Re-Airing Of A Legacy Of Letters
JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): Lines from the front lines. The letters of soldiers and their families are literally about life and death. And long after wars end and old soldiers fade away, it is the letters that survive. (on camera): Hello, and welcome. Few people fight a war alone. War is a collective tragedy that people face in public, but also in very private ways. Their letters have that dual nature as well. They are documents destined for particular people that can tell anyone who reads them something meaningful. In the United States, an effort that calls itself the Legacy Project is collecting and preserving letters, the personal correspondence of American men and women who found themselves caught up in conflict from the Revolutionary War to the ones on the front pages. On our program today - a look at letters written in wartime.</s>ANDREW CARROLL, FOUNDER OF THE LEGACY PROJECT: "Dear Mom and Dad, I don't imagine you could ever guess where I am as I write this letter."</s>BOB LEAHY, VIETNAM WAR VETERAN: Writing the letter was traumatic because I would remember the people who died and the screaming.</s>CARROLL: "Dear Betty Anne, I saw something today that makes me realize why we're over here fighting this war."</s>HORACE EVERS, WORLD WAR II VETERAN: The greatest thing in the world for a soldier is to get letters. That's the only tie you had with anything except the rotten life you were living.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, stand by for evening prayer.</s>CHAPLAIN: Let us pray.</s>CARROLL: "They would herd the Muslim men in the parking lot and just spray them with gunfire."</s>EMMA SWEENEY, DAUGHTER: It's his voice that comes through, and it's a sense of who the real person was. And it is - and his vulnerabilities.</s>CARROLL: The organization is called the Legacy Project, and the whole purpose or whole mission is to encourage people from all across the country to go through their attics, their basements, their closets and try and find letters that they have written during war time. In these letters are extraordinary stories about what they saw, what they experienced. And that's what letters can do is they put you in the front row of history. This is, by far, I think the most extraordinary letter we've received. This was written from Hitler's apartment in May 1945, just days after Hitler committed suicide.</s>EVERS: "Second of May, 1945 - Dearest Mom and Lou, a year ago today, I was sweating out shells on the Anzio beachhead. Today, I'm sitting in Hitler's luxuriously furnished apartment writing a few lines home. What a contrast." Wherever we went, any town, any time we went in the lines, somebody picked up the place where the command post was going to be. In Munich, at the end of the war, they set us up in Hitler's apartment. Well, the apartment itself had a big long meeting table in it. You could write letters on it, do whatever you wanted. I wrote a lot of letters, a lot of people got that stationery. "A still greater contrast is that between his quarters here and the living hell of Dachau concentration camp only 10 miles from here. I had the misfortune of seeing the camp yesterday. I still find it hard to believe what my eyes told me. "The first boxcar I came to had about 30 what were once humans in it. All were just bone with a layer of skin over them. And then, into the camp itself. Filthy barracks suitable for about 200 persons held 1,500. There was a gas chamber and furnace room in one barracks. Two rooms were full of bodies waiting to be cremated. In one room, they were all nude. In the other, they had prison clothes on as filthy as dirt itself." Sometimes I felt we were making a movie or something. It was almost like a movie. And other times, I thought, "I hope this is just a big dream." Eisenhower had ordered any troops near any of those death camps to see what they were fighting for, so they could take it home and know that they didn't waste their time over there. You can't put up with stuff like that, you know? I took pictures of the boxcars and the camp itself. And when they were developed, I had thought about it and thought about it. And I took them, and I tore every one up. I wouldn't send them home to my wife. I wouldn't send them. I didn't want others to see what I had taken, it was so - it was just terrible. "Well, enough for now. Miss you all very much. Your son, Horace."</s>CARROLL: Hey, there. I just want to thank you so much for sending those letters. We've received about 10,000 or 20,000 contributions of letters. And also, not just from World War II. If you've got friends who were in Korea or Vietnam or even the Gulf, we'd love to see them. Through the handwriting, through the paper, you get a sense of the immediacy of that time, even if it's from 200 years ago, from the American Revolution or their Civil War letters. To see the spots of mud, the little flecks of blood that are often on some of these letters, it brings it alive. Some of the most agonizing letters we've received are from the Vietnam War, and I especially want to make sure that war is remembered, the emotional cost those men endured and still live with to this day. One example we have is from a man, Bob Leahy, who was in battle, an extraordinary battle, and he wrote a letter to the sister of one of his friends who was killed in combat.</s>LEAHY: "Dear Carol, the following is my recollection of your brother's death. On Thursday, June 12, 1969, our company was walking down a mountain path in Vietnam, when someone opened fire on our point man with a .51 caliber machine gun." Asking people to walk to their death and to watch people die when you're 20 is fairly soul-searching. If you want to see a true measure of a man's character, you watch him as he faces his death. "We were in heavy jungle. When we advanced again, they opened fire. We assaulted the bunkers time after time, and we lost men each time. The lead platoon was basically wiped out."</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get Medevac up here. I want to get these boys out now, over.</s>LEAHY: "When it ran out of men, my platoon was brought in to take over." We might have been 120. But they were probably 500. So we were 5- 1 in the wrong direction. "Steve was less than 20 yards from the bunker, and he was trying to toss a one-pound grenade into a small opening about six inches high. The task is especially difficult because the man inside is doing his very best to kill you. Steve evidently crouched up too high or someone opened fire from a second bunker. In any case, he was seen and shot several times with an AK-47. The platoon medic, who was right next to me, started working on Steve. All he could do was basically make him comfortable. "A battle was a very noisy affair. The machine guns, the rifles, the grenades, the mortars all make a great deal of noise. In addition, there are screams from the wounded. There was too much noise to hear Steve during the peak. But during each of the lulls, I could hear him laboring to breathe. The wounds in his chest had punctured both lungs, and the lungs were filling up with blood. Our lieutenant told us to carry Steve down to the Medevac area and leave him there. I did so, and I never saw him again." It's not the sort of thing that I will ever forget. You know, enormous numbers of people died for nothing, and I can't see any way of forgetting that. You can cut out a liver. You can cut out a finger. You can cut out a kidney. But you can't cut out a memory. "Sincerely, Bob Leahy."</s>CARROLL: Hey, there. It's Andy Carroll with the Legacy Project. We work mostly as a conduit so that when people send us letters, we then help them get them to museums, historical societies, archives throughout the country. And that way, scholars and people from all walks of life will have access to these letters and insight to these letters and realize what these men and women gave up and what they sacrificed. We receive a lot of love letters, and we're often asked what relevance did love letters have to warfare. Well, to me, the love letters in many ways are the most important because they put a human face on the soldier.</s>SWEENEY: "To the best wife a man ever had. Honey, I am writing this letter to you to say a few things that I might leave unsaid if I should depart this world unexpectedly. In this flying business, you never can tell when you might all of a sudden get mighty unlucky and wake up dead some morning." My father was squadron officer, and he was sent to Bermuda in '56 with my mother and my four brothers. She was five months pregnant with me. "First of all, let's face one fact. Everybody ends up dead. Even if I should die the day after writing this, I still claim I am one of the luckiest people who ever lived, and you know it." And there were quite a few reasons why before he left, he might have written my mother that letter saying that it was it, it was dangerous. This was sort of a Cold War mission. His objective was to travel up the Atlantic, sort of running parallel to the Eastern Seaboard looking for Russian submarines. "I've got a lot to live for, all the rightness (ph). But when I count up all the blessings I've had, I can see that I've already lived a lot. When you come right down to it, I've done just about everything I've wanted to do and seen about everything I've wanted to see." My brother John was 7. He was helping my mother make pancakes. And the two men came to the door in the Navy dark blue suits. He said that my mother then just sat down on the couch and started to cry. "Sure, I'd like to stick around while the boys are growing up and to have fun with you again when we have time after they grow up. But you and I agree so closely on how to raise a family, the boys are going to be all right. I'm sure of that. And I've had enough fun with you to last anybody a lifetime." I didn't know anything about my father growing up because my mother remarried when I was 4. And it was, I'm sure, her feeling that I should, you know, become part of this new family. I was about 10 years old, and I was in the basement of the house that we had moved into, and I came across this letter. "Don't let the memories of me keep you from marrying again if you run across somebody fit to be your husband, which would be hard to find, I know. But you're much too wonderful a wife and mother to waste yourself as a widow." It was the first time I had ever heard his voice. I kind of had a sense that maybe I did come from somewhere, you know? "Life is for the living. That's not original, I'm sure. So get that smile back on your face. Put on some lipstick and a new dress, and show me what you can do toward building a new life." These are letters that tell the whole story. They're like the whole person. I can tell you how many medals my father has. I can tell you now how many battles he fought in. But that doesn't tell you who he was. These letters say who he was.</s>CARROLL: Reading through these letters, you learn a tremendous amount about human nature, about perseverance, about sacrifice. But also, how much we can endure. People have a lot of different reasons they want to send us letters, and one of them is to, in many ways, bring back to life the people whom they loved and knew. And that's one of the things we hope to do is to preserve their memory and to keep them alive through their own words.</s>MANN (voice-over): The first world war was unlike any war before in a number of ways. One of the easy ones to overlook - the letters. Never before had so many men who could actually read and write engage in battle. Never before had so many letters been written to record what those men endured. (on camera): Welcome back. The Imperial War Museum in London has long collected the letters of British servicemen. It has about 100,000 of them in its archives, only a few dozen actually on public display. Just a short time ago, we got in touch someone who has read more of them than most people - Roderick Suddaby, keeper of the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum.</s>RODERICK SUDDABY, IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM: Letters were, of course, an enormously important means of communication during both world wars because servicemen were separated from their families often by many thousands of miles or an ocean or two. And in consequence, letters became an absolutely key means of communication. We have figures for the first world war which show that no fewer than 2,000 million letters were written by people in Britain to servicemen overseas and that 1,600 million letters came back the other way from servicemen on all the fighting fronts to people in this country.</s>MANN: So if you multiplied that by all of the belligerent nations, an awful lot of mail going back and forth. Why did the countries involved try so hard to make that kind of communication possible (ph)?</s>SUDDABY: Because it was vital to maintaining morale. There was nothing for which servicemen longed more than news from home, and there was nothing that their families back on the homefront wanted more than reassurance that their men were surviving the circumstances.</s>MANN: I can't imagine that that's the kind of thing that changes a lot over time. But you've seen letters from very different eras, from very different people. Do the letters change much depending on the war, depending on the people who wrote them?</s>SUDDABY: In one sense, they change a little as the century has gone on. So educational standards have risen, and in consequence letters written by ordinary servicemen during the 1939-'45 war, sometimes they're slightly more sophisticated than those written by the previous generation. But what is remarkable really is that the quality of the letters written despite the wartime constraints of censorship, the quality of the letters written by all ranks in both world wars. There wouldn't be a Department of Documents in the Imperial War Museum if it wasn't for the fact that these letters were worth preserving.</s>MANN: Have men's attitudes towards war changed in all of the years that you've studied, or their families' attitude?</s>SUDDABY: I think war is such an extraordinary circumstance that doubtless many of these men, but for the separation of wartime, would never have been writing letters in the way and with the intensity which they did. I think that the first world war, the first great total war of the 20th century, in a way, conditioned those who fought in '39-'45. So that there isn't perhaps the surprise in their letters at the sheer scale and horror of war that you might find in some of the letters written during the '14-'18 war.</s>MANN: Let me ask you more about that because you have the historian's ability to look back and measure the accuracy of those letters against what other sources may tell you. Did the men tell the truth? Were they able to? Were they censored? Were they unwilling?</s>SUDDABY: There was both censorship and self-censorship in both world wars. That men would obviously be careful in writing not to disclose information that if the letter fell into the wrong hands might be of value to the enemy. And of course, there was a whole system of censorship in place to ensure that this did not happen. And at the same time, however, they were often moved by their circumstances to write in a way which is extraordinarily frank. And you will find in letters statements of their horror at what they'd witnessed, of occasionally you will find criticisms of superiors and of the staff. And you will find a whole range of observation. The censors obviously didn't have the time to look at every letter. Some were censored locally, others were censored further away from the man's unit. And obviously, a great deal did slip through the net.</s>MANN: Roderick Suddaby of the Imperial War Museum. We have to take another break. But when we come back, the other great passion we put on paper - love letters. Stay with us for that.</s>MANN (voice-over): The computer revolution has not only changed the way we work and learn, but also the way we communicate with each other. E-mail is the easiest and fastest way to correspond there ever has been. But are we losing a crucial part of our heritage? (on camera): Welcome back. Letters can be extremely personal, especially handwritten ones with everything that makes them individual, including their imperfections. Electronic type lacks a certain character, not to mention that if an e- mail is not saved or printed onto paper, who will be able to read it in 10 or 20 or 100 years? Earlier, we spoke to Cathy Davidson of Duke University - a scholar of love letters, actually - about love letters and letters emotional and electronic.</s>CATHERINE N. DAVIDSON, DUKE UNIVERSITY: I think a love letter is a performance. A love letter is not just the words on the page, it's how those words say, how they express the character of the love letter writer, and they're almost a kind of - they require technique. And it's almost like sexuality. It has a performative aspect to it, and it's there to display yourself in front of the person who loves you and maybe make them love you a little more.</s>MANN: Now you are a scholar of love letters, and you've read and studied a great many of them, especially the love letters of great writers. When it comes down it, are they all the same in the respects you just described?</s>DAVIDSON: No, there are many different techniques. Some writers are soulful. Some are melancholy. Some are very deeply earnest. Others are witty. Some are actually abrasive. I think one quality they all have is the appearance of revelation. I think a love letter doesn't work unless it seems as if you're telling something from the depths of your soul. Whether you tell that in a witty or a serious register, it has to sound like it's really communicating the inner self.</s>MANN: It's interesting the words that you choose. You describe it as the appearance of something and as a performance. I'm getting the sense from you that love letters aren't really true.</s>DAVIDSON: Well, they're different than truth. I'm not sure they're a lie. They may be some middle ground in between. I think a love letter is the performance of our very best selves. It's the self we wish to be loved, the person we wish we were and the person we know is the most lovable aspect of ourselves. So it's, I think, a performance in that sense. There's always a little bit of a seduction in a love letter, although, of course, there are moments where all the seduction breaks down, especially if you think you're losing the beloved and you surrendered a pure, deep objection and all of the other phases of love. And then there are other times when the performance falls away and what you get is this aching sincerity of the person.</s>MANN: Now, you've studied particularly the writings, the love letters of people who actually write as an avocation. Do they tend to write letters the way they write books and novels? Are they that careful or, once again coming back to the question of sincerity, do they give something of themselves away and let their craft kind of drop for a moment?</s>DAVIDSON: Well, I think writers don't love any better or worse than anyone else. The difference is writers write about it. And so, the craft of writing is extremely important to writers. And there are many cases - for example, Hemingway is one - of writers who write letters, get the kind of adrenaline flowing in the excitement of writing a love letter, and then later on take out that passage and put it actually into a novel almost verbatim. In fact, it's almost as if the situation of a love letter juices them up and gives them some of their best prose that they can then put into their fiction. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald did exactly the same thing.</s>MANN: Do the letters you read tend to be racy?</s>DAVIDSON: Often they're racy. I mean, often the letter is a kind of foreplay. The love letter is a prelude to what will come when the people are no longer apart and when they finally see each other face to face.</s>MANN: That's easy to imagine on the printed page. It's hard to imagine that kind of emotion and sentiment and sexuality with a computer. But e-mail tends to be wave of the future. Have you ever read a love letter that began as e-mail? Can you imagine that?</s>DAVIDSON: Well, actually, it's quite common. And of course, in chat rooms, one thing people do is they take the convention of performance in a love letter even further, and sometimes people will even pretend they're somebody else - a man pretending to be a woman, or somebody pretending to be fat who's thin or thin who's fat - and they'll actually create a character as themselves and send out a love letter, or often an erotic letter from this fictitious self. But I have to admit e-mail doesn't quite seem as sexy to me as a beautiful piece of paper and a scented envelope and all of that ritual of opening the letter and seeing the stamp from some wonderful foreign place - all of that exotic quality of the love letter.</s>MANN: Whether for love or any other reason, do you think e-mail is changing the way people write to each other?</s>DAVIDSON: Absolutely. I don't know about you, but I now find it very difficult to write an actual letter. I used to be a great letter writer. Now I answer my 200-some e-mails a day, but I can barely stand to go through all that ritual of finding a letter anymore and sending it off. And I think that's a condition of modern life is that the letter is becoming less prevalent because e-mail has become so ubiquitous. I mean, we hear from each other altogether too much sometimes. For all the benefits we have of being able to communicate more and faster than ever, sometimes the problem is that people are communicating with us more and faster than ever. And as anyone who's gone away on a trip and come back to find an inbox filled with e-mails knows.</s>MANN: Catherine Davidson, the book is "The Book Of Love: Writers and Their Love Letters." Thanks so much for talking with us.</s>DAVIDSON: Thank you, Jonathan.</s>MANN: One final word about another love letter of sorts, featuring man and machine. We asked the co-author of the book, "Letters of the Century: America 1900 to 1999," what his favorite letter was. Stephen Adler's choice was not the words of a great leader, but the scribblings of an outlaw. Clyde Barrow, one half of the murderous, infamous, bank- robbing duo of Bonnie and Clyde, wrote a letter to Henry Ford. Clyde thanked the automaker for developing the Ford V-8, which he praised as the best get-away car on the market. Six weeks after the note was written, Bonnie and Clyde's life of crime ended inside a stolen Ford V-8 - the car riddled with bullets. That's all for this edition of INSIGHT. I'm Jonathan Mann. Stay with us. There's more news just a head. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com