What to do with those letters…

Last week I came across a number of old letters written to me from my three older brothers who served in various theaters of war during World War II.

They were written in the 1940s, some nearly 80 years ago.

The question I am facing is, do I toss them or hang on to them?

So, I settled in for a trip down memory lane and decided to re-read them.

My three brothers were Richard, who was drafted and served in the army; David, who was drafted and served in the air force; and Robert, who volunteered in the navy when he was 17.

I have several letters from each of them.

No military secrets shared, just things that families discuss.

Universal in all three cases were questions of how our mother and father were doing, and the importance of getting letters from home.

I was in my early teens at the time and must have written a lot of letters to them.

Richard was in a position with the MP military guard and escorted Italian prisoners from Africa to camps in the southern part of the United States. He was given furlough then and came home for a brief visit before returning overseas.

He told us that he would be going to England before heading into Europe.

So I wasn’t surprised when at the top of his next letter it said “somewhere in England.”

I was surprised that the censors, who were good at marking and cutting up parts of letters, didn’t do so in this case.

My next brother, David, was sent to Clovis, New Mexico for training. I received several letters from him from there.

He ended up with MacArthur’s air force division and did some island hopping before ending up in Japan. He was onboard when the Japanese signed the surrender agreement.

My other brother was on a small ship that was at Iwo, Okinawa and later in Tokyo harbor.

But not much about those campaigns in the letters.

My brothers David and Robert got together on board Robert’s ship in Tokyo harbor and spent a brief time together. This news came later when they returned home after the war.

A family friend was the telegraph operator and received the news of war injuries and killed-in-action reports and had the duty to inform families of their losses. People just didn’t like getting telegrams in those days.

I re-read all the letters I kept, a long journey to take in a little over an hour.

I am still stuck with the question of where do I go from here? I doubt if anyone in the family would care about the letters; there is no historic significance to them, except perhaps to me.

I had mentioned to one brother that I couldn’t wait until I turned 18 and could enlist.

The return advice was to think twice about that.