Dearest Sweetheart
“DARLING, I hope you like this rather weird pose. This was the surprise I had for you and I do hope you like it. I love to keep you well supplied with pictures, so you won’t ever have a chance to forget me … so this photo is from me … Lots of love and millions of kisses, Pat.”
Those are the words Patricia Brim, 20, wrote to her husband, Raymond, on Valentine’s Day in 1944, with a photo of her “rather weird pose” attached.
Raymond was in the Army Air Corps, fighting the Nazis in Europe on dangerous bombing runs. A little more than a year earlier, he had gone AWOL from his air base in Wyoming for 48 hours so he could quickly marry Patricia in Utah before being sent overseas.
“My dad said a hundred times, a thousand times: ‘I swore to myself I would come home to Pat,’” said their daughter Celia Straus.
He did.
Last year, 78 years later, Straus, who lives in Washington, DC, handed her mother’s love letters over to a long-time acquaintance, historian Andrew Carroll. “These are really rare,” Carroll said. “Back then, it was mostly men writing home to their wives, so they (the wives) could keep the letters. But if the wives wrote the husbands, they (the husbands) couldn’t in many cases hold on to them.”
Collection
Carroll knows this better than anyone; he has been collecting war letters since his sophomore year of college in 1989.
His family home in DC’s Georgetown neighbourhood burnt down that year. He was upset over the loss of family memorabilia, so, perhaps to console him, an older cousin showed him a letter the cousin had sent his wife during World War II.
When Carroll tried to return the letter, the cousin told him: “Keep it. I probably would have thrown it away anyway.”
“And that was the spark,” Carroll said.
Since then, Carroll has collected more than 100000 war letters. He has letters from American conflicts from the Revolutionary War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which now come in email form). He has often picked up old letters in person, earning him the nickname “the historian who makes house calls”.
There was a book compilation of the letters, a PBS documentary, and a play that made it to the Kennedy Center. The latest iteration is a podcast, Behind the Lines, with journalist Barbara Harrison.
Love
Other than descriptions of combat, the most common subject of the letters is love.
“Everything becomes more vivid in the prism of warfare,” Carroll said.
“The letters of faith are a little more philosophical; the letters of love are a little more impassioned, because a lot of them realise this might be the last letter their spouse receives.”
There are tragic ones. During World War II, a woman named Gene Sobolewski, who was in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, sent a letter to her fiancé on the front lines:
“Dearest Sweetheart,
I didn’t write to you last night, Honey, but I guess you won’t miss one letter. You get my mail in bunches anyhow. Besides, I always write about the same subject, hundreds and thousands of books were written about it also. I’m talking about ‘love.’”
Months later, the letter was returned to her unopened with red letters on the envelope: “Deceased”.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Carroll said. “Because they weren’t married, she was not officially notified. His parents got the official notification, so this was how she found out the love of her life was gone forever.”
Sobolewski eventually married another service member and had children, but she kept the unanswered letter her entire life. Her daughter donated it to Carroll.
There are happy stories, too. Nathan Hoffman had gone on only five dates with Evelyn Giniger in New York City before he was shipped overseas during World War II. They wrote to each other every day, and because of Hoffman’s assignment as an army clerk, he was able to keep her letters. When he returned to his home town of Waco, Texas, 16 months later, she was there waiting for him. They married soon afterwards.
They were still happily married in 1999 when they donated their complete collection – more than 2 000 letters, Carroll said.
Months later, director Steven Spielberg contacted Carroll. Spielberg said he was directing a special millennium celebration show for CBS and hoped to have an elderly couple read their World War II letters onstage; might Carroll know anyone who fit the bill?
That was how the Hoffmans found themselves on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by celebrities and in front of then US President Bill Clinton, reading their sweet nothings aloud.
“My dearest Evelyn, in leaving I have only one regret – that I was unable to see you just one last time. There was so much that we didn’t get around to talking about, a great deal that I’m sure each of us would have said that now will have to wait.”
“My dear, every day I miss you a little bit more. And today, I miss you like tomorrow. The knowledge that you’re getting closer to the front makes me tremble every time I think of it. I wonder how you must feel. All I can do is pray and keep a hopeful heart.”
Nathan Hoffman died in 2005, Evelyn Hoffman in 2011. They were married for 59 years.
Preserved
For a time, Carroll rented the flat next door to his own just to store the letters. In 2013, he donated the collection to Chapman University in California, and it became the Center for American War Letters.
He was still making house calls on the centre’s behalf when the pandemic hit. Though the work has been put on hold for nearly a year, the centre is accepting submissions.
“We’ve actually seen a huge uptick in donations throughout the pandemic, and it’s because people are trapped in their homes,” Carroll said.
Straus, who works with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, has known about Carroll and his letter-collecting mission for years; they have worked together on veteran support projects.
Her parents were married for 65 years until her mother’s death in 2007. Her father died in 2019, and she inherited the old manila folder stuffed full of letters. Reading them was inspiring, she said, because the immediacy “makes me grasp the bravery of these kids”.
In honour of Valentine’s Day, Strauss shared a transcript of one her mother’s letters, written for Christmas 1943:
My darling,
This is just to try and half express what I feel – because it’s Christmas and because you’re over there and I’m here so far away from you. Of course, I’m writing it way ahead of time but the feeling is the same and always will be, dearest, for that matter.
To say that I am thinking of you, dear, is not to touch it. Christmas Eve is when it will be the worst, because all I’ll see is us last year – having our little supper and our tree – and church in the snow and all that.
We were afraid we’d be homesick and darling, I can truly say I’ve never in my life been less homesick or more happy. It was all heaven, every moment with you – loving you as I do, and knowing that I have a husband who is so wonderful and sweet and tender and loves me so terribly.
Darling, I’ve missed you terribly since you went away, but it’s nothing to how I’ll feel when you read this. I’ve tried to send a few things to help make it a better Christmas but perhaps I can promise that next year, when we’re together, we’ll have our love and happiness and the most perfect Christmas in the world.
Ray, my dearest darling, I love you. I love you with all my heart and body and soul. Nothing can ever change it. And so, darling, a Merry Christmas and God keep you always, Your own,
Pat