A lonely Thanksgiving

kw: family history, artifacts

My father never dreamed he'd spend Thanksgiving 1945 still in New Guinea. The war had ended in August, he'd mustered out many of his men, but the Army for a series of reasons he didn't understand kept many men and most of the officers in place. So in his letter home for November 22, 1945 he included this menu for the day.

Of the hundreds of letter he wrote to his intended (my mother), this is one of the most poignant. In a paragraph about the middle he wrote,

"I've decided to resign to my fate again and plug along till my number comes to go home. All day and way into the nite each day all you hear is griping about points, when I'll go home, etc. Many guys almost drive themselves nuts, worrying about it. There must be thousands, but in the last month I haven't talked to anyone who has been overseas longer than me."

Dad had one brief visit home in mid-1943; thereafter he didn't return until late February 1946. He and my mother married in early March 1946.

I've just finished initial curating of my parents' wartime letters for WWII. It has taken months. I have yet to read more than little bits here and there as I put each sheet, or pair of sheets whenever only one side was used, into clear jackets. Our next generation is just getting into their college years (my brothers and I all had children quite late), so it may be left to a younger family historian to read all the letters and then, who knows what?

Here is a closeup of the Thanksgiving Dinner Dad and the rest enjoyed that warm day in the tropics. Quite a spread. I dunno; seems to me that turkey noodle soup isn't quite the same as roast turkey, but when it is a warm, rainy day, the spirit of the season isn't quite the same anyway. Soup is easier to transport half across the planet than frozen turkeys, anyway.

This bottom section of the page has the ration for the two holidays, per 100 men. Multiply this by twenty or so, for the men who were still deployed that Thanksgiving weekend, and you can see why military cooks need large staffs! The biggest single item, 170 pounds of potatoes per 100 (probably 1.5+ tons for the whole bunch)…that is a lot of peeling.

Back to Dad: he didn't write every day, but I still have ten binders full of his letters. Most of Mom's letters were lost, I only have the first year, but that is four binders because she did write every day, for four years. Is it any surprise they were married 58 years? I've been lucky; my own courtship lasted less than a year, yet in a few months we'll have had 35 years of marriage. We both come of long-lived stock, so we could last another thirty years or more. That suits me.