Uncle George couldn't say a lot about where he was at or what he was doing in his v-mail letters, but there are many clues. Those from APO 464 were from North Africa, where, after the surrender of the Axis forces in that theater on 13 May 1943, his unit would have been one of many guarding over 275,000 prisoners of war. The first of his two letters from North Africa was dated July 13, two months after the surrender; the second August 17, by which time the Allies were preparing for the Italian campaign.
Link to Wikipedia, North African campaign: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_campaign
His third letter was not dated, but the APO was now 512, indicating he at least on his way to Italy, and the mention of Oran by name that he had already left there. Oran, Algeria, is a seaport and was one of the departure points for the invasion of continental Italy by the U.S. Fifth Army, which landed at Salerno on 9 September, 1943. The next letter, dated September 21, gives no real clue, and the next, dated October 23, has a line censored. In the November 18 letter he mentions "a church built before Columbus was ever born, or some of Europe's famous places." December 21 doesn't add much; but in the January 5 letter is a comment, "We were fixing a road to our position and the only difference between me and the rest of the mud was that I wiggled a little bit. I was camouflaged perfectly." This was during the Allied advance to Rome, during which "The Winter Line proved a major obstacle to the Allies at the end of 1943, halting their advance on the Fifth Army's front, the western side of Italy. . . . blizzards, drifting snow and zero visibility at the end of December caused the advance to grind to a halt. . . . It took four major offensives between January and May 1944 before the line was eventually broken by a combined assault of the Fifth and Eighth Armies (including British, US, French, Polish, and Canadian Corps) concentrated along a twenty mile front between Monte Cassino and the western seaboard. . . . On 15 February, the monastery, high on a peak overlooking the town of Cassino, was destroyed by 1,400 tons of bombs dropped by American bombers." In spite of all this Uncle George writes about fresh foods and "garden things" in his letters of January 27 and February 7. After this time he was probably very busy as the Italian campaign continued into northern Italy. US forces took possession of Rome on 4 June 1944.
Link to Wikipedia, Italian Campaign: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian%20Campaign_(World_War_II)
The next letter, undated, but now with APO 758, is the first to mention what country a letter is written from. While the Italian campaign was not over, preparations must have been well underway for the move to France, from which the next letters, dated December 20, 1944, and February 8, 1945, were written. "After the capture of Rome and the Normandy Invasion in June many experienced American and French units, the equivalent of a total of 7 divisions, were pulled out of Italy during the summer of 1944 to participate in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion in the South of France." This took place on August 15, 1944.
Link to Wikipedia, Opperation Dragoon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dragoon
Link to Wikipedia, Seventh Army: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Europe
Link to Wikipedia, Fifth United States Army: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_United_States_Army
On May 8, 1945, the World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Uncle George's final letter, dated May 29, mentions that he had "been all over Southern Germany and seen most of the interesting spots both famous and Infamous. The concentration camps and all other spots that Hitler was connected with." It is my understanding that he was involved in the liberation of some of the death camps, as well as some of the prisoner of war camps.
Link to Wikipedia, Victory in Europe Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_in_Europe_Day
A classmate of mine from kindergarten through high school wrote a biography of one of those POWs, Dale Aldrich, whom I knew also, as he lived in Coulee City, Washington, and was the father of another of my K-12 classmates. Uncle George retired to Coulee City in the late 1970s, and died there in 1987. He would have known Dale there. It is possible that their paths had already crossed at Stalag 17 as the war was ending.
Carol Edgemon Hipperson
The Belly Gunner: An Eyewitness Account of Stalag 17 & World War II in Europe (Twenty-FirstCenturyBooks/MillbrookPress, 2001)
http://carolhipperson.com/
On March 21, I posted a partial transcript of a letter from Uncle Marvin, who had made two round trip flights from Hawaii to Australia in early 1945. After the war he worked at North American Rockwell in Pasadena, California, as an electrical engineer (rocket scientist) on the Atlas missile program, and later on the Mercury program, and then on the Apollo program. He might easily have crossed paths with Ray Daves, the subject of a second book by Carol:
Carol Edgemon Hipperson
Radioman: An Eyewitness Account of Pearl Harbor & World War II in the Pacific (ThomasDunneBooks/St.MartinsPress, 2008)
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