World War II Letters: The Women Who Stayed Behind
My mothers and her peers called themselves “war widows,” the wives, fiancées, and girlfriends of World War II soldiers. They worked long hours, visited each other, went to movies, gossiped on the phone, played cards, listened to radio, fixed each other’s hair, and shopped for gifts and necessities amidst scarcity. I promised my mother that after she was gone I would read the love letters she wrote to my father in 1943 when he was stationed in Alexandra, Louisiana. I am glad that I finally honored that pledge.
Mom’s letters were a window into her as a young woman as well as a picture of what life was like in 1943. They were chatty and filled with local gossip, ending with proclamations of love. During this period, Mom spend much of her free time with her older sister Mickey, whose fiancée had also been drafted. She often wrote about buying presents for both Dad’s family and hers and going out with her friends on weekends to keep busy. She tried to save money, but a constant refrain in her letters was “I just don’t know where my money goes to.”
I learned quite a bit about my mother through reading her letters. For one, she was a terrible speller (reck, devel, blood donnor), a trait she passed on to me. That didn’t deter her from writing to Dad every day, and sometimes twice a day. She also corresponded with family in Cleveland, Ohio and Bridgeport, Connecticut, as well as friends who were in the army. One of her biggest issues was the scarcity of stationery and ink. She wrote often about movies she saw and hairstyles she and her sister were trying. She described housework, ironing, cleaning closets, baking pies, entertaining hordes of company, and struggling with unreliable public transportation.
My mother was always an optimist. Thus, it was no surprise that she wrote constant pep talks to my father, who was deeply depressed and struggling to fit into army life. Whenever she felt “down” or lonely, she thought about future happiness, and she counseled him to do the same. She was certain the war would end soon and even wrote “God bless the Russians.” In one of her longer lectures to my father, she told him,
“I can hear you saying that as long as we’re together everything will be fine. Life isn’t as romantic as all that, honey. There will be a time when we will take each other for granted and we shall have our little differences also…You also say, dear, that you have no purpose or ambition in your particular company. Since you are unable to transfer into something else, why not make some sort of a purpose…and then ambition will follow…You can make your army life miserable or livable.”
She told him to make the best of his circumstances, even if he couldn’t better his situation. Then, she wrote him a second letter apologizing for what she said. Mom was always a pleaser, fearful of offending people. And she was always Dad’s greatest fan, describing him as a genius and supporting him through all of the turmoil of his army service.
My mother was also incredibly naïve. She couldn’t write out “swear words,” instead saying “he — ” or “da — .” She called underwear “unmentionables” and worried about keeping her “girlish figure.” Bambi was her idea of a pretty good movie. She also believed, “If you wish hard for something, it’s bound to come true.” When Dad sent her all of his personal belongings prior to September maneuvers, she was quite embarrassed to find nude girly magazines. She claimed a friend of her older sister told her the facts of life, which shocked her.
Many of my mother’s letters were filled with her fantasy of having a double wedding with her sister Mickey. Despite how difficult this would have been to pull off logistically, Mom battled all of the uncertainty in life during the war. Ever the Pollyanna, she declared,
“You say it’s the uncertainty of everything that gets you down. Don’t you see — life is uncertain! Wouldn’t it be terrible if we knew exactly what was going to happen the next minute? Life would be very uninteresting.”
Because Mom’s letters were filled with the minutia of daily life in 1943, I got a good sense of what these “war widows” endured. She described rationing, which limited her to two pairs of shoes. Everyday items were in short supply. She wrote about blackouts, curfews, and the race riots that erupted in June of 1943 in Detroit. I doubt she understood the underlying causes of these riots. While she was appalled by “colored only” signs by drinking fountains and restrooms in Alexandria, Louisiana when she visited my father in April, she told Dad that,
“It’s the real thing, only worse than you think. My dad closed his store at 4:30 pm as the rioters were already shooting in the parking lot across the street from P. Krut Tailor…On our way to work this morning…burglar alarms were sounding off and every store window was smashed…I had no idea how terrible the rioting was for I decided to go to my dad’s store after work. Luckily Mick went there earlier and made him go home. It is actually dangerous to walk the streets…If you ask me I think it’s all a matter of sabotage and whoever started this whole business should be shot.”
My mother didn’t understand the underlying causes of the riots. Black Detroiters lacked housing and had to live in overcrowded and deplorable conditions. Most of them were crammed into Paradise Valley on the east side of the city. When construction workers tried to build a housing project in a white neighborhood, a mob burned a cross and blocked their arrival. White Detroiters also slowed down factories to protest having to work with African Americans. All of this tension boiled over on June 20, 1943 in racially motivated fights that broke out on Belle Island. Riots fueled by rumors resulted in violence and President Roosevelt had to send in 6,000 army troops to restore peace. Twenty-five black Detroiters were killed, 17 by the police, along with nine white citizens, and there was two million dollars in property damage.
Mom’s assessment was,
“War, curfew, strikes, riots — Who would ever think that these things would be as alive and real as you or I? I guess our generation will thoroughly experience and know the true bitter facts of life before we’re through with this whole darn business.”
As it turned out, Mom got her formal wedding pretty much when she wanted. Dad received his honorable discharge in October due to medical and emotional issues, and they were married a little over three months later. Looking at the World War II experience from the perspective of my mother and the other women left behind gave me insight into their lives in 1943. Beyond that, it reinforced the stability of my mother’s personality over time. To her last day on earth, she remained family-centered, loyal, loving, naïve, and above all (to borrow from South Pacific by Rogers and Hammerstein) a cockeyed optimist.
My mother ended many of her letters BBDCYK, which stood for “Bye-bye dear, consider yourself kissed.” I’m missing her as I write this. Mom, BBDCYK.
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