Author’s Note: The following post discusses topics of WW II, including its soldiers and a slight mention of the Holocaust.
This past week, the class was introduced to the resources and guidelines of the World War II letters project. The project is a group effort in which each group is assigned a Muhlenberg alumni that served during WWII and must create a PowerPoint detailing the biography of the soldier as well as highlight a certain aspect of the letters, such as the traveling, the censorship, or the relationship between the two letter recipients. Each group varies, and each year, something new is highlighted in the projects. The librarian introducing the project then gave the groups a folder with their designated soldier, filled with letters, photographs, and more information for their research.
Getting more personal, my group was assigned James (nicknamed Jim) Hemstreet. He certainly seems to be quite a character, as a lot of his letters had jokes on them instead of the formal and polite nature I had originally thought of the past. Paired with the very clean cursive, it was very off-putting to me.
One of his photographs of rubble, the aftermath of a tank on a schoolhouse, really made an impression on me. I wondered about how Hemstreet could be in awe of America’s power and strength after witnessing destruction. I couldn’t understand it at first, but I thought about nationalism and how pride in one’s origins and country was especially heightened during this era. It started making sense then. I had to wonder though, what was the general public’s impression of the war? I recall reading somewhere that the brutality of the war and tragedies such as the Holocaust were thought of as propaganda and rumours by the American public, so what is the truth? Bringing it back to Hemstreet, did he ever think about the other side? What did he think of the war personally? How did censorship affect him, if at all? How does his “story” end?
Looking back on these letters and photos, I feel as though from present perspective, I can be so focused on the great suffering this war brought. This is to not deny that they happened, but the people within those stories or accounts are often reduced to numbers or faces without connection and meaning, merely an image. However, these letters show otherwise, as you can witness the humanity and the actual people facing the front lines. Jim was stranded in the Pacific on a boat, and he wrote to Muhlenberg wondering about school life, invested in getting back to normalcy, and thinking about the future and settling down. He took enjoyment in traveling across Europe and South America, and he certainly seem like a good-natured person. He was human, and it’s very emotional and wounds me deep to know that he lived through this. But his letters are here, despite it all, and I hope to get to know him more as a person.
