Letters piece together U.S. wars from the trenches

By Lawrence L. Knutson
Associated Press

When author Andrew Carroll began Project Legacy, a one-person campaign to preserve as many American war letters as possible, he was deluged with urgent messages from the past.

The result is a treasure house of a book: "War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars," to be published this week by Scribner. It contains 200 previously unpublished letters from the Civil War, the two world wars, the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, the Cold War and from more recent U.S. military operations in Somalia and Bosnia.

Some are family and national treasures.

But many are neglected, stuffed by the shoebox into attics and closets in every city and town in the country. As memories and lives fade, letters that once were lifelines between soldiers at the front and families at home are often thrown into the trash.

Carroll, the editor of previous collections of historic American letters and 20th-century speeches, chose from the estimated 50,000 war letters that flowed in after syndicated columnist Abigail Van Buren described his project in a 1998 "Dear Abby" column.

Others were ferreted out of archives, libraries and private collections around the country.

There are letters from generals and privates, the famous and the obscure. To read them is a little like leaning over a soldier's shoulder on a Civil War roadside or in a World War I trench.

Some are intensely personal. Some describe horrific combat scenes. Some profess undying love. Some were written to be read only if the writer was killed. Inevitably, there are "Dear John" letters.

In one Civil War missive, a soldier husband assures his wife that he has absolutely, positively not been shot for desertion, despite a local newspaper's report to the contrary.

There are letters stained with mud and blood. A series of Civil War letters are written in blackberry juice. One letter, written after bloody fighting at Anzio in Italy, has been pierced by a bullet.

One startling letter was composed by an army sergeant on the conference table in Adolf Hitler's apartment in Munich as World War II in Europe ended. Written on Hitler's gold-embossed personal stationary, the sergeant drew a neat line through the dictator's name, then described the horrors he had just witnessed at the death camp int nearby Dachau.

In another, an Army corporal describes a nightlong vigil in September 1945 at the bedside of former Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo, suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot. American officials were anxious that Tojo recover so he could be tried and executed for war crimes. (He did, and he was.)

Carroll says this letter illustrates the point that war letters are an endangered species.

The letter did not remain in the writer's family. It was purchased for a dollar at a Davenport, Iowa, yard sale 20 years ago.

"Every day these letters are getting thrown away or lost," Carroll says. "This is a tragedy. They are the first unfiltered draft of history. To me, this is the great unknown literature of the American people."

There are also moments frozen in time, as in a December 1862 letter timed at 2 a.m. — in which nurse Clara Barton describes her foreboding in the still, moonlit hours before the disastrous assault on entrenched Confederate lines at Fredericksburg, Va.

And in a far different mood, Union soldier Charles George, describing the events of April 1865, tells his wife: "In one week, we have eaten up Lee's whole army — taking large mouthfuls every day."

George H.W. Bush, a future commander in chief but then a young Navy lieutenant, tells his parents he grew a goatee, but has just cut it off; Army 1st Lt. George McGovern, not yet the anti-war liberal of his 1972 presidential campaign, writes that he "will be more than disgusted" if Republican Tom Dewey fails to win the presidency.

There's a former president, Theodore Roosevelt, mourning his youngest son, Quentin, "the huge, laughing, gentle-hearted boy," shot down behind enemy lines in France near the end of World War I.

Speaking for many of the young men represented in this collection of letters is Union Pvt. Elijah Beeman: "Truly we know not the horrors of war until peace has fled," he wrote in April 1862. Five months later, he was killed in action.

Lawrence L. Knutson has covered the White House, Congress and Washington's history for more than 30 years.