Attu, 21 March 1945 -- "only forty days"

Home on Attu in March, 1945:  The tunnel to the hut entrance goes down 14 feet.

Attu, 4 March 1945 -- "the privilege of the salute"

my weary wapiti... 

"Negro USO" East Madison YMCA, Seattle, 1944. Rosa Morgan photo

...great is my delight in the pictures in the Y brochure. already three fellows have asked me to ask you to get the name and phone number of the little lass perched on the edge of the swimming pool. My favorite, like yours, is the shot of the east madison christmas party. there is a wonderful collection of faces in it; the girl to the right of the pianist looks like margo carlin, the one to the left belongs with hilda simms and lena horne, but the boy at the extreme right looks like an illustration for native son. 

I rather look forward to meeting pearly and lem, sometime around second week of our furlough. but would you start spreading the word that the morgans will not be "at home" during the early days of may. eight weeks from tomorrow and the ordeal is over ...

... Little lover, since writing yesterday I haven’t done a thing but sleep. I went down to the hut and decided to take a nap before supper and woke up, late to work this morning. And so there just isn't a thing to tell you about life in the Aleutians that I haven't told you so often before.

Oh, there was one thing. I told you that we were due to get classes in military courtesy because a couple of our boys have forgotten to salute the commanding [censored] Vern H, when a jeep breezed by without stopping, thumbed his nose at it in the mistaken impression it was the ACS mailman; it was an officer. So, yesterday, the first class in courtesy. I attended reluctantly but under compulsion. It was worth the time. Dave M, whose irony can be delicate, read from the field manual on the privilege of the salute, a privilege denied to civilians but done snappily by soldiers because of their pride in their profession. 

La, little lover. Only 56 days, 12 hours and 54 minutes.

You are adored,

M

Attu, 2 March 1945 -- "classes in military courtesy"

Hello bodacious and beloved...

Murray was getting over a cold

... My mistake was in getting some exercise or, to avoid all euphemism, in doing some work. I have told you about our rather strange tunnel into the hut. From time to time snow drifts into the entrance, making passage a major problem ... So on my day off I finally decided to take remedial action, i.e., grab a shovel. 

I dug for a solid six hours and when I was through I had constructed a lovely labyrinth with secret passages and, really, a trap door. It was the most fun I have had with snow since we last did Carr Street. All who beheld, wondered. The only trouble was that I sat in the snow myself and marvelled at the ice caves of APO 726. And verily, I say unto you, the cold I contracted was heavier than the bomb load of a B-29.

Gene ministered to me most touchingly, little lover. When I refused to get up for chow call he broke out a can of mushroom soup and heated it in his mess kit. He tells me it tasted good. ...

Big Ass Chess

... There are eight entries in what is known officially as the APO 726 Big Ass Chess Tournament. So far I have played Ross, 110% Johnson, and Jay-Bird Berry. We play two games each and are awarded ten points for each win, five for a draw or a stalemate and nothing for a loss. ... There is a $3.00 big ass prize (official nomenclature) and if I capture it I will buy you a doll to go with the shuffleboard ping-pong trophies. 

Big Smitty, who had the collection of phonograph records in our hut, finally got his furlough orders yesterday and will be down in Seattle in a few days, the fortunate individual. Yesterday he took his Courtesy Board test, and passed. This test is a neat little indignity inflicted on all outgoing army personnel from this post because too many of them got in trouble on their return to the states by forgetting to [censored]. Now we all have to pass an exam in military courtesy before we can leave the island. 

For that matter we are due to have classes in military courtesy right in the area. It seems that one of our local characters, a large-featured ox named Howard, who wanders around drawing pubic hairs on pin-up pictures, breezed by [censored] without saluting and, it is said, when called back by the offended dignitary, explained "ACS men don't salute their officers." Result: classes on courtesy and more memos on the bulletin boards. We are all supposed to read our field manuals on courtesy, too. 

Personally, I’d rather read Vanity Fair, into which I have gone a cold-fogged two-hundred odd pages. If I remember right, Nunny, you were not impressed by it; but I'm not sure I remember right. I find it charming. It is particularly interesting because it covers the same period, and the same social strata, in England as War and Peace did in Russia. ...

The local library has received a large shipment of books from the states, and in looking them over I was surprised to find all of the early Hemingway stuff, which is practically unobtainable: In Our Time, Torrents of Spring, and Winner Take Nothing. I am pleased at the prospect. There are also a couple of the histories of Alaska that I have been hunting for. 

I have also acquired a haircut, the first since the GI massacre of Station Two. The new one eliminated some of the more startling inequalities perpetrated by the Moldovian madman and might even meet you with approval. In the barber chair I read an article by Henry Pringle [biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and former journalism professor at Columbia University] on U.S. education. Pringle quotes, in apparent dismay, the answer of a college freshman to a test question on what was the major contribution of Teddy Roosevelt to the United States: "a large collection of animal heads." Another answer, held to be wrong, was that the traditional U.S. policy in China was "to get as much as we could for as little as possible." Which is a rather good description of the Open Door diplomacy. 

Churchill, FDR, Stalin, etc., at the Yalta Conference. Credit: Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard part but not all of the President's report on the Crimea Conference. It seemed to me to be a sweet and reasonable statement of the case for pure power politics. Since the only alternative to a world run by the three big powers is a world fought over by them, there is no choice but to support the Administration's policy. But as long as the Big Three retain individual sovereignty and independent economic interests, the possibility, or rather the probability, of a bigger and better war in another fifteen or twenty years is unpleasantly apparent. ...

My darling, my darling. When I woke this morning and looked at your pictures on each side of the bed I was able to think, "Less than two months." In fact, on the pink slip on the right of my bed I crossed out 60 and announced to the uncaring, solidly-slumbering multitude: "Fifty-nine days, five nine. I say again fifty-nine more days." In less than 1 month I put in my papers applying for a furlough. Take good care of yourself, my most adorable one. 

Your everloving, undeserving,

M