Dear Mom

DEAR MOM: A COLLECTION OF LETTERS TO AND FROM A SOLDIER DURING WWII

Edited by Victoria Otto Franzese

Introduction

I first ran across this cache of almost 250 letters in 1974 when my family moved across our town, Newburyport, MA, into my grandmother’s house. She was well into her eighties at that time and could no longer care for the nineteen-room house and three acres of land, her home for 30 years, by herself. Grandma moved into a small apartment fashioned out of the rooms on one side of the house, and my parents, three siblings, and I moved into the main part of the house.

My family spent the bulk of that summer removing wallpaper, painting, and waxing floors. We also sorted through the items that Grandma had left in the third floor storerooms. Somewhere among my grandfather’s drafting supplies and landscaping books, and my grandmother’s crewel yarn, we stumbled across envelopes written in my dad’s neat, distinctive handwriting. I sat down and read through a big batch of letters in a single afternoon. My father, Victor Otto, had written these letters to his mom as he recuperated at Walter Reade Medical Center in the waning days of World War II. I got a kick out of envisioning my dad as a young man, writing about popular songs and attempting to date the pretty girls.

Like many kids, I knew very little about my father’s life before he had become a parent, and other than providing some entertainment for an hour or so, as well as a chance to tease my dad by quoting from the letters from time to time, the letters didn’t hold my interest for long. In no time, they were packed back up and returned to storage, where they sat for another 30 years until I became interested in helping my dad write about his experiences during the war.

Before I started the memoir project that became the book Close Call: The Story of a World War II POW (currently a work-in-progress), I didn’t know much about my dad’s World War II service. Sure I knew that he had been wounded — the scar on his arm and missing thumb were testament to that — and he occasionally told funny stories about being on the run in Italy, but generally my dad kept mum about what he did during the war. Although the most exciting portions of my dad’s time in the service — the six months he was on the run as an escaped POW in and around Florence, desperately trying to avoid the attention of the local Fascists and Nazis as he fought with the Italian Partisans and tried to make his way back across to the Allied line — are not recorded in the correspondence between my dad and his family and friends, these letters put that experience into context, describing the training Dad received prior to his short time on the Anzio battlefield, as well as his time in the hospital recovering the injuries he sustained while on the run.

I have also included some of the letters Dad received while he was in the service. These help round out the picture of his life at the time, describing as they do, his family, friends and the home life he was missing. One interesting note: these letters written to Dad while he was MIA were not delivered to him until well after he had returned to the states and had seen his family. For that reason, some were never opened until I read them almost 70 years after they had been written. All this time, they had remained signed, sealed and saved, allowing me — and now you — to gain a first-hand perspective of what this time period was like.

A few notes about the process that led Dad into the army. He had just turned 19 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Although he worked for a manufacturer that was considered critical to the war effort, and therefore he had several deferments, he ultimately signed up and was inducted at Fort Devens. His first day in the army was June 15, 1943, which was Father’s Day. Being a good son, he sent his dad a card. I haven’t included that, but I have transcribed every subsequent letter and intend to post them roughly on the anniversary of the day they were written 77 years ago.