From among 25,000 of an estimated six billion letters sent overseas during World War II, Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith have culled and skillfully edited a sampling by 400 American women. Tragic, touching, and funny, the correspondence is full of prosaic news and gossip about jobs and neighbors, along with accounts of births and intimate allusions to love-making. There are letters of growing independence, with strong and at times explicit indication that the boyfriend or husband will be facing a very different woman upon his return. . . .
Every war leaves mothers with broken hearts.
In the end, it is the small human dramas in these letters that stand out. The wife of an Air Corps navigator reads in a news story that only 15 of 1,500 Allied bombers were lost in a raid over Europe and later learns that her husband died in one of the 15. It was the pen of Dickens, of course, that put Britain's sweatshops out of business. It was a single book that brought slavery into focus. But no book of the several which tried has yet convinced us of the absurdity and futility of war.