NATION/WORLD ON PEARL HARBOR DAY: A FAMILY’S WAR STORY
Handwritten correspondence traces three sons’ service, from Japanese attack in Hawaii to likely PTSD diagnosis
MESA, ARIZ.» The storage unit’s corrugated metal door slid upward, revealing 100 square feet of mostly empty space. Not very promising, thought Joe Alosi, a businessman who bid on units, sight unseen, when tenants stopped paying the rent. Several plastic bins sat in the middle of the floor. Alosi peeled off the first lid.
Inside, tightly packed, were rows of envelopes. Alosi opened one, and another, and another. The Marine Corps veteran felt a slight chill. The mostly handwritten letters, on tissue-thin paper, dated to World War II and were penned mostly by the members of the Eyde family of Rockford, Ill. Three brothers were in the military: one in the Marine Corps, one in the Army and one in the Army Air Forces.
There were hundreds of letters, stretching over four years of war and beyond. They captured the horrors of combat, offered warm reminiscences of childhood and exchanges about topics from the movie “Casablanca” to the brothers’ beloved Chicago Cubs. The brothers also used racist and pejorative language, including in their descriptions of the Japanese and Germans.
Alosi wondered how such an intimate and gripping collection had ended up in a storage locker, whether any of the brothers had children, if there was anyone left who would care to see them.
“I’ve seen multiple times the way people leave things, you know?” Alosi said. “And when they leave them in a certain way, it’s like they don’t plan on coming back.”
What remained was the story contained in the letters.
The war begins
“We have been called out on air raid alarms the last few days, but you know as much about what was happening as I do, the radio is the only dope we get as well as you about them Japs and Nasty Germans. Bastards are what they are, raiding without warnings, sneaking up at night and such wrong methods of a clean fight.” — Frank Eyde, in a letter home, Dec. 10, 1941.
Lorentz Eyde and Margaret Larsen separately came to the United States from Norway and married in Rockford in 1908. He was a cabinetmaker, she a homemaker, and they settled in a small three-bedroom home on tree-lined Fremont Street.
Frank, the eldest child, graduated from Rockford Central High School in 1933. Frank had a wide smile and thick, dark hair, and worked as a traveling soap salesman for Procter & Gamble. Frank enlisted as a Marine in October 1939 at age 26, shortly after Germany invaded Poland.
Two years later, Frank’s younger brother, Ralph, quit his factory job at George D. Roper Corp. to enlist as an Army infantryman at age 23.
In a stroke of good luck, both brothers were stationed in California — Frank with the 2nd Marine Division’s 2nd Tank Battalion at San Diego’s Camp Elliott and Ralph with the 32nd Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, a sprawling installation near Monterey.
Conflict in Europe and Asia seemed far away. “All this falseness of war, it’s hooey!” Frank wrote home in November 1941. He had just been to Los Angeles and spotted Hollywood stars Margaret Lindsay, Betty Grable and Claire Trevor. “Could have dated your choice if I had the dough, say me,” he boasted.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. U.S. troops up and down the California coastline began pulling patrols to watch for enemy bombers, as well as preparing to deploy to the Pacific. An attack on the mainland seemed entirely possible.
“No telling when I’ll go home now,” Ralph wrote to his brother John, the youngest sibling, on Dec. 18. “Won’t even get Christmas off. Stood five and a half hours of straight guard last night. Shoot anyone suspicious lurking around in wee hours.”
Frank described the changes in San Diego: “All the shops are putting black paper on their windows and when the alarm goes, all lights will have to go out except those on the inside that can’t be seen from the street,” he wrote four days after the attack. “There is talk of 4,000 Japs organizing
along the Mexican border.”
In Rockford, the other two brothers — Sanford, the second-oldest, and John — considered what they might do in the military. Sanford, 26 when the war began, worked at the Woodward Governor factory as a carpenter. He was rejected by the military: Doctors declared him 4F.
The Battle of Tulagi
“What I saw I will never forget. I was on a guncrew that shot down a Jap bomber coming right at us about 20 feet off the water and about 25 feet from our boat. In all, our ship shot down five bombers coming right close to the ship, trying to crash into it.” — Frank Eyde, in a letter home in summer 1942.
Frank became a section chief for an intelligence unit in 2nd Tank Battalion, overseeing 18 men. He told his father in a letter home in May 1942 that he had learned how to do jobs from changing the treads on a tank to using a 37mm antitank gun that was pulled by a Jeep.
“Wherever I am, I know how to take care of myself and you know my speed, so watch them babies fall when I get that gun working,” Frank wrote.
Frank’s unit sailed to the Solomon Islands and was deployed to Tulagi, where hundreds of Japanese soldiers fought to the death on a strip of land about 3 miles long and a half-mile wide.
“High bombers overhead dropping eggs all around us,” Frank wrote home in the summer of 1942. “At night a real battle was on. I saw tracers blast from our ships ... heavy fires all around. We can’t talk about the losses of the war, so I guess all I can say is we won the battle. It was sure a 4th of July and it happened eight months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
In February 1943 Frank contracted malaria and jaundice, and the Marines sent him home.
Ralph is wounded
“As long as you know now that it was only a slight head wound + nothing more it’s OK by me. It was plenty close but I was never out of the 18 straight days of action nor in any hospital or rest camp. Too many fellows worse off than myself.” — Ralph Eyde, in a letter home, Sept. 28, 1943.
Ralph wrote John in April 1943 that he was preparing to deploy. That month Ralph left San Francisco on a transport ship, traveling under the Golden Gate Bridge and heading north to Alaska. Japanese soldiers had landed in the Aleutian Islands in June 1942, raising fears that they could use them to launch attacks on the continental United States. The invasion was the first on an American territory since the War of 1812.
The Battle of Attu began May 11, 1943. Ralph suffered a head wound from a shell early in the battle but shrugged it off and stayed in the fight. He and four other soldiers from his company of a few hundred received a Purple Heart, which he sent home to Rockford and called a “real honey of a medal.”
U.S. accounts of the battle state that 549 Allied troops were killed, 1,148 more were wounded and, 1,814 suffered through cold-weather injuries and disease.
“It was plenty tough + rugged going with the weather against us + Jap snipers harassing us all the time,” Ralph wrote in another letter that August. “But we blew them from their foxholes + they all ended up 6 foot under.”
Frank struggles
“I am still here at the U.S. Naval Hospital being watched over by some experts in the art of bringing one back to normal.” — Frank Eyde, in a letter to his mother from a hospital, July 11, 1943.
While Ralph remained on Attu, Frank returned to San Diego. He initially appeared upbeat, but Frank had begun a long downward spiral. Traveling back to Rockford, he experienced a paranoid episode on Chicago’s Navy Pier on July 7, 1943. The military admitted him to the Great Lakes military hospital for observation.
Frank was diagnosed with combat fatigue — often considered a precursor to the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder — a few weeks later. He was transferred to a Navy base in Crane, Ind.; to the naval hospital in Charleston, S.C.; to the National Naval Medical Hospital, Bethesda, Md.; and to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C.
As Frank’s mental condition worsened, his letters got shorter and shorter, usually touching only on the weather and baseball.
Ralph wounded again
“When dawn broke and the sun was shining brightly, the dead Japs were piled in lines where our machine guns had been mowing ’em down all night.” — Ralph Eyde, in a spring 1944 letter to Frank.
By January 1944, after jungle-warfare training in Hawaii, Ralph was back on the high seas. U.S. commanders sent his division to assault the Marshall Islands, on which the Japanese had several airfields.
Ralph was hit by a Japanese shell and blown 20 feet out of his foxhole, with shrapnel wounds to the lung. Ralph was dizzy from his concussion and wounds, he wrote, but continued to throw grenades.
The Battle of Kwajalein ended with 142 American troops killed, two missing and 845 wounded. The Japanese lost more than 4,300.
“Golly, you sure get your share of battle, don’t you?” John wrote Feb. 11, not knowing that Ralph was wounded and being shipped to Hawaii for treatment.
By then, John was a member of the Army Air Forces, and training for a deployment to the Pacific with the 505th Bombardment Group at Wendover Airfield in Utah.
John deployed late in the year to an airfield on Tinian. John stayed abroad for eight more months, working on the electrical components of airplanes.
Postwar
“Thanks for keeping my whereabouts a secret.” — Ralph Eyde, in a June 1959 letter to Sanford and John.
Frank continued to struggle for many years after the war, unable to hold a steady job. In March 1954, John wrote to Ralph that “Frankie boy” was recently freed after serving 20 days in jail.
But he outlived John and Sanford and died in 1996, age 83.
John, who opened a window installation business out of his childhood home after the war, fell ill in 1962, dying from a brain tumor at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Madison, Wis. Sanford, who continued to work at Woodward Governor, died in 1971 at age 56.
Ralph’s life took more unusual turns. He took a job with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; worked for the government for decades, in a somewhat clandestine fashion, writing his family from Africa, Asia and Europe during the Cold War; was assigned to perform work on a Navy construction contract in Saigon in 1967. He wrote letters through at least 1970, as the Vietnam War raged around him. When he died in 2003, at age 85, his obituary said he had served in the CIA.
A mystery solved
For eight years, Alosi sat on the letters he had found in a storage unit, unable to find relatives, before contacting The Washington Post, which located distant relatives. The closest surviving family member is Vicki Venhuizen, a second cousin of the Eyde brothers who said she remembers them as young men. None of the brothers married or had children, she said.
Venhuizen, of Mesa, Ariz., said that in Ralph’s later years, he settled in Rockford and collected the family correspondence, which he stored in plastic bins.
A now-deceased cousin of Venhuizen’s, Darwin Backer, took care of Ralph’s affairs when he died, including his obituary. He turned over the letters to Vicki’s half sister, Judith Jones Ellis.
Ellis took the letters with her to Arizona, where she also lived, Venhuizen said. Ellis died a few years later, and it’s likely that family members in Arizona did not realize the significance of the letters, she said. Somehow, they ended up in the storage unit.
Venhuizen expressed gratitude to Alosi for not throwing them away. She believes the letters are Alosi’s now.
Alosi said he’s still uncertain what to do with the letters.
“I’ll talk to her and we’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’m just really excited that people will get to hear about these guys.”