*****” inscribed (later, after Dad got Alzheimer’s, Mom added their phone number in Washington, D.C.) and on the back, she put “JUDY 1 - 1 - 45,” the date they met.

(Now the letter, gift card, and gift are all together again—more or less.  I put the card with the letter in the scrapbook, but the bracelet is in my jewelry box.  I think the fact that all three of those items still exist and had been preserved over all these years—in three separate places—and that my rereading the letters allowed me to identify them all and reunite them is remarkable.

(It’s not so astonishing that I connected Mother’s letter to the bracelet in my jewelry box—her description of the gift was a pretty broad clue—but that I linked the letter to the note card was serendipitous.  Language in Mom’s letter is nearly identical to language in her note on the card.  I wrote up this incident as a sample of what “Letters from the Fronts” contains; it’s posted on ROT as “The ID Bracelet” [18 August 2025].)

Still waiting to hear from Dad, Mom wrote on Thursday, 15 March (“Income tax due,” she noted; 15 April didn’t become Tax Day until 1955), how much she was enjoying spring, which had broken out in New Jersey—she described the day before as “a day of days!  It was simply gorgeous—really spring; with lots of sunshine, & warm, warm weather”—and wished Dad were there so they could take “a long long walk somewhere”—and then added “pardon the suggestion—perhaps a drive would be better!” 

(I assume that’s a reference to the frequent hikes Dad had to go on as part of this army duties.  I don’t recall Dad saying anything about hiking later, but when I was a Boy Scout and started going on overnight camping trips, he did say unequivocally that he’d had enough of “sleeping on the ground” in the army and wasn’t interested in going camping ever again.  He never did, either.)  Mom pointed out that they’d only been together “when it’s been cold, nasty, & very wet”! 

Mom also recounted “a very annoying experience” the previous evening.  She and Kris returned early to the apartment and while they were busy straightening the place up, “the phone began ringing away impatiently.”  Mother answered it to find a long-distance operator on the line.  It seemed that “she was not quite certain of what she was saying,” Mom thought, “trying to find out if it was o.k. for her to charge that phone with a call made earlier that day by Lt. K*****.”  It was obvious from what Mom wrote next that she had my dad on her mind:

When she finished, it occurred to me somewhere along the line I was impressed with the idea “Capt.” K***** was meant rather than Lt. – and that a long distance call was coming in—.  Well, needless to say, both the operator & I finally came to an understanding – and “parted” – but in the meantime I fear I suffered a shock – and Kris, who knew what was going on, all the while, laughed!!  Vulgar!  No sympathy.

Mom went on to acknowledge that she knew it was impossible for Dad to be calling, but because he’d “bobbed up unexpectedly at times in the past,” she formulated “a miracle” in her imagination.  Mom never explained what actually happened, but do I have to point out that Kris was “Lt. K*****” (which Mom seems to have forgotten).

Given Kris’s reaction to Mom’s confusion, she probably had placed a call sometime that morning, perhaps from her navy base, and charged it to her apartment phone.  Hence the confirmation call from the operator.  Mom was fixated on my dad, as she wrote: “Must be I miss you, eh?  [A]nd perhaps think of you once in awhile [sic].”

(Readers should remember that calls from Trenton to New York City and vice versa were long distance in 1945.  Furthermore, a call to Kris’s family back home, which is what I’d guess this was, wouldn’t have been a work call, so she’d have had to pay for it herself, not charge it to the navy.) 

Many of Mom’s letters, at least at this point before Dad began writing again from overseas, fell into a pattern.  She spoke emotionally about missing Dad and feeling unhappy that she hadn’t heard from him in so long, and then (though not necessarily in this order) turned to gossip and chit-chat.  In an undated letter written, I figure, around Saturday or Sunday, 17 or 18 March, Mom went on at some length on the first topic:

Thought that the more I did to occupy my time – and mind would help to keep me from thinking of how far away you are, and how long it[’]s going to be before seeing you again.  But, darling, I miss you more and more each day – and with every new event or activity taking place I want you to be here to take part.  Sweet, it may be hard to believe, after reading my letters since your going away – but, actually I’m not one for writing a lot of corny sentiment – all this candy-sweet business.  I never have, and never thought I would.  But, dearest, forgive it if it’s nauseating to you – I realize once in awhile [sic] it’s pleasant – but a “habit” of it can become annoying.  However, I’ve got to write what’s on my mind and right now that’s you & my missing you – never have I felt I’d have to express myself like this in the mail.  So, dear, forgive it – and realize that after awhile [sic] I’ll get use[d] to your being away – especially after I get a letter or two from you.  Then perhaps I’ll get back to normal.

Okay, a word here about my mother’s lack of sentimentality—at least of the epistolary kind: it’s not true.  Not in my lifetime, at any rate.  I’ve said this before, but in my family, Dad was the rationalist and Mom the sentimentalist.  Now, maybe she never wrote what are essentially love notes like this before, so she was never called upon to use “candy-sweet” expressions—but Mom never shied away from sentiment either in her speech or her letters.  (I know.  I was on the receiving end for over 60 years!)

After the emotional effusion, Mom turned to commentary, covering her first horseback ride in many months earlier that day—it left her somewhat saddle sore—and an impromptu party the night before at the officers’ club that started out to be a bridge game and ended up at Mom’s house (because her folks were gone) “for eats, etc.” 

The gathering lasted till 4 a.m. and Blossom stayed over (Kris was in Washington for the weekend—part of her navy duties) and even after they went to bed, the young ladies “had to gossip and compare notes” until the wee hours.  I tell you, Mom and Kris and their buddies were like a miniature sorority when they got together!

[“The Letters Project, Part 4” starts on the day that my mother-to-be heralds the beginning of spring.  Mother also alludes to a health problem in Dad’s family.  The first letters from Dad from France are also the first ones with actual war reports—the fighting had moved east, so Dad was describing the aftermath of combat.  ROTters’ll see that installment on or about Saturday, 13 November 2026.]

The Letters Project, Part 2

 

[This is the second installment of my transcription and summary (with commentary) of the correspondence between my future parents over the course of 1945.  If you haven’t read Part 1, I urge you to go back to 19 September and read it first before going on to Part 2.  There will be about 20 installments, spread out from now through the end of October 2027.]

LETTERS FROM THE FRONTS
January-December 1945

[This section of the letters starts off with something of a bang.  After that, it covers Dad’s last weeks in the U.S. before he and his artillery battalion are shipped to Europe.  The letters here record the last time my parents-to-be see each other until Dad returns after the end of the World War II and his separation from the service at the end of the year.]

23 January – 26 February 1945

In her letter of Tuesday, 23 January, Mom wrote that on Saturday night, she and “some of the ‘old crowd’” went to the Grill Room (in the Hotel Hildebrecht in downtown Trenton), which Mother characterized as “more or less Trenton’s night spot” that “use[d] to be our Sat. night hang-out,” and she found herself in the middle of “a real, honest-to-goodness brawl.”  At closing time, 2 a.m., Mom’s crowd began getting ready to leave “when, from apparently nowhere, & for no good reason came the cry ‘You S of B of a Jew!’”  Mother went on to describe the event:

Fists began flying; words socially un-mentionable were echoed thru-out the room, tables were thrown over, glasses were smashed—and what not—until the MP’s came in—and the fight temporarily subsided.  However, the fight was carried out into the lobby—and, in discussions, to the street and to where we went for “a bite.”  To say the least, it was something!!  The “grease-ball” who started the whole thing got scratched a bit—but not enough, to my satisfaction.

I don’t know what Mom meant by “grease-ball” (the quotation marks are hers), once a common disparaging term of contempt for someone of Mediterranean or Latin descent, except that it was intended as an all-inclusive insult for the man who shouted the anti-Semitic slur and started the brawl. 

Neither of my folks was the kind of person to throw around ethnic slurs, but there were a large number of Trentonians of Italian heritage (I believe there still are), and Mother may have been referring to that, especially if the instigator appeared to be Italian-American.  If that’s the case, I can’t explain her choice of words except to think she was young, intemperate, and probably very angry.

(Opened in 1929, the Hotel Hildebrecht, at West State Street and Chancery Lane, featured a well-known Grill Room and cocktail lounge that famously doubled as a local nightclub and evening gathering place through the World War II era and into the 1950s.  The hotel closed in 1980 and was demolished in 1984.

(The Military Police were involved because, during the war, Trenton was a major transit hub for service members due to its proximity to Fort Dix, less than 20 miles to the southeast, one of the Army’s largest training and mobilization centers.  Because so many soldiers flooded downtown Trenton on weekend passes, both local police and Army MP’s actively patrolled downtown night spots like the Hildebrecht.)

“It’s laughable, looking back,” Mother admitted when she wrote about it three days later.  “But it surely produced a great deal of anger at the time.”  She went on to express some thoughts, not about anti-Semitism so much, but wondering why some “people have to segregate themselves.”  Ironically, she was talking about Jews, who she seemed to feel congregate in enclaves, keeping themselves separate from gentiles.

Now, both my mother and my father were “assimilated Jews,” part of the so-called “lost generation” of American Jewry.  That’s the generation of Jewish Americans, mostly born during or just after World War I, many the children of immigrants, who assimilated so thoroughly that they were more “American” than Jewish. 

(My dad’s parents, Jacob [1890-1963] and Lena, née Kirschbaum [1896-1949], were both born in Eastern Europe—the Ukraine and Latvia, respectively—in the late 19th century; Dad was born in New York City in 1918, days before the armistice that ended World War I.  Mom’s family, on the other hand, were native-born Americans for several generations on both her parents’ sides; my maternal grandfather was even a World War I vet, as I noted earlier [see Part 1].  Mom was born in 1923, just 4½ years after the end of the war.) 

While most of the lost generation, like my parents, practiced Judaism (they were not apostates), going to synagogue, being confirmed and bar mitzvahed (bat mitzvahs weren’t common for two more generations), and marrying within the faith, few learned Hebrew (much less Yiddish), kept kosher homes, or observed the domestic rituals of Jewish worship.  Almost all were Reform Jews. 

Neither of my parents grew up in Jewish neighborhoods and they both went to public schools (though my mother went to a co-ed private boarding school for high school—but it was Quaker).  Mom went to a women’s college in upstate New York and Dad went to a small men’s college in Virginia.  (Dad did join a Jewish frat, however.) 

Neither of my grandfathers was in a business that’s traditionally identified with Jews: my dad’s father, my Grandpa Jack, or Pop-Pop J.L. (his middle initial was L), was a pharmacist in New York City and Mom’s father, Grandpa Harry, or Pop-Pop H.F., was a doll manufacturer (see “Horsman Dolls”). 

(I don’t remember Jack’s actual middle name—just his initial—but I think it was Leopold or some Jewish or Slavic name that was later Americanized as Leopold.  Harry Freedman didn’t have a middle name.  “Harry” also wasn’t a nickname—that was his actual name on his birth certificate and his military documents.  Jack was, of course, Jacob, but probably only after he arrived in the States in 1900; I imagine at birth he was named “Yaakov” or some East European equivalent, like the Ukrainian “Yakiv.”

(I mentioned earlier where my father-to-be’s family lived in Manhattan.  It’s curious, but that site—the building no longer stands—is a short walking distance from my current home.  In addition, though Pop-Pop H.F. had moved his doll factory to Trenton in the 1930s, the company maintained sales offices in Manhattan’s Toy Center South, a building at 200 5th Avenue on the northwest corner of 23rd Street.  That’s one-and-a-half blocks west of Pop-Pop J.L.’s pharmacy and his family’s apartment.  Both are in my cruising area.)

You already know about Mom’s social work with the Red Cross, a field in which she continued to volunteer in the civilian sector after the war (she worked with the Travelers Aid Society in Washington); Dad was a journalist briefly after he finished college, before he “volunteered to be drafted” (as he put it) in 1941, and then he was an executive with a small movie theater corporation in Washington after he was discharged until he joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962. 

(The Travelers Aid movement began in 1851 in St. Louis, Missouri, to assist travelers, primarily women and children traveling alone.  The idea spread to other cities and the primary purpose became to provide social work to women traveling alone in order to protect them from moral danger, specifically white slave trafficking.

(The Travelers Aid Society of Washington, founded in 1913, began assisting travelers at the new Union Station in March 1913 to help them navigate the city for the first inauguration of Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924; 28th president of the United States: 1913-21; inauguration: 4 March 1913].  The first National Travelers Aid Association was founded in 1917 to serve all travelers regardless of gender, age, class, race, or religion.  

(From the 1920s through World War II, Travelers Aid was a fixture at major railroad stations, assisting travelers with information, helping unaccompanied minors as they traveled, and assisting stranded travelers.  It was one of the original organizations that came together in 1941 to form the United Services Organization [USO] to assist traveling service men and women.

(Travelers Aid International, which is the successor to the National Travelers Aid Society, welcomes immigrants to the U.S., with operations at or near many ports of entry.

(At the current point in history, when there’s no longer an active military draft, the expression “volunteer to be drafted” might be hard to understand.  When the U.S. instituted its first peacetime draft in 1940, men were originally only supposed to serve for 12 months.  If Dad had walked into an Army recruiting office to enlist in March 1941, when he entered the service, the War Department would have required him to sign a 3-year enlistment contract.

(By going to his local draft board and choosing to “volunteer to be drafted,” he technically entered the military as a draftee.  This legally locked him into the shorter 1-year service obligation required by the peacetime draft law.

(Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, however, Congress immediately amended the law.  All draftees and enlisted men had their service terms automatically extended for the duration of the war plus six months.  A point system for releasing GI’s went into effect in May 1945, and by November, the points for officers’ release was set at 60.)

From the perspective of my parents and their peers, I suppose it might be explicable that my mother would see Jews associating exclusively with other Jews as unwholesome self-segregation.  It’s ironic, too, in a way that 81 years ago, my mother should focus on a phenomenon that is today an occasional topic of concern among African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and other groups, particularly on college campuses.  I can’t say I ever thought of my mother as prescient.

In what came close to anti-Zionism, Mom questioned the need for Jews “to go over [to Palestine] and disturb the Arabs . . ., when they’ve got a good enough place right here in the U.S.”  This was a remarkable notion for several reasons.  First, Mother was considering only Jews from the United States who emigrated to Palestine, which was a relatively tiny number precisely because they had a good situation here. 

Second, the question came long before the mass immigration of displaced European Jews to Palestine after World War II, leading to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. 

Third, Mom wasn’t reckoning on the determination of many peoples to have a homeland—we’ve seen it in the Kurds, the Armenians, the Chechens, the Basques, the Canadian Inuit, and many other ethnic and national groups who’ve lost their homelands or never had one.  It’s a current concern again now in the Middle East with the drive for a Palestinian state.

Finally, Mother had yet to feel the bite herself of the kind of overt anti-Semitism she would encounter a few years later after she and my father moved to Washington, D.C., and went house-hunting.  More than once, in the capital city of this “good enough place,” real estate salespeople announced proudly, as they showed a prospective home to my parents—neither of whom looked stereotypically Jewish—that the neighborhood was “of course, restricted”! 

If you’re too young to have heard that code word—or never saw the Best Picture Oscar-winning 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement—it meant “no Jews allowed.”  Why emigrate to Palestine, indeed.

Dad responded to Mother’s tale of violence and anti-Semitism on Friday, 26 January.  He exclaimed, “Sounds like you really got yourself involved in something last weekend.  My goodness, a veritable race riot.”  He wondered what he’d have done if he’d been there, and imagined he’d have “dived under the closest table still standing.”  My father, the hero!  He then added a little remark which I hope was at least slightly sardonic—although, perhaps not: “I have always maintained that when one visits the provinces (Trenton) barbarism is very rampant.” 

As for Mother’s rumination about Jewish self-segregation, Dad agreed with her.  “You know, dear, you’ve hit on what I believe is one of the fundamental causes for anti-Semitism,” he began.  “Segregation by the Jews to themselves.”  But he continued: “Another and opposite cause is those who force themselves into places and among people who neither welcome nor tolerate them.” 

That sounds like a call for separatism, or at least an acquiescence to exclusion.  That’s not the father I knew, especially in the 1960s when men like Martin Luther King, Jr.; Jesse Jackson; and Andrew Young were agitating for black civil rights.  Both my parents supported this movement, including desegregation efforts, even among people who “neither welcomed nor tolerated” it!  In his letter, Dad closed by saying: “A happy medium is much closer to the answer.  This problem, however, is another one that will and can only be solved by time.”

In his 24 January letter, the one in which he told the story of the distraught sergeant, Dad also wrote that he’d “been awfully busy for the past three days,” though he expected “from tomorrow on I will have a little more time to relax.  Things won’t be going at quite such a furious pace,” Dad predicted, “for a few days at least.”  That turned out to be an erroneous prediction (as he would admit in a subsequent letter). 

I surmise that orders for the transfer east hadn’t been received at Camp Hood yet—in wartime, those kinds of orders weren’t committed to paper and delivered until the last possible moment for security reasons (and for the possibility of contingency alterations in plans)—but with just a little over a week to go—considering how much would have to be readied for a move of that magnitude (artillery battalions travel with a number of big guns, trucks and jeeps, and all sorts of heavy materiel)—there would have to be scuttlebutt.

The 529th was an 8-inch howitzer battalion with 5 batteries, including 3 Firing Batteries (100-120 men each), comprising 4 guns per battery, or 12 guns in all.  All the support equipment for maintenance, ammunition supply, and logistics was in the Service Battery, while the Headquarters Battery, Dad’s command, contained the battalion’s command, staff, wire and radio communications, and fire-direction elements.  At full-strength, the battalion would number 540 to 600 personnel (consisting of approximately 30-35 officers and 500-565 enlisted men).  

As CO of the Headquarters Battery, Dad would have directly commanded 3 to 4 staff officers and approximately 95 to 110 enlisted men.  In addition, the Battalion Commander and his staff lived, ate, and traveled with the HQ Battery.  The HQ Battery Commander had to manage this complex of men and equipment that allowed the battalion staff to do their jobs, including seeing to their rations and housing.

Despite all the frenetic activity—and I’d imagine that nearly everyone at Camp Hood, around 50,000 troops until the 529th and other units began departing, would have been involved one way or another—there was still time for social events.  Dad wrote that everyone was anticipating “a soirée of sorts for Saturday night,” three nights hence, the 27th. 

The President’s Ball at Camp Hood, which I assume was the annual charity celebration across the country on or near FDR’s birthday (30 January) to raise money to combat polio (which Roosevelt had contracted in 1921), was to be “a formal dance . . . at the club.”  “All the wives are in a dither about the prospect of wearing a gown,” Dad reported.  “They get such few opportunities that they practically all faint at the mere possibility—such an existence.” 

Well, I can imagine that there were few chances to dress up in the wartime army, especially at a base like Camp Hood—but I suspect Dad was overstating the case a bit.  (A “camp” in the army is a temporary or reserve base, though some become permanent “forts” later, as Camp Hood did.  The facilities at the smaller camps are minimal and rudimentary, sometimes no more than tents and Quonset huts, compared to the larger, more substantial forts.  Semi-permanent army bases in combat zones abroad, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, are also called camps.  The Marines call all their bases camps.) 

The women (those who weren’t military personnel—the army had the Women’s Army Corps, or WAC, just as the navy had the WAVES) would wear civilian finery—an evening gown in this case—and the officers would wear Class A uniforms.  The army’s formal dress uniform, the equivalent of the civilian tuxedo, was Dress Blues, but that uniform was discontinued between 1940 and 1947 for austerity reasons during the war.

(The WAC was formed in 1943 when the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps [WAAC], established in 1942, was transformed into an active-duty branch of the army.  Except for nurses, assigned to the Army Nurse Corps, all female soldiers were assigned to the WAAC and later the WAC.  In 1978, the WAC was disbanded and all female soldiers were integrated into the appropriate formerly male units.)

However festive the evening was for the members of the 529th Field Artillery Battalion and their ladies, they couldn’t have known that it would be the last President’s Ball of this kind: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who founded the March of Dimes in 1938 to support the fight against polio, died in office on 12 April 1945, ending the tradition that started in 1934.

Dad reported he’d tried to phone Mom on Wednesday night (the 24th), before he wrote her, and in a note on Saturday afternoon, the 27th, Mom told him she was devastated at missing the call.  She also mentioned the President’s Ball (which was the evening of the day she wrote). 

The note, written at the Hotel St. Moritz on Manhattan’s Central Park South (the portion of West 59th Street along the southern boundary of Central Park from 8th Avenue/Central Park West on the west to 5th Avenue on the east), was mostly chit-chat; Mom was waiting to meet her parents at the hotel for a “fancy” lunch with a business associate of her father who wanted to introduce his nephew to my mother—a set-up, to which Mom wasn’t looking forward! 

Behind all the gossip—Mom had been reading Kathleen Winsor’s steamy 1944 novel Forever Amber, “probably the most talked about book today!” Mother exclaimed (everyone “wants to know with whom next Amber will sleep,” Mom explained)—was the unasked question: what about that journey home? 

What Mom couldn’t know was that on Friday, 26 January, the day before Mom wrote her note from the St. Moritz, amidst Dad’s responses to Mother’s account of the Grill Room brawl and her opinion of Jewish self-segregation, he wrote succinctly: “Darling, the trip east is out of the ‘possibility’ stage.  Just stand by and wait for a call.”  Two sentences for the news at which Dad had been hinting and for which Mom had been waiting.  Now it was a reality, just short of official. 

Mom wrote back on 30 January, having just gotten Dad’s announcement, to “Gene, my l’il [sic] precious bundle of joy!” 

(I must insert here that this letter seems to have been bound in the wrong order and I’m making the decision on my own that it’s out of place.  It was mounted right after Mother’s letter of 23 January and, since both letters were annotated only “Tuesday,” without a date, Dad must have thought, as I did at first, that Mom had written two letters on the same day, one before and one after receiving Dad’s letter of Sunday, the 21st. 

(After I read Mom’s letters, I began to have second thoughts about this notion, and now, after relating Dad’s 26 January letter, the one announcing the certainty of his move east, I’m convinced the letter is Mother’s immediate reply, written not on Tuesday, 23 January, but one week later. 

(There are several reasons for this conclusion, but the main one is that without this letter, there’s no response from Mom to Dad’s major announcement.  I can’t believe that Mom wouldn’t respond enthusiastically to that letter—and I don’t accept the likelihood that of all Mom’s letters, that that response would have been lost.  Besides, this letter simply fits here too well, whereas it didn’t really a week earlier.  There’s even a reference to the set-up she wrote about on the 27th.) 

“I’m so damn excited with the idea,” Mom wrote, and she told Dad she’d “plan to stay home as much as possible, till your call comes in announcing your arrival in the East.  Don’t want to miss it for all the world.”  She also provided Dad with a fairly detailed schedule of her upcoming activities so he’d know when not to call or where to find her if she wasn’t home.  (For instance, there was to be a 50th-anniversary celebration for my mother’s grandparents in the Cotillion Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel on East 61st Street in Manhattan on Saturday, the 27th, and Mom planned to stay in the city overnight.) 

Mixed with her excitement of the prospect of my father coming back to New York, Mom admitted also that “now that it’s practically happened (your coming) . . . I’m a wee bit scared!?” 

Mom explained that she wasn’t sure she could manage the expectations she’d built up—but I think there was also an element of dread because of the unacknowledged purpose of his trip east: Dad was about to go off to war.  He knew it, of course, and I’m sure his family and Mother had guessed by now.  It’s that topic they didn’t put into words, as I said earlier—outside of anything that was classified.  Not only did Dad not bring it up except that one time (see Part 1), but Mother didn’t articulate it, either. 

I don’t have the letters Dad exchanged with his parents and his sisters (Kris, like Mom, was just out of college, but baby sister Marion [1927-2015] was still a 17-year-old freshman at Vassar College at this point), but I suspect the war wasn’t discussed among them, either.  Army life was one thing to write home about—I did that myself, just like I’d written home about boarding school and college before that—but the war and the prospect of facing “shots fired in anger,” as we used to put it, were something else altogether.  And I imagine the same was true of other GI’s and their families as well.

(By the way, Mom didn’t specify which grandparents were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, but I’d guess it was her mother’s parents.  I never heard Mom talk about her paternal grandparents, but her Grandfather Jackson Kline was the subject of several stories.  I don’t have any recollection of him—I don’t even know his wife’s name; I assume she was gone by the time I was born—but there are a couple of wonderful photos from around 1947 or ’48 of four generations of my Grandmother Valerie’s family sitting on the veranda steps of my grandfather’s rented vacation house in Deal, New Jersey.

(We’re each sitting on one step above the other, in a diagonal line with me at about a year old—Mom’s actually holding me up—at the bottom right; then Mom above and to the viewer’s left of me; then Nana Val above her; and then Valerie’s dad, my great-grandfather Jackson, at the top on the left. 

(Jackson, according to my mother, was a yarn-spinner—apparently you couldn’t ever be sure what he said was true; it usually wasn’t—and an inveterate flirt.  Mom described to me a scene in a hospital room where Jackson was once confined, and she arrived for a visit to find him surrounded by a gang of young nurses who were rapt by stories he was telling, none of them factual!  He also lived to a ripe old age, a rarity on both sides of my family until my mother, who died at 92, and my Aunt Kris, at 93.)

On Sunday night, 28 January, Dad wrote that he’d taken it easy that day: “I didn’t get out of bed until after two (just to show you that I can do it) . . . .”  He expected that the “next week should go very fast (I hope) and should not hold too much labor for me.”  He continued, “If I can stay out of the ‘old man’s’ way I should be fairly unoccupied for the next few days.”  My dad, the goldbricker!  Who’da thunk it?  (By the way, “the old man” was a common way GI’s had of referring to their CO’s; it was usually a term of endearment and esteem more than insulting or derisive, but we’ll see that Dad didn’t have a lot of respect for his colonel.)

Of course, Dad acknowledged, “I said the very same thing a week ago and then lightning struck.”  He even added: “God—how I hate work.”  With less than a week before Dad and his unit moved out of Camp Hood, it’s more likely that this day would be his last leisure time until he boarded the ship to France.  Either he was fooling himself, or he didn’t really know the date of his departure yet.  (As I observed earlier, orders like these came suddenly so there’d be less time for sensitive information to leak out.) 

Dad went on to muse about his post-war druthers:

When I get out of the Army I shall spend some time lying flat on my back and have all sorts of bugle calls sound so that I can completely ignore them.  I shall stay up late nights and never even be awake to see a morning sun.  I shall surround myself with chaise lounges (I’ve grown quite fond of them) and expend my energy moving from one to another.  I intend to use my mustering out pay to hire a small boy to occasionally refill my glass and change the records on the victrola.  Think this sounds at all exciting?

I wonder how many other GI’s had similar dreams.

(A victrola was a common, colloquial term for a phonograph or record player.  The word was actually a brand name, Victrola, for the popular machine made by RCA Victor.)

Mom’s letter of Friday, 2 February, was just chatty—complaints about work, a “hen party” she and Kris happened into the previous evening, plans for a movie with “the WAVES” (Kris and, I imagine, her roommate, Blossom Willens [1920-2019])—except for her disappointment that she hadn’t gotten any mail from Dad for two whole days!  “Then again—maybe you’re on your way—huh?” she suggested, not knowing that Dad was in fact on a train en route for New York. 

Indeed, on Thursday night, 1 February, Dad wrote, “By the time this letter reaches you I will have left Texas.  Matter of fact, I may even see or speak to you before you read this.”  (Dad, in his turn, was “very much perturbed all week by the complete lack of mail.”  The letter Mom wrote on Hotel St. Moritz note paper on Saturday, the 27th, was the last he’d gotten, he affirmed, and it hadn’t arrived until the morning of the 1st. 

While Dad blamed the bad weather in the east for holding up “all transportation,” I suspect that the battalion’s imminent transfer and the logistics of the move might have had something to do with the mail delay.  The very next day, Dad sent Mom a change-of-address notice because the unit’s mailing address was changing from Camp Hood to “APO No. 18257”—the address that would follow the unit abroad—and it’s not a stretch to assume that the Army Post Office was already diverting mail to the battalion’s new quarters. 

Dad described the activities of preparing to depart the camp:

It has been a very hectic day, as you can well imagine.  Everything had to be cleaned up, buildings emptied, last minute packing accomplished, and the train loaded.  This loading of trains can be and is quite a task.  It has been my primary job for the past two weeks.  I have loaded two of them now, and when we load our personnel tomorrow, I will have completed that job.  Now I only hope I don’t have to load the ship.  The forms the army dreams up to be filled out are endless.  I am quite convinced that the war cannot possibly last another two years for the simple reason that there isn’t enough paper.

That was only the third mention of the war in any context so far in any of Dad’s (or Mother’s) letters.  You’ll notice they were all vague and general. 

Dad finished his work at 9:30 that evening and the 529th would entrain for New York on Friday, 2 February (the day of Mom’s most recent letter), arriving on the 7th, and he ordered Mom, “Make some wonderfully fantastic plans, and we can be gay trying to fulfill them.”  (Dad added as his closing lines of his last letter before being essentially sequestered before embarkation: “Being gay with you is no effort at all.  Somehow or other you bring out the playboy in me.”) 

The next correspondence between my parents-to-be were three telegrams Dad sent Mom from the train (or from a station en route) on Wednesday, 7 February, announcing his arrival that evening.  One of the wires, time-stamped 6:44 p.m., read: “BE HOME TONIGHT AT EIGHT CALL KRIS AND MEET ME.”

Mom revealed in a much later letter that she met Dad’s train in New York as he asked—against her parents’ wishes.  According to family lore, when Dad asked my mom to come to New York City on his arrival at Penn Station from central Texas, she agreed—over my grandfather’s stern objections; my grandmother was aghast. 

In that day and age, proper young ladies just didn’t rush off to the big city alone to meet a man, especially one she’d only met a few weeks earlier—and who’d gotten smashed at her parents’ anniversary celebration!  But my mom stood her ground—she obviously already had the stubborn streak I got to know from an early age—and met my future dad’s train from Texas on that Wednesday evening. 

Mother and Dad were obviously together a lot over the next weeks because the only correspondence until the end of February was a short, undated message on Hotel St. Moritz note paper that Dad must have left at the hotel for Mom one afternoon after his battalion arrived in New York City to tell her he’d be by to pick her up at about 5 p.m. after taking care of some “business” uptown.  After that, the next letters Dad wrote were from the unit’s temporary quarters when he was prohibited from leaving before shipping out. 

(None of the letters, either from Dad or Mom, stated where Dad was billeted before boarding the transport ship.  This may have been for reasons of security—or it could simply have been unnecessary since they both knew where he was.  In a letter written from Germany on 30 June, Dad revealed that the 529th Field Artillery Battalion was housed at Camp Shanks in Orangetown, in Rockland County, New York [27 miles north of New York City and 88 miles northeast of Trenton]. 

(According to Wikipedia, Camp Shanks was “a staging area for troops departing the New York Port of Embarkation for overseas service during World War II.  Dubbed ‘Last Stop USA,’ the camp housed about 50,000 troops spread over 2,040 acres . . . and was the largest World War II U.S. Army embarkation camp, processing 1.3 million service personnel.”  The camp closed in 1954.

(Mom wrote in a 22 February letter of “putting you on the train” the previous evening, the last day she and Dad saw one another before further passes were denied, but in his June letter, Dad wrote about habitually taking a bus to the camp, a trip that would have taken over an hour-and-a-half in the days before the Interstate. 

(I tried to obtain my dad’s military records from the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis to try to eke out some details of his World War II service, but his were among the personnel files lost in a fire in 1973.  I also tried to get my Grandpa Harry’s World War I records, but that request failed, too; this may have been due to the fire as well, or it may have been because I lacked too much pertinent personal information about Private Harry Freedman.)

From Mom’s 22 February letter, as I observed, it’s clear that she and Dad spent Wednesday evening, the 21st, together.  Later, Dad seems to have sent Mom a telegram about the suspension of passes because she wrote plaintively on Thursday afternoon:

[I] thought I’d . . . start what looks like a long-term corresponding relationship!

Already feel like something, very important to me, is missing – Only said good-bye a matter of several hours ago, and it’s as if you’ve been gone for ages.  Although it was obvious from the beginning that you’d not be around for long – the more I saw of you the more difficult it became to realize that fact –.  While I suspected, for some strange reason, all last evening that it would be “so long” for a time – it still came as a sock in the jaw when you admitted that there’d be no more passes!!

Then my future mother began bargaining:

And still today . . . I had a slight hope tickeling [sic] my sub-consciousness that your hike would be called off or you’d be able to have just one more pass!  Honey, just one more to really say good-bye.  Putting you on the train last night left me with a feeling of “unfinished business.”  I suppose, tho’ I knew, I nevertheless didn’t realize I’d not see you again – so that when you “boarded” I couldn’t make myself say all the usual “good lucks” expected at a farewell such as ours ought to have been.  (However, that all goes without saying – You know, words or no, that my very best wishes go with you, no matter where.  My sweet, only the very best for you, always!)  Honey, maybe you were wrong (and I suppose you can be sometimes).  Perhaps you will get off tonight – or even tomorrow.  After all, it’s only a little past two – and I’ve never received your wires this early and the matter of your leaving now is a “spot” of guess-work, on your part – no?  Oh, please, God, just once more!!!

She closed by promising to write again the next day and complaining about “why the devil . . . can’t your mail start coming in!?”  No one said, but I suspect the confinement to camp also included censorship of mail—stopping all unofficial correspondence from leaving the post. 

There may also have been some form of screening of in-coming mail as well, as Dad didn’t get Mom’s letter of 23 February until Monday, the 26th.  (If it only took two days for a letter to reach Texas from New Jersey in January, why would it take three days to get one from Trenton to Orangetown, New York, in February unless the mail was being held up?)

Mom wrote again on Friday afternoon, the 23rd, as she promised, a mostly chatty letter about work and weekend plans written from her Red Cross office in New Jersey.  Mom apparently had found a little “cubby-hole” where she could write to Dad during office hours . . . until it was “discovered,” as it were [tsk, tsk!].  (Kris had apparently not been feeling well for a “couple of days” and was taking off work.  Mom was planning on “entertaining the l’il [sic] gal” that evening.) 

She did devote a paragraph to bemoaning the lack of contact with her beau, “so near, and at the same time, completely out of reach,” and dreading what she’s “figured” would be “3 weeks (opt[i]mistically), but with a usual amount of luck, 4 weeks” without mail from Dad . . . “and, sweetheart,” she added, “that’s a Hell of a long time.”  (I don’t really know what that’s all about exactly, except, as I speculated, the preparation for embarkation for the ETO—the European Theater of Operations—meant a blackout on both passes and off-post contacts.)

It seems Mom’s epistolary prayer of the 22nd was granted.  After Mom sent off her Friday letter, pass restrictions were apparently lifted for Saturday; Dad called her Friday night to tell her the news.  The next day, on Sunday, the 25th, Mom wrote: “I was so sure you’d be in last evening—I’m beginning to wonder now, tho’ if you didn’t have some slight suspicion, hunch, ‘or something’ that Fri. would be the last [day of pass restrictions].  No?” 

I can’t tell if Mom was being serious about Dad having foreknowledge that the restrictions would be lifted or if she was just teasing, but it’s possible—not to say likely—that Dad did have some idea, even if only scuttlebutt.  On the one hand, the lifting of restrictions would probably have been considered sensitive information and not announced to the men of the 529th in advance so that word wouldn’t get out; on the other, information like that is hard to keep off the post grapevine. 

In any case, Dad would have been constrained from phoning, telegraphing, or writing Mom beforehand.  Of course, it might also just have been a last-minute decision by the colonel: a letter Dad wrote during the day on Saturday, 24 February, reads as if he had no intimation that he’d be free that evening and seeing my mother.  It would be the last time they’d be together until Dad came home from Europe after the war ended.

In the letter, Dad lamented, “Today might have been so very lovely if circumstances had only permitted,” obviously unaware what was coming down the line later that day.  “I miss you darling,” he continued.  “I know that as time piles up, this missing you will grow more and more intense.”  But I have no way of knowing when this letter, despite its date, was actually delivered to Mom; she didn’t mention it in her next couple of letters, and Dad didn’t say anything about hearing from Mom until his last letter in the month, the one dated the 26th (in which, you recall, he reported that the last correspondence he got from Mom was from three days earlier).   

I’ve always said, by the way, that Mom had a way of seeing things from an emotional perspective rather than a rational one, and in her letter of the 25th, she put a sentimental spin on this turn of events, too.  “I’d been certain you’d come in—maybe because the plans we discussed seemed so nice,” she decided, “—or perhaps you didn’t give me an opportunity to doubt the possibility.”  That’s my mother all over: things happen for her because she feels they’re right—and logic be damned.  (That was Dad’s department!)

Mother never detailed those “nice” plans for Saturday evening, though she did strike a grateful and deferential note:

However, I ought not to be “piggish”—in my last letter to you [it was actually the letter before that] I begged for “just one more pass” and the Gods were with me that time – I don’t dare ask for “just one more” – Tho’ for my part, it could go on and on and on . . . .

In his letter of 24 February, Dad made a wry comment on life on post at that moment:

I am sitting here midst much confusion and a great deal of cussing.  Just the normal emotional outlet of some of the boys accompanying necessary chores.  Somehow or other things just don’t seem to work quite satisfactorily unless accompanied by profanity.  It makes up for an undeveloped vocabulary—and I find that I’m certainly no exception.  Just another “post-war readjustment” that I am going to have to enjoy working on.

He ended the letter by saying, “I can hardly wait to get this over with and get back to you.”  This makes me wonder if Dad and his fellow artillerymen in the 529th had any idea how imminent their departure for Europe was.  The fact is that beyond the immediate cessation of the restriction to the camp, “this,” meaning the preparation for embarkation for the ETO, wasn’t over and, after that Saturday evening, Dad didn’t “get back to” Mom until after V-J Day, half a year away.

On Monday, 26 February, Dad wrote the last letter in the collection before embarkation.  He’d received Mom’s letter of the 23rd, probably the last correspondence he’d get until disembarkation in France, and he spoke of his sadness at the prospect of not having “personal contact” with Mom for some time to come and having to make do with her letters as the only available substitute.  Then he related a chance meeting with “an old friend” on Sunday night.  He made a poignant point that I bet many GI’s considered under similar circumstances.

At the officers’ club with his CO to relax over a “jug,” Dad’s former battery commander from 1942 walked in.  Captain Leary, commander of HQ Battery, 45th Field Artillery Battalion, at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, had “made” Dad a first sergeant. 

(Dad was promoted to first sergeant [enlisted pay grade: E-8] on 4 February 1942, the last enlisted rank he held before entering Officer Candidate School [OCS] at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the Field Artillery School, on 26 February.  He graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant [pay grade: O-1] on 9 June and was retained at the school as an instructor for a year. 

(He received several subsequent assignments, including a stint, likely July to August 1943, before he was assigned to Camp Hood, at the newly established Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie—later Fort Ritchie, now closed—in Cascade, Washington County, Maryland.  A former resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland, Camp Ritchie was about 75 miles north-northwest of Washington, D.C., 70 miles from Baltimore, and 16 miles northeast of Hagerstown, the county seat.  Afterward, Dad held various posts until he was assigned to the 529th sometime in 1943 or ’44.

(MITC was formed at the very beginning of the war (19 June 1942) to train GI’s in interpretation, translation, interrogation, intelligence, and counterintelligence directed against the Axis powers.  One of the War Department’s first efforts was to cull service personnel with knowledge of the languages of the Axis and the occupied lands, and soldiers from all over the armed forces who spoke German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Greek, and so on, were gathered at Camp Ritchie. 

(These recruits became known as the Ritchie Boys.  As my dad explained it to me, most of these men were either immigrants and refugees—many were Jews who fled Germany and Austria and Nazi-occupied countries—or first-generation Americans like my dad who grew up speaking one of the needed languages at home. 

(Dad first learned German from his Grandmother Fanny [Frances, née Draubner; ca. 1865-?], with whom he spent afternoons after school while his father was working in the drug store; Dad’s grandmother had refused to learn English.  He then studied it in high school and college.  Coincidentally, Dad’s German professor in college, William W. Pusey, III [1910-94], was, some 30 years later, my Russian teacher there.

(A large number of the men were restaurant workers from the ethnic eateries in cities like New York and Chicago, but once they were at MITC and began testing and training, the instructors discovered that many of them had no other usable skills for intelligence work than language facility. 

(When they washed out of MITC, instead of sending them back to their original units, the brass at Camp Ritchie decided to keep them on as camp complement, and they became the cooks, pastry chefs, and bakers in the mess halls and service clubs, doing the work they’d done as civilians.  My father—whose mother was said to have been a terrible cook who could make only one dish well: stuffed cabbage—told me that the food he ate at Camp Ritchie was the best he had anywhere in his life.  I suspect that was a great exaggeration with respect, at least, to the latter half of his life.  We did some mighty fine eating from my teens on!

(Besides, my mother was—or became—a terrific cook!)

In the 26 February letter, Dad recounted:

We sat for several hours and talked of old times and men in the old outfit.  It amazed me how actually long ago that all was.  I’ve kidded a great deal about all the time I’ve spent in the service, but actually it has passed very quickly.  Last night, however, it suddenly dawned on me how many years have gone by, and how many more remain before there is an end to all this.

[“The Letters Project, Part 3” picks up on the day that my father’s unit sets sail for the ETO.  As you’ll read, Mother didn’t know he’d departed and it was days before she caught on to that fact.  The next letters from Dad will be written from France (after one piece of correspondence from shipboard, but I suspect it was dispatched after he reached Le Havre).  Readers’ll see that installment on or about Saturday, 31 October 2026.]