At Amherst Museum, a talk on ‘Soldiers Write Home‘
By Paula Voell NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 07/01/08 9:02 AM
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- Jean Neff, curator of education at the Amherst Museum, looks through the scrapbook of soldier Carl Unger.
As Jean Neff reads through these letters, she’s very aware that she holds history in her hands. These aging pieces of paper, the letters that soldiers wrote home, reflect something of the country’s history, but mostly they record what they’d seen, heard and experienced.
What Neff has learned, as she pores over original letters and those written about in books, is that soldiers all write about the same things: the food, the weather, guarded reports from the front, their hunger for news from home, requests for warm clothing, descriptions of what they’ll do when they get home, and a reassurance that they are fine, just fine.
“What the soldiers always, always, do is to make sure they don’t worry their family,” said Neff, curator of education at the Amherst Museum, who will present a lecture there on “Soldiers Write Home” at 7 p. m. July 16.
As one example, she cites a letter written by Sgt. Carl Unger, a World War II veteran who wrote frequently to his mother and sister in Eggertsville.
Though he’s writing from a hospital bed, he downplays his injury, calling it a “slight flesh wound.” “I wouldn’t even have bothered writing about it, but I’ll be getting a Purple Heart and you’d be notified. Lots of times they say you were severely wounded and you were just scratched,” he wrote.
In fact, Unger spent several weeks in the hospital recuperating from a rather sizable wound. “He has a scar on his upper arm that’s about seven inches long,” said his niece, Virginia Coon, who facilitated the donation of her uncle’s letters to the museum. “He freely talks about the war, but never about being wounded,” she said.
Unger, who posted his letters using 6-cent air mail stamps, was consistently reassuring about his situation.
“His mother was known as a worrier,” said Coon.
In one letter, he compared the weather to a Buffalo winter, requiring four blankets and woolen underwear. “It could be worse,” he writes. “It’s better than I expected.”
When the letters arrived, Unger’s sister faithfully pasted them into a scrapbook, interspersed with newspaper stories and black-and-white photos of Unger and fellow soldiers.
At this point, with Unger 86 years old and living in a nursing home, family members weren’t sure what to do with the letters until Coon, who is a museum docent, had a conversation with Neff.
“She told me she didn’t have any letters from World War II,” said Coon, who then sought her uncle’s permission to turn them over.
“He was delighted to donate them,” said Coon. From the perspective of a historical museum, they are considered “marvelous treasures,” Neff said.
A last letter
In surveying letters, it becomes clear that servicemen will write whenever and wherever they can. Some letters were written as a sailor sat on a ship deck, some while a soldier crouched in a foxhole lit by candlelight. They were responding to letters that may have taken weeks to get to them, especially if they were on the front lines.
One of the most poignant letters that Neff has come across was written by a Civil War soldier on his deathbed, in a scribble far different from his typically beautiful penmanship. “I can hardly get through it when I read it,” said Neff.
Written in 1863 by James Markel of Candor, it reads:
“My dear Father, Mother, Sisters and Brothers,
“I am here on the battlefield, wounded in two places, once through the bowels and once in the left shoulder and must die within 24 hours. The battle rages terrible, but my dears I die for my country and I pray to God to take me to that house in heaven where I will meet you all.
Goodbye forever, James.”
At her lecture, Neff will touch briefly on letters from previous wars, but will focus mainly on Unger’s as well as those of 2nd Lieutenant Kenneth Bolton Thurstone, who fought in World War I and was also from Western New York.
“I chose those two because they are so complete and so powerful,” said Neff.
The Thurstone collection is particularly engaging because it contains two sets of letters: one written to his parents and one to his girlfriend, Harriet Jackson, nicknamed “Harry.”
“He’s more honest and frank with his parents,” Neff said, “and more cautious with his girlfriend.”
Writing in pencil, Thurstone begins one letter with the heading “8th Day at Sea.”
“So far I have not been anywheres near sea sick and don’t expect to be,” he writes, explaining that he spends six to eight hours a day in the crow’s nest with his eyes glued to the water.
“One’s sleep is irregular. But you can bet I sure like this job. Can you imagine me a landsman climbing 100 feet above the water with the old boat pitching?”
As the war progresses, his tone remains positive as he describes wearing a steel helmet and gas mask and remaining alert for the next shelling, intimating that he is exactly where he wants to be. “I wouldn’t have traded my boots for any of theirs,” he writes.
After being sleep deprived, not able to bathe, being bit by “cooties,” he knows exactly what he wants to do when he gets home: “I’ll wash in warm water and drink cold water.”
With the war drawing to a close, Thurstone seems to flag. “It makes a fellow lonesome as the dickens, with nothing to do for pleasure but read ... waiting is very tedious and lonesome,” he writes.
Neff said that when she read the letters Thurstone had written to his girlfriend, she became so involved that she found herself rooting for him.
“The letters were so sweet and touching, I kept saying ‘I hope he makes it,’” she said. In fact, she met Thurstone’s son, when he visited from his home in the Midwest, and learned that Thurstone returned safely and married the girl he had written to all through the war.
“He came home and had a wonderful life,” said Neff.
