Letters from World War II (1)
Part I: Letters Found
Last week marked the eightieth anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a shocking turn in the final weeks of the deadliest war in human history. With its expanded use of military technology, that war claimed the lives of somewhere between 70 and 85 million people — the vast majority of whom were civilians. No war was more costly or more dramatic in fundamentally changing the ways in which people lived and died.
The Second World War had a profound impact on my family. From countless conversations that I’d had over the years with my parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends, I knew that the war experience had been brutal on so many levels, both at home and abroad. I knew that some had paid the ultimate price in key battles of that war, while others returned home to families that were changed forever. I had even formally interviewed one of my uncles for a school project that illuminated the difficulties of military service—difficulties faced not only on the field of battle but in the aftermath, as postwar traumatic stress altered the quality of life and of life’s relationships.
And yet, nothing quite prepared me for the education I’d receive upon discovering and reading scores of letters, which my mother had saved, written during the war — transporting me back to a time and place that enabled me to feel the daily trials and tribulations of a generation in ways that I could never have imagined.
A Remarkable Discovery
When my sister Elizabeth Sciabarra died in November 2022, I was faced with the enormous task of sorting through several lifetimes of family stuff — “stuff” defined broadly as clothes, closets, cabinets, and collectibles. I must have trashed or donated over five tons of stuff, and that’s not an exaggeration. The downsizing took nearly two years and enabled me to move into a new apartment clutter-free.
One of the most remarkable consequences of downsizing was my discovery of about a hundred letters that my mother, Ann Sciabarra, had saved — communications to and from relatives and family friends written during World War II.
This modest selection of letters pales in comparison to the collection of over 200,000 communications that historian Andrew Carroll amassed over many years of archiving war correspondence going back to the American Revolution. Author of Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters, Carroll is the founding director of the Center for American War Letters and the Legacy Project, “an all-volunteer initiative to honor veterans, active-duty troops, and their family members by preserving their wartime correspondences.”
I marvel at the breadth and depth of Carroll’s research given that it took me some time to organize a mere hundred letters. As I packed for my move, I made sure to put all those letters into a single file box, to be sorted and read later. Knowing that we were headed toward the eightieth anniversary of the end of that terrible global conflict, I was intent on publishing my family’s correspondence as part of a series, “Letters from World War II.” I sorted them first by name and then, for each of the six people whom I identified, I organized them chronologically to create the semblance of a given individual’s timeline.
Unfortunately, anyone whom I could have asked to provide additional information about these individuals is now dead. I knew three of them personally; they were my uncles. Of the other three whom I never met, one was a family friend, another was a cousin, and the last was an uncle who died in combat. Doing the requisite biographical research for each person would have made this a much more robust endeavor. That worthwhile project awaits.
For now, however, I have decided to publish lengthy transcriptions and commentary based almost purely on the letters themselves. I will provide whatever biographical or historical details I can, but for the most part, my intention here is to give voice to these people through their own words. I have included excerpts relevant to the war experience, leaving out much of the family drama that sometimes preoccupied the correspondents. I could not possibly recreate the complex context that informed some of the discussions of relationships, marriages, squabbles, birthdays, and tragedies of people from the 1940s whom I never met and whose names weren’t even remotely familiar to me. In some isolated instances, it was necessary for me to correct some misspelled words so that readers could properly grasp the meaning of a few sentences. I have not edited any of the excerpts for content, no matter how raw or ‘politically incorrect’ some of that content might be to twenty-first century readers.
These letters speak to a certain moment in history. They reflect the thoughts of members of the so-called “greatest generation,” a term popularized in the title of a 1998 book by Tom Brokaw. It was a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, suffering its severe deprivations and answering a ‘call to duty’ as the dark clouds of war consumed the entire world. It is not the purpose of this series to debate the causes or consequences of that Depression, that War, or the politics of that time. While the larger context cannot be ignored given its impact on the correspondents whose letters are the subject of this series, my focus here is on the individuals themselves, their personal interrelationships, and how they processed the whirlwind of events — what they often called “this damn mess” — that consumed them.
On the nature of war, however, I found this observation from an unlikely source, to ring true. In the book, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Kim Paffenroth writes: “As a bumper sticker I just saw proclaimed, ‘You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.’ The most one can hope for with wars … is to make the best of a bad situation and to emerge with the least number of physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual scars possible” (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2006, p. 67)
Many of these letters were written under the strain of wartime experiences that left profoundly deep scars in their wake. These experiences are well outside my frame of reference. I would never even think of judging any individual herein for what they wrote. In many cases, because of the constraints of military censorship, I couldn’t know for sure the precise backdrop that informed the style or the substance of what was being conveyed by the correspondents. But what was written was so powerful that uncovering the full details of the experiences seemed irrelevant. The letters could be moving, joyful — and horrifying.
If anyone out there is a surviving relative of any of the folks identified in these installments, I trust that they will be touched by the words herein. The fears and foibles, volatility, patience, fortitude, and hope conveyed in these letters are a testament to the authenticity of those who wrote them in the face of war’s brutality. These letters honor not only the memory of their authors but also their generation, which lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in human history.
This series will conclude on September 2, 2025, to mark the eightieth anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
As an historical footnote, Emperor Hirohito’s announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender was broadcast on August 15, 1945, just days after the atomic bombings. But even the signed instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945 wasn’t officially acknowledged by the United States as the end of the war. President Harry Truman declared the cessation of all hostilities on December 31, 1946, to allow for the continued U.S. occupation of Japan and Germany and the conclusion of a series of War Crimes Trials. Alas, though war crimes trials ended in Germany in 1946, it wasn’t until 1948 that the International Military Tribune for the Far East adjourned. Moreover, the U.S. occupation of Japan lasted until April 28, 1952. The situation in Germany was even more complex, given its joint occupation by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France until the establishment of West Germany in May 1949 and East Germany in October of that year. By then, of course, the Cold War was well underway.
In the Coming Weeks …
Every Tuesday through September 2, I will post another installment in this weekly series. We will learn about a man who yearned to battle fascism at home and abroad; two brothers, who fought in Germany and Italy, respectively, with vastly different fates; and three men whose lives were intertwined as they faced Japanese military forces in the Pacific. And we will confront the thoughts and feelings of the people they left behind — the mothers, siblings, wives, and friends, who waited patiently for each letter, spiraling into despair every time one showed back up in their mailboxes, marked “Missing” or “Undeliverable as Addressed” or “Returned to Sender by Direction of the War Department.”
In my next installment, I will focus on the experiences of Frank J. Rubino, married to my mother’s sister Joan, who fought gallantly in the European theater of the Second World War.
Series Installments
Part I: Letters Found (August 12, 2025)
Part II: Frank J. Rubino (August 19, 2025)
Part III: George & Charlie (August 26, 2025)
Part IV: The Navy Boys (September 2, 2025)
