We typed and printed all of the letters from my uncle who flew a B-26 in Europe. He sent one to my grandmother virtually weekly from October 1942 through May 1945. A truly great report on the life of a pilot.
I have a box about the size of two shoe-boxes with my dad’s letters to my mom. He was on a small mine sweeper - I think in our harbors and sweeping them for any enemy mines that they might sneek in. So pretty safe. He never saw any action, but they were always itching to come across a submarine.
My daughter has that on her list of things to do - scan them in and sort them by date. I imagine that will never happen!
We read them once-in-awhile. Pretty mundane. Although he did write about a Marine that came on board. He was the brother of one of his guys on the ship. The marine spent the night, and was commenting on what a cushy job they had to spend the war on a cruise ship. (My dad knew he was lucky too.)
The marine had just come in from a battle, and was heading out the following day to another battle. “I’m sure you’ll hear about it in the news in a little while.”
I looked up a timeline - the letter was sent a little bit before the invasion of Tarawa where we lost so many men. I wondered how that marine fared.
I remember a time, when I was about seven, sitting at his kitchen table after lunch. My brother and I were astonished and amazed when he pulled the majority of his teeth out of his mouth to clean them. We had never seen dentures before. He said he had lost them in the War. Nothing so gallant as combat, but instead it came from losing a bet. He was an officer in the mounted engineers and had bet his buddies he could jump a trench on his horse. He said he still came out better than the horse, which broke its leg.
All the animal lovers can slam him for getting that horse killed, but I remember this quiet, little old man, with a big denturey grin, that at one time must have been quite the hell raiser.