Letters from George

By the autumn of 1944 George was writing from Belgium. For the engineers this was a hard stretch of the war: the grinding fight in the Hürtgen Forest, and then, in December, the German counter-offensive through the Ardennes — the Battle of the Bulge — for which the 49th earned its Ardennes-Alsace campaign credit.

His letters from Belgium run from about September 1944 into January 1945 and swing between the ordinary and the extraordinary: rain and mud, Christmas mail arriving in a flood, USO shows (he mentions seeing Marlene Dietrich), buying a radio with his squad — and, between the lines, a man far from home through a brutal winter. He tells his sister not to send cigarettes because of the shortages at home, and jokes that he is "so far behind the lines" she needn't worry — the censor, and a brother's kindness, both at work.