Dear Mom, the War’s Going Great

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/opinion/sunday/dear-mom-the-wars-going-great.html

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On Sunday morning, May 12, 1918, Arthur Wolff penned a four-page letter to his mother, Frances, in New York City. A captain in the 306th Infantry Regiment, Wolff was quartered in Calais, France. He was safely behind the lines, but he could hear the distant roar of the giant guns at the front. Wolff wrote to his mother faithfully each week to assure her that he was safe. But this correspondence had special meaning — it was Mother’s Day.

“Dearest Mother,” he began. “I am back from a four days trip to frontline trenches. … Today is known as Mother’s Day and every American soldier is writing home today. I never felt better in my life.”

A hundred years later, with email, Skype and text messages, such letters seem quaint, even antiquarian. But during World War I, pen and paper provided one of the only links between soldiers like Wolff and home. By May 1918, the Army had deployed more than one million soldiers on the Western Front to fight in a distant war over tangled loyalties and imperial aspirations. Keeping morale high meant reminding them of home.

Perhaps no one knew the tug of family ties better than the chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, Gen. John J. Pershing. A hard-bitten veteran of the Spanish-American and Philippine wars, Pershing, known as Black Jack, hardly seemed the type of soldier to harbor a sentimental streak. But it was Pershing who, on May 8, 1918, issued a general order strongly suggesting that American soldiers, known as doughboys, write Mother’s Day letters.

“I wish that every officer and soldier of the A.E.F. would write a letter home on Mother’s Day,” Pershing declared. “This is a little thing for each one to do, but these letters will carry back our courage and our affection to the patriotic women whose love and prayers inspire us and cheer us on to victory.” He then encouraged his commanders to allow men to write letters that day “as the preoccupying business of war will permit.”

Pershing’s suggestion came not from pathos, but from an affectionate family and personal tragedy. Though his mother, Anne, was no longer alive in 1918, he had fond memories of her from growing up in the town of Laclede, Mo., about 100 miles northeast of Kansas City. Anne Pershing made sure that her children were well read and well clothed, and that they attended church every Sunday.

When Pershing considered attending West Point, she was skeptical. Yet, after he graduated and began rapidly rising through the ranks, his mother turned “distinctly proud of having a son serving with the colors” and followed his “career with the utmost interest,” he wrote in his memoir. She died in 1902, a few years before Pershing attained the rank of general, married and began a family that would grow to three girls and a boy. Grieved by his mother’s passing, Pershing wrote that “I had from her the finest heritage with which a parent can endow a child, a glorious memory.”

Grief on a far greater scale struck Pershing in 1915. On Aug. 27, while he was posted with a cavalry brigade on the Mexican border, a fire broke out at the Pershing home at the Presidio, an Army facility in San Francisco. The fire killed his entire family except his 6-year-old son, Warren. Pershing buried his wife and three daughters in a Wyoming cemetery and sent Warren to be cared for by family members. Pershing dove back into his career; he chased Pancho Villa with the Mexican Punitive Expedition a year later and took command of the A.E.F. in 1917.

Pershing found time to write Warren regularly from France to reassure him that his father was safe and would be home one day. He wanted each doughboy to follow his lead. “When no letters are received from overseas,” he advised in his order,” the greatest distress is caused to those at home.”

For Mother’s Day, the letters had to be written and posted by May 12, then placed in an envelope with the words “Mothers Letters” in the upper-right corner. Letters were given to censors, who carefully read each line, redacting references to force strength, unit movements and troop locations. Finally, the letters were sent back across the Atlantic in returning troop transport ships.

The Army wasn’t alone in promoting the effort. At the soldiers and sailors’ club in Paris, servicemen were invited to stop by and enjoy unlimited helpings of ice cream and cake while they wrote their letters. Y.M.C.A. volunteers drove to the front with pouches full of pencils and paper. Posters in Red Cross canteens reminded doughboys who stopped in to write home, and stationery was provided.

Wounded soldiers who were unable to hold a pencil dictated their letters to Red Cross volunteers. From a base hospital, one suffering doughboy was O.K. with his mother learning that “a Boche shell has played the devil with my beauty.” Soldiers without mothers were asked to write to the “man or woman who has done the most to take her place.”

Even the French first lady Henriette Poincaré threw herself into the effort, sending a message on May 12 to mothers in the United States. “For all the distance, the women of France feel quite close to American women now,” she wrote, “they are closely linked in the same patriotic duties, the same hopes.”

The hope was a quick end to the war. But it took another six months before the armistice of Nov. 11 silenced the guns. Left behind, as Captain Wolff described to his mother, were “destroyed villages, torn up fields and one shell hole after another.” When the conflict ended, more than 50,000 American mothers had lost sons on the battlefields; 63,000 Americans perished from noncombat-related causes.

President Woodrow Wilson had suggested to mothers whose sons or daughters died overseas that they should display a service flag with a gold star. In 1928, the organization American Gold Star Mothers Inc. was formed, and it remains active today as men and women in uniform continue to be deployed in harm’s way.