A collection of letters written by deployed service members at Chapman University’s Center for American War Letters beautifully portrays how past generations captured the human spirit, sometimes in a writing style that sounds like classic Hemingway.
Founded by Andrew Carroll, the collection archives and preserves more than 200,000 letters that date from the Revolutionary War to the present day.
“There is something about your holding a letter that someone back in 1775 wrote back in the Revolution,” Carroll told CBS Eye on Veterans. “I almost get tingles when I look at these.”
Donated by the letter writers themselves or their families, some are handwritten, while others are emails. Some are written in cursive, while others include cartoon sketches.
Carroll said one of the most extraordinary letters in the collection was written on May 1, 1945. on Adolph Hitler’s gold-embossed personal stationery. The letter was written by an American staff sergeant who was in Munich at a base camp where Nazis were being rounded up at the end of World War II.
“They walked through one part of the complex and it was more luxurious than any they had ever seen and Horace Everetts, the staff sergeant, said we’ve just walked into Adolph Hitler’s private Munich residence,” he said.
Everetts went up to Hitler’s desk, noticed a stack of Hitler’s stationery and began writing a letter to his parents. The letter was eventually authenticated at the Holocaust Museum thanks in part to the postmark on the envelope it was sent in.
Carroll had no interest in either history or the military, until 35 years ago when his home in Washington, D.C. burned to the ground, destroying everything. Carroll, a college sophomore at the time, said the blaze destroyed family letters, which led him to become interested in preserving history. The effort got a boost in 1998 when Dear Abby wrote a column on Veterans Day that encouraged service members and their families to save the letters they wrote to each other.
“There’s something about the experience of war, it makes letters that much more intense because the stakes are higher,” Carroll said.
American Army nurse Maude Fisher served in France during World War I and wrote a letter on Nov. 29, 1918, to the mother of a soldier who passed away due to the Spanish Flu after the war.
In the letter, Fisher described the soldier’s final resting place in a cemetery in Commercy, France and enclosed leaves which had fallen near the site.
“The country will always honor your boy because he gave his life for it,” Fisher wrote. “And it will also love and honor you for the gift of your boy. Be assured the sacrifice is not in vain and the world is better for it.”
While on board a ship off the coast of the Philippines, Navy Ensign Charles Sweeny wrote a Christmas letter in 1944 to his cousin Esther describing injured American servicemen being brought aboard his ship as Christmas dinner was being prepared. He described the bloodied torn uniforms of those who were physically injured and the moral injury of others.
“As he walked past us, the assisting sailor said shell shock, and we noticed the vacant look in the soldier’s eyes, which were widened by recent horror,” Sweeny wrote.
Carroll also shared a letter written by Frank Conwell, an American soldier stationed on Europe’s Western Front in February of 1945.
In the letter, he described the weather – cold and snowy, which he said sparked childhood memories of building snowmen, raucous snowball fights and sledding on Flexible Flyers.
“There’s a lot of snow on the western front these days and the country looks like a Christmas card,” he wrote. “Snow lies smooth on the hillsides, but the Flexible Flyers have turned into tanks. The snowmen are now the German enemy. The snowballs are grenades.”
Carroll also shared one of his favorite letters of all time – written by Navy and World War II veteran William Lederer, who became an author after the war. Written to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral D.L. McDonald in the early 1960s, the letter describes what happened at a French restaurant Lederer and his family stumbled into on Christmas Eve.
In the letter, Lederer wrote everything had gone wrong for the five days and the family had little Christmas spirit. He said that matched the mood of the sparsely decorated restaurant.
“The minute they walk in, it just felt like utter misery,” Lederer wrote.
Only five of its tables were occupied, including one where an American sailor sat alone. A piano player was half-heartedly playing music when an old French woman came in and tried to unsuccessfully sell some flowers.
Turning to the piano player, the woman said, “It’s Christmas Eve and all I have is soup to eat.”
“The young American sailor finished his meal and got up to leave,” Lederer continued. “Putting on his coat, he went over to the flower woman, Happy Christmas he said, smiling and picking up two flowers.”
The sailor bought two flowers, which the woman told him would cost two francs. Instead, he gave her a 20 franc note, telling her to keep it. The sailor then approached Lederer’s table, asking for permission to present the flowers to his beautiful daughter.
“In one motion, he gave my wife the flowers, wished us a Merry Christmas and departed,” wrote Lederer.
Throughout that exchange, the restaurant had been silent. Everyone had been watching the sailor.
“A few seconds later, Christmas exploded throughout the restaurant,” Lederer wrote. “The old flower woman jumped up, waving the twenty franc note, shouting to the piano player, Joseph my Christmas present. You shall have half, so you too can have a feast.”
Joseph began playing music and those inside the restaurant began singing. Lederer said his wife looked like she was 20 years younger.
“A few hours earlier, 18 individuals had been spending a miserable evening,” the letter continues. “It ended up the very best Christmas Eve we’ve ever experienced.
“As the top man in the Navy, you should know about the very special gift that the US Navy gave to my family, to me and the other people in that restaurant because of your young sailor in that restaurant. He gave us Christmas.”
Carroll said the letter shows the fundamental decency of American service members.
“This is the heart and soul of American military personnel, wanting to serve, wanting to make a difference,” he said.
Carroll calls the letters the world’s great undiscovered literature.
“They are really works of art,” he said.
Carroll said the center has a goal to get a quarter of a million letters by 2026, the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Among its most urgent missions is reaching out to veterans of the Global War on Terror to urge them to donate both letters and emails.
“Even to write something now that was a memory, we’d very much include that in our collection, we call them post-war letters,” he said. “We absolutely want this generation to have their voices and stories recorded for posterity. We need to know what they wrote.”
To learn more about the letter or to preserve your own family mementos, visit here.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.
Reach Phil Briggs at Phil@connectingvets.com.