Andrew Carroll (ed.) - War letters: extraordinary correspondence from American wars

PRAISE FOR ANDREW CARROLLS WAR LETTERS

Andrew Carroll has given America a priceless treasure. These letters are intimate, deeply personal portraits of the courage, sacrifice, and sense of duty that made this country.

Tom Brokaw

These war letters are more deeply moving, more revelatory, and more powerful than any dispatch from the front. Its the truly felt history of what war is all about.

Studs Terkel

In the sweep of history, the experience of the lone soldier is often lost, but in this breathtaking collection the individual voices of the men and women who have served this nation come to life with a power and an eloquence that is both gripping and unforgettable. I can think of no better way to understand the horrors of war than to read the words of those who have been caught in its grasp, and these extraordinary letters offer some of the most dramatic eyewitness accounts of war imaginable.

Andrew Carroll has assembled a collection of previously unpublished letters that run the gamut of wartime emotion. An excellent compilation that I enjoyed reading very muchand believe you will, too.

Stephen E. Ambrose

It was a letter that moved me to write Flags of Our Fathers. A letter my dad wrote four days after he helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. My father honored his country. And Andrew Carroll honors us all with his gift to the nation of the superb War Letters.

John Glenn

[T]he power of these voices from various fronts is undeniable, and the sentiments and observations they record have a compelling immediacy.

James Bradley, son of flag-raiser Doc Bradley

This wonderful collection of war correspondence is a treasure. For scholars, a wealth of primary-source material is provided here. General readers will find it an informative and deeply moving reading experience.

Publishers Weekly

Booklist

W AR L ETTERS

Letter by Pvt. John P. McGrath, writing from Anzio, Italy, on April 25, 1944, to his high school friend Dick Treanor. A bullet ripped through the unmailed letter, which McGrath was carrying in his backpack. McGrath himself was unharmed.

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Copyright 2001 by Andrew Carroll

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First Scribner trade paperback edition 2005

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Text set in Bembo

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2001020574

ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-1006-9
ISBN-10: 0-7434-1006-8
eISBN: 978-1-439-10731-7

Permissions appear on page 499.

All of the authors earnings, minus limited expenses incurred in the preparation and support of the book, will be donated to nonprofit organizations, memorials, and institutions, particularly those working to honor and remember the men and women who have served this nation in wartime.

In memory of my uncle F RANK W. H ARTMANN (1920-1999) and my godfather J ONATHAN H. J ACK L ASLEY (1910-2001), two of the most honorable veterans I have ever known.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, in a speech to the Grand Army of the Republic Convention, August 11, 1880

Like most great old soldiers, General Sherman knew whereof he spoke in his gut hatred for war: Sixteen years before he made his starkly poignant appeal to future generations, he had been supreme commander of the Union army in the West, and it was he who had slashed and burned a fiery swath across Georgia, sacked Atlanta, and marched on to the sea with an indomitable brutality that sealed the triumph of the North in the U.S. Civil War.

But how it must have pained him to know what he had done, to have seen the blood spilled and the devastation wrought at his own orders; how he must have ached, as he revealed to those boys a decade and a half later, that posterity should grasp, and heed, his heart-felt horror of war.

Indeed, Sherman stands in a long line of military leaders whose battle scars would yield a profound understanding of human belligerence and all its attendant atrocities. And the most important thing experience teaches these thinking warriorsfrom fifth century B.C. Greek naval commander-turned-historian Thucydides on down the millenniais the ancient truth philosopher George Santayana articulated so well at the beginning of the twentieth century: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.