Monday, July 8, 2019

Book - "Dear Mary: Letters to and from Italy - January 1945-July 1945."

Sydney M. Williams

 This book is to be published in July 2019 and is available on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

Introduction

“Dear Mary: Letters to and from Italy, January 1945 – July 1945”
                                                                                                                                      July 8, 2019

Please Mr. Postman, look and see.
Is there a letter, a letter for me?”
                                                                                    The Marvelettes
                                                                                    “Please Mr. Postman,” 1961

My father was drafted in March 1944. He was thirty-three years old, married with three children and a fourth on the way. After basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama he was transferred to the 10thMountain Division, which was then stationed at Camp Swift in Texas. In December they were sent to Fort Patrick Henry in Virginia, and on January 4ththey boarded the USS West Point (built in 1940 as the SS America) for the trip to Naples, Italy. He was a PFC, in the 87thRegiment, 1stBattalion, C Company, 2ndPlatoon, 2ndSquad. In six years of marriage, my parents had not been separated. This is their correspondence during a trying time for the country, but especially for those who were sent overseas and for loved ones who remained at home.

In his new biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts writes of the future Prime Minister writing to his wife when he went to France in November 1915: “His letters,” Mr. Roberts writes, “allow us to peer into his mind better than at any other period in his life.” All letters do that, but especially those between spouses. Unlike Churchill’s my parents’ letters were never written with the prospect of being published. That was something to consider when weighing the appropriateness of having the letters transcribed and made available for all to read. In the end, their value as a window onto a special time in our history seemed worth whatever embarrassment might accrue to those no longer alive.

One could argue that letters between one man and one woman reflect only their thoughts and, thus, have little universal value. But their significance, in my opinion, is more ubiquitous. Sixteen million Americans served in uniform during the three years and eight months the United States was at war. More than a million became casualties. For every soldier serving, there were two or three (or more) family members at home. In all, they represented almost half of the United States’ population of 132.1 million in 1940. This was truly a total war.

For those who did remain at home, life was not easy, even excluding fears of the unknown. Lives were disrupted in many ways. There was a breakdown in in social values: Divorce rates increased, as did truancy, juvenile delinquency and venereal disease. Alcoholism was a problem. With women needed in the workforce, there was a growth in unsupervised, “latchkey” children. While unemployment declined due to conscription and expansion of war industries, so did safety nets, as spending on defense needs preempted funds for support programs, so poverty increased, and income gaps widened. Gasoline rationing meant restricted travel and food rationing meant substitutions, like powdered eggs and milk, and liquid paraffin for cooking oil. At one point during the war, 50% of the nation’s vegetables came from “Victory Gardens.”

As these letters show, my parents were more fortunate than many. My mother moved back to her parents in Madison, Connecticut, where we lived in idyllic conditions—a large house on Long Island Sound, a barn with animals and a mother and grandparents who were attentive and who loved us. We were too young to understand what was happening, and we were never deprived of food or a comfortable place to sleep. We were protected from the worries that consumed my mother and grandparents. My family was fortunate in other ways. All immediate family members survived. My mother’s three brothers served as Naval officers; all experienced combat and all returned uninjured. Of my father’s two brothers, one was a medical doctor who remained state-side, the other an Army Lieutenant who was wounded on Okinawa but made it home with no visible scars. Both my father’s brothers-in-law served as Naval officers; neither was wounded.

This generation was the last of the letter writers. My generation wrote letters when in school, college and the army, but we lived into an age of cell phones, e-mail, Instagram, Twitter and social media; so, the letters we write now are mostly ones of condolence or expressing thanks for a gift. But for those born earlier, the writing of letters was the most important means of communication.

Because of the personal nature of these letters, especially their reference to people and places, footnotes have been added where appropriate. The book also includes commentary about the War that allows the reader to follow the course of the 87thRegiment while in combat. Fortunately, there is a surfeit of literature about the 10thMountain Division, especially Hal Burton’s The Ski Troopsand Charles Hauptman’s Combat History of the 10thMountain Division. Particularly informative was History of the 87thRegimentby Captain George F. Earle, written in 1945, which includes a day-by-day history of their time in combat. It also includes a listing of all the men who served in the 87th. And, of course, the book of photographs, which have been used, with permission, to illustrate this book.

Besides letters to and from my parents, included are a few letters from my father’s parents, his two sisters and one of his two brothers.

Minor changes have been made to the letters. Paragraphs have been created where none existed. As well, commas and other punctuation marks have been added, to clarify what was written. While not all letters survived, a surprising number did—especially given that those from home were carried by my father in his backpack, across fields of battle. They traveled over the Apennines and through the Po Valley. They crossed the Po River, to the shores of Lake Garda (where they were when the War in Europe ended). The 10thremained in Italy, guarding the Yugoslav border against threatened incursions by Marshall Tito. They were there until the end of July, before sailing home from Naples. Since the expectation was that the Division would be sent to Japan for the planned invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall), included are letters written during those two and a half months after the war in Europe was over. All of these letters carry the voices of those who wrote them seventy-four years ago.

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My father, a skier since the late 1920s, died in 1968 at the age of 58. He had grown up in Wellesley, Massachusetts and Peterborough, New Hampshire. He graduated from the Belmont Hill School in 1928 and left Harvard College, at the depths of the Depression in 1932, at the end of his senior year but without a degree. His love was art—he had drawn cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon—but jobs for cartoonists were scarce. He got a job as a receptionist in a brokerage firm, where he spent time carving pipes. Finally, he volunteered in the Entomology Department at Harvard, modeling backgrounds for display cases at the Fogg Museum. He did well enough that he was invited to join the Faculty Club, despite never having received a degree. In 1936, he resigned to study sculpture with George Demetrious at his studio in Gloucester, Mass., where he met his future wife, Mary Hotchkiss.

My mother, who died twenty-two years after my father, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, in a large house at the top of Hillhouse Avenue, a house that belonged to her paternal grandfather. She graduated from the Foxcroft school in 1929 and spent a year in Italy at Madame Boni’s finishing school in Rome. Her life changed in 1933. Her grandfather had died in 1930. Her father, a director and vice president of U.S. Rubber Company in charge of their world-wide rubber plantations, had invested [sic] most of his money with Ivar Krueger, the Swedish “Match King,” a Ponzi-scheme operator whose empire toppled in 1933. The house on Hillhouse Avenue was sold. Their summer place in Madison became their year-round home. For two years my mother taught art at Foxcroft and, in the early summer of 1936, she went north to study sculpture with Mr. Demetrious, where she met my father. They were married two years later. At the time of their engagement, in October 1937, my mother wrote a revealing letter to her brother Henry about her fiancé: “His tastes are similar to mine, though perhaps he is more of the earth while I am off the earth, but his realm is comprehensive of both. He is an animal of instinct – does not bite, however – and stands for simplicity and nature.” They were married May 28, 1938 in New Haven.

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My mother spent most of that year and a half that he was in the Army with her parents in Madison, Connecticut. She brought with her three children and a fourth who would be born in August 1944. (I was the second oldest.) My earliest memories are of that period. I remember the house, the barn and the animals (which play a large part in these letters). I remember leaving my father at Union Station in New Haven in late August 1944, as he went off to Camp Swift in Texas, prior to being shipped overseas with the 87thRegiment of the 10thMountain Division, in early January 1945. He would be there until late July, before being shipped back to the U.S., ostensibly for a home leave before heading to the Pacific for the planned invasion of Japan. For me, those months were filled with the joy and wonder of childhood, a place where the guns and bombs that devastated Europe, the Middle East and Asia were not heard and had no meaning.

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My mother did not often display emotion, but there were tears in her eyes when I left for Fort Dix on August 11, 1962. The United States was not at war. I was fulfilling my military obligation, in serving six months of active duty. There was little chance I would be endangered. But for her, my leaving was a reminder of a time less than two decades in the past. It took me time to realize the emotions she must have felt. Time is long when one is young, but short, as one ages. It had been only seventeen years since my father had returned from Europe on VJ Day. Memories of those years must have haunted her, as it did millions of others. During the War, people like her lived in a cocoon, absent of information—until the next letter arrived, a letter censored to remove any information as to exactly where the writer might be, or what casualties his unit may have suffered. Battles would be reported by the press, but families did not know where their loved ones were or how they had fared—if they had been wounded or killed; there were no cell phones, e-mail or instant-messaging. What no wife, mother or child wanted was a telegram or, worse, a visit from the military.

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The lives of those left at home was surreal, like an Ingmar Berman movie, with past memories appearing in mist-like conditions and with vague glimpses of a what the future might hold. A few years after my mother died, I had a chance to read through the letters my parents had written one another. My mother’s letters provided a sense of the sacrifice she made, the gaiety she showed us children, the normalcy she expressed to my father and the torment that rendered her heart, which she was unable to disguise. It was not politics or the War as a whole that consumed her; it was the personal. In an appendix to War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy wrote of the contrast between the way historians view war and artists: “…for the artist there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.” These letters show people. Footnotes have been added to provide context, to explain, for example where his regiment was and had been, and to provide color regarding people mentioned. Unlike many returning soldiers, my father did speak of some of his experiences, but he always omitted the horror and fear he had to have experienced and felt.

None of these letters say anything about the geo-politics of the time, but they do show people, as individuals – not made-up and not idealized. This book is an attempt to derive a better understanding of that time and what life was like, for those in combat and for those left at home.


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