Dear Folks: Letters Home from World War II in the South Pacific
Dear Folks is an account of a young Pennsylvania farm boy growing up within the maelstrom of war. Until that first afternoon at navy boot camp, my entire existence was centered around a small, 58-acre farm and the few neighbors within walking distance. That first day my world increased in size about a hundredfold. It continued to grow from our first march to the mess hall to the invasions of the Marshall Islands, Guan, Leyte and Luzon. The war took me through the occupation of Japan with stops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a dozen or more ports in that island nation, and finally to the first two atomic bomb tests at Bikini in 1946. It was the greatest adventure of my life. But like all experiences of that magnitude and nature, I saw men depart this life in the blink of an eye. As I write about it now, at the age of 84, those memories choke me up and bring tears to my eyes.Although my shooting experiences started at age five, it was the big naval guns that whetted my appetite for the big bores in the hunting field and on the black powder cartridge silhoutte range. Just as I had watched a battleship at Guam obliterate a Japanese machine-gun nest with three simultaneous shots from a single turret at a mile range, I have since believed that in the world of long-range precision rifle shooting, bigger, heavier and faster are always better.We will never see another era like the years of World War II, where everybody knew somebody who had been killed in the war, and each of us knew several people who served.Whenever someone is shooting at you with the intent to kill, be it one person or a hundred, it is a big war!Paul A. MatthewsNovember 11, 2009