Lockdown notes from 1944 -- "My bonnie ambivalent bivalve"

Staying at home during COVID-19 times gave me more time to spend with the family correspondence. In many ways, these letters seem from a different world, but some challenges of being cooped up sounded familiar. 

Murray spent a year and change posted to the Aleutian Islands in World War II, as a cryptographer and correspondence censor. He got there in the spring of 1944, and though the Aleutian chain is famously wet and windy, he spent much of his time off hiking and bird watching. He preferred working graveyard, which gave him more daylight hours outside. 

When not fogged in, the views were great.

Come winter, of course, all that changed. Wind squalls became blizzards. Just suiting up to get from the communal Pacific huts (basically a Quonset built of wood rather than steel) to the mess hall took a good twenty minutes with the Army-issue cold-weather gear of that era. Then you crawled through a snow tunnel to the surface and skittered across the snow crust to your destination, occasionally on all fours. Most huts kept a stash of food for times when they would burn more calories getting to a meal than they could take in once they got there. One of the many hazards of walking around on winter nights, was tripping over the chimneys of the buried huts. And there is a lot of winter night above the 50th parallel.

Chimneys were tripping hazards.

The huts had 16 x 36 feet of floor space and housed up to nine men apiece. Since hut assignments were not made by shift schedules, someone was pretty much always trying to sleep during someone else's time off. You could listen to the radio, at low volume; you could talk, likewise quietly; you could play cards. You could drink, if there was a beer issue or you could afford gray market hard liquor, but then you had to consider the certainty of navigating back up the slippery tunnel to the latrines or at least to the snow.


Murray spent most of his hut confinement reading, and writing letters or articles. He wrote almost daily to Rosa, and one way to chart the procession of dark months is to look at his salutations. Back in boot camp and his first island posting, on Adak in the spring, most of the letters started with variations on Dearest Nunny, My darling, Nunny darling, and the occasional Little Lover. By the time he reached Attu, at the western extreme of the Aleutians and the last months of his tour, he had branched out. Here's a selection:

My willowy one,

My quiet curassow,

O most delectable,

My Hemingway hating honey,

My pleasant capybara,

My incredibly loved infant,

My delectable darling

My wonderful wapiti

My passionate ptarmigan,

My adorable apple pie,

My favorite photographer,

My luscious little one,
My weird little watermelon,

Hello bodacious and beloved,
Allo my quaint little cabbage,

My cool charmant,

My bonnie ambivalent bivalve,

My pretty piltzer,    
My consummately constructed consort,

      

and in the last few weeks  before he was sent back to Seward on the mainland where she could join him (posing as his sister)

            My soon to be rejoined Rosita.

When she wrote to him she called him Butch.