Smithsonian Magazine - 11.2019

(Joyce) #1

prologue


VETERANS

16 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019

On a tape from
Vietnam, then
Col. George Pat-
ton IV admitted
he would “miss
my chopper with
all the bullet
holes in it.”

he barely knew, who had called to check in on his
relatives. His cousin, James Carroll Jordan, respond-
ed by sending a surviving piece of family history, a
letter Jordan himself had written as a pilot in World
War II. It was dated April 21, 1945, three weeks before
Nazi Germany’s surrender to the Allied forces.
“I saw something today that made me realize why
we’re over here fi ghting this war,” Jordan wrote to his
wife, Betty Anne. That day he had been tasked with
visiting Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp,
which had been liberated a few days earlier. “When
we fi rst walked in we saw all these creatures that
were supposed to be men,” Jordan wrote. “They were
dressed in black and white suits, heads shaved and
starving to death.” His descriptions of this almost
unbelievable scene are vivid and brutal, though he
told his wife he had spared her the worst of it. Fi-
nally, he wrote, “our time was up, so we boarded our
truck and rode home, just thinking.”
The letter stunned Carroll, who was about the
same age Jordan had been when he wrote it. He was
surprised again at his cousin’s reaction when he of-
fered to mail it back. “He said, ‘Just keep it, I proba-
bly would have thrown it out.’ ”
For Carroll, a student at Columbia University who
previously had no interest in history, Jordan’s letter
was the start of a three-decade quest to collect these
memoirs. He started by asking friends and family,
teachers, coaches, everyone he encountered. Most
were happy to have him take some letters, often writ-
ten by relatives they didn’t even remember. For a
while, it was just a hobby for Carroll, whose full-time
job was working with Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky
to launch the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a
foundation-funded nonprofi t with the goal of dis-
tributing one million free books of poetry. It wasn’t

how important—and ephemeral—such documents
are. It’s all part of the historian’s ambitious eff ort to
rescue these eyewitness accounts from attics, base-
ments, garage sales and trash bins.
The letters he carries to make his impassioned
plea—and the tens of thousands more he donated
to establish the Center for American War Letters at
Chapman University in California—are the personal
stories of war, intimate descriptions of the battle-
fi eld and the home front that often get overlooked
by history books focused on troop movements and
casualty counts. They are also a democratization
of history: Hundreds of handwritten missives of a
World War II Air Force pilot remembered only by his
family will be preserved as carefully as the previous-
ly unheard audio recordings created by then Army
Col. George Patton IV, of the famed Fighting Pattons,
in his command tent in Vietnam.
“These letters are America’s great undiscovered
literature. They give insight into war and into hu-
man nature,” says Carroll. “We can’t lose this kind of
history.” He calls his project the Million Letters Cam-
paign—but he still has a long way to go.

THE FIRST LETTER IN Carroll’s collection arrived
about 30 years ago.
In December 1989, a fi re destroyed the Carroll
family home in Washington, D.C. No one was in-
jured, but everything they owned was lost, includ-
ing family photos and other mementos. “That’s the
hard part,” Carroll, then 20 years old, told a cousin

COURTESY BEN PATTON

TO LISTEN to then Col. George Patton IV’s audio letters
to his wife, go to Smithsonianmag.com/warletters

Staff Sgt. Horace
Evers wrote
about the horrors
of Dachau on
Hilter’s statio-
nery while sitting
at the dictator’s
desk.
Free download pdf