CUSHING, Maine — World War II veteran Hugh Aaron recalled this week that mail delivery was always a time that servicemen looked forward to as way to connect to home.
“If you got mail you felt good. If you didn’t you were disappointed,” Aaron said.
Historian Andrew Carroll considers war letters, such as ones Aaron has saved from his war years, so valuable that he has made it his mission to preserve as many as possible. Carroll is the founder and director of the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University, a private university in Orange, California.
Carroll kicked off another nationwide effort Wednesday afternoon to collect and preserve more war letters when he stopped at the Cushing Public Library to meet with Aaron. The Cushing man was donating nearly 1,000 letters that he wrote and were written to him during his service in World War II from 1943 through 1945.
Aaron recalled how important it was to receive mail while overseas but acknowledged how upon his return home he didn’t think about the letters much for many years. Then, after his mother died in 1987, he was cleaning out her home in Worcester, Massachusetts, and found a carton stored in a closet that contained all the letters he had written to his parents. He also learned that while he was in the war, his parents would read his letters to family members every night.
Realizing the impact they had, Aaron gathered the letters his parents had saved and found the letters that had been written to him that he had saved and wrote a book in 1997 titled “Letters from the Good War, a Young Man’s Discovery of the World.”
Aaron served in the Pacific as a member of the Naval Construction Battalion, also known as the Seabees. His construction battalion went to locations that included New Caledonia, New Guinea, and eventually the Philippines. The Seabees would come in and rebuild things destroyed during battles.
Aaron said he always liked to write, and during the war, he wrote home every day.
The letters focused on the daily life overseas. He said he did not remember at first how much emotions were in his letters, but upon reading them again that came back to him.
One that stands out was when his battalion arrived in the village of Hollondia in the northern part of New Guinea on July 28, 1944. He said the beautiful village had been devastated.
“I tried to reconstruct what it must have been like before the war. I saw stuccoed mansions and cute thatched homes. I saw green fields, running streams, flourishing flower gardens, small children walking down the country road lined with blossoming trees that passed through the center of the village. I could see it all as if it was still there,” he said in the 1944 letter to his mother.
But what he saw in reality was a town that had endured a tremendous naval barrage.
“The weakest structures were razed and warehouses take their place. … The once green lawns were trampled into dust. A supply depot now stands next to the chapel. The streets have been widened, filled with the hustle and bustle of jeeps and trucks, kicking up swirls of choking dust. Telephone poles dotting the area, supporting the crisscrossing network of wires. Even the once clear brooks have been made into drainage ditches,” he said.
Carroll said Aaron’s donation of nearly 1,000 letters is the single largest donation of original letters written during wartime for the preservation project. The historian has been collecting and preserving such letters for 16 years and said even after this nationwide tour is completed in November, he expects to continue this effort for the rest of his life. He made Cushing his first stop in this latest campaign because of the size of Aaron’s gift.
The center director said he has been honored to meet so many veterans and their families over the years and to read their letters.
“They have almost become a family to me. They have been incredible to meet,” Carroll said, adding that he stays in touch with many of them.
The center’s letters include ones from all the country’s wars as far back as the American Revolution. Carroll talked about one that was written by a colonial soldier to a friend named Phillips who later founded what is now Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. The author of the letter survived battles throughout the American Revolution only to die in the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia.
Carroll said some of the letters also have provided some humor.
For instance, the center director heard from a veteran who found out when he returned home that censors had added material to his letters in which they asked the family to send fruitcakes and cookies. Then the censors would take the baked goods before the soldier got them and would remove references to the goods being sent.
The collection also includes emails from soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The collection of correspondences have exceeded 100,000 items, and the correspondences are being digitized and catalogued at the California center.
Carroll was editor of two books including “War Letters.”
In a review of “War Letters,” NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw said, “Andrew Carroll has given America a priceless treasure. These letters are intimate, deeply personal portraits of the courage, sacrifice and sense of duty that makes this country. They remind us that greatness is borne on the shoulders of the ordinary men and women who love their country and each other.”
Carroll and Aaron connected after the Cushing man read an article about the California man’s effort in an AARP bulletin. Carroll said he received many responses to that article.
After meeting with Aaron, Carroll went to Bremen and collected original letters from William Hornberger that were written by his father, H. Richard Hornberger, who was a captain in the Army Medical Corps during the Korean War. The surgeon wrote about his experiences in the novel M*A*S*H, which inspired the popular movie and television series.
Carroll said the letters are so valuable that he does not trust having them sent to him by the U.S. Postal Service, UPS or FedEx.
“I like to pick them up in person,” he said as he thanked Aaron for his donation.