God spare us, ‘for we are young and love life so much’

Before Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. led a wave of assault troops onto Utah Beach at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, becoming the first infantry general to land, he composed a letter to his wife.

“We are under way. The time is short now. What the future holds for our enemies or us as individuals, no man knows,” he wrote. “All afternoon the ships have been steaming east, then south. The sea is covered with them – convoys of many types, going at different speeds, one passing another, all timed to arrive at their rendezvous… The Great Armada that sailed these waters was but a group of ships compared to this gigantic effort…”

Roosevelt’s men were tense, “and all are pretending to be casual,” he told his wife. “Bravado helps. We had some proclamations read over the loud speaker, pompous declarations about ‘liberty’ and ‘rescuing the oppressed.’ Afterwards, I spoke a few sentences of plain soldier talk to buck up the men. God has been good to me – far better than I deserve. Whatever may come, we must remember this…”

The Roosevelt letter is among scores from GIs of all ranks and circumstances contained in “Lines of Battle – Letters From American Servicemen, 1941-45,” that Annette Tapert edited in 1987 for Times Books. I trot out my dawg-eared volume each Memorial Day because it is in the personal stories of the men and women who have actually done the fighting and dying in this country’s wars that one gets a sense of the immense debt a grateful nation owes its veterans.

Marine Lt. Richard Kennard, a forward observer in the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns, wrote his parents: “War is terrible, just awful, awful, awful. You have no idea how it hurts to see American boys all shot up, wounded, suffering from pain and exhaustion, and those that fall down, never to move again. After this is all over, I shall cherish and respect more than anything else all that which is sweet, tender and gentle.”

For all the eloquence of their letters, U.S. soldiers didn’t have a history of letter writing behind them, Tapert points out. Most of the sheltered young Americans had never left their home towns before answering the call to war. In strange lands, far across the seas, they were subject to a convergence of forces – loneliness, fear, the possibility of violent death – that generated a need for self-expression.

“You know, I heard so much about the changes war makes in people, that they return so different after combat,” young Army Cpl. William Preston, 743rd Tank Battalion, 1st Infantry Division, wrote from France to his wife in New York. “D-Day then should certainly have changed me, because I saw as much then to make me cynical, bitter, irreligious as I may ever see at one time, and yet today I find that I am just about the same person I was before it all, with the same philosophy, the same hopes, sadder that what happened did have to happen, but wiser because of it…When I see a dead American soldier I get angry and sad that he should have died so unnatural a death. I wonder about him, what were his plans never to be fulfilled, what fate brought him to that spot at that moment, who was waiting for him at home?”

From the Philippines, Lt. Kermit Stewart wrote to a friend back home. “We’ve been fighting again – I don’t know how many days. I’ve had a lot of responsibility. I directed my cannon fire today – hundreds of rounds – and most of the time firing within one to two hundred yards of our own men. The least slip, and maybe 20 of your own men get killed. When you’ve sat through 300 rounds – nerves like fiddle strings till each round hits – well, that’s one thing that makes an old man of you.”

Private First Class Robert Baum served as an aerial radio gunner with the Marine Corps in the South Pacific. “It’s the fellows who have gone before us who make us willingly bear our burdens,” he wrote to his parents in April, 1943. “Dear God, spare our lives, for we are young and love life so much. This is just a short incident in a fellow’s life, I tell myself, and soon it will be behind me and I will have forgotten it, and settle down among you all again… I’m coming back. Remember me in your prayers, especially in the next few weeks. We have some messy action ahead of us.”

This was PFC Baum’s last letter. Shortly afterward he was reported missing in action, and, like so many courageous warriors, never returned. On this Memorial Day, such supreme sacrifice shall not go unremembered.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.