Love Prevails During War-Through Letters

This week in class, we listened to a plethora of love letters written during US wars. Though we mainly focused on letters written during World War two, we also learned about the history of war time love letters, dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

At least for me, I think it’s easier to imagine love letters being written during World War two than the Revolutionary War, because of just how long ago it was, and how little we know about those soldier’s private lives. However, this actually may be due to the fact that some wives during the Revolutionary War actually burned the letters that their husbands sent them, for privacy reasons. It’s easy to forget that the people writing and receiving these letters do not expect them to be released to the public, and many of them include private and personal information. This is actually why Martha Washington (George Washington’s wife) burned many of the letters George sent to her while he was fighting. In result, we don’t know much about the great George Washington’s personal life.

Though, from the letters we did listen to from the Revolutionary War, many of them were very poetic. We learned that this is actually because the one book all the soldiers had been raised on, was the bible, so this reflected in their writing by their letters being very dramatic. However, as time went on, letters became less formal, and more conversational

For example, we learned about a specific couple during WW2 whose letters were actually all written in the form of an actual conversation. It went like this: The wife, Goldie, would write a letter to her husband, Ed. Upon receiving the letter, Ed would put it into a typewriter, and respond to each question Goldie wrote, line by line, so it really looked like a conversation. I thought this was very clever, and not to mention, comedic. It reminded me of the idea that many troops on the front lines used humor in their letters to cope with the extreme hardships they were facing.

Listening to these love letters only further solidified the idea of how big of a role letter writing has played throughout history, and gave me even more information to work with for my paper coming up.