Gerry Howe Sprague’s first handwritten letter to her husband, Bill, was five pages. It spoke about how she missed him already. He’d just left Bremerton on the USS New Orleans in November of 1941, heading toward Pearl Harbor.
“Darling, can you smell the paint on my hands? If you can, it’s from the painting I have been doing every night since you left, to keep me busy and my mind off of you, which I find quite impossible.”
Her letter told of her tears and how “every song reminds me of you.”
“Do you feel sea sick yet,” she asked her husband.
His first letter to her was dated Nov. 15, 1941, from aboard the ship.
“We are almost in Pearl Harbor,” Bill wrote. “The sun has just gone down behind the island of Oahu, leaving a beautiful sunset. Appearances aboard the ship certainly have changed since yesterday. The reason being that today we changed to white uniforms. It will be good to put our feet on dry land tomorrow. It seems like such a long time since we pulled out of Bremerton. And yes, I saw you standing at the Narrows.”
These are just the first two letters in a large notebook filled with the wartime correspondences between husband and wife from November 1941 to September 1945, Pearl Harbor to D-Day, and Bill’s arrival back in the United States. The letters are on file at the Kitsap County Historical Society Museum and are a classic example of wartime military mail.
Susan Howe Hamilton, Bill and Gerry’s daughter, gave the volume of letters to the museum as a tribute to her parents. Included are some photographs of her parents, when they were married and a few of her father in his Navy uniform.
Hamilton, who lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, recently was in Bremerton and spoke about the letters.
“They were kept in a secret cupboard in my grandma’s house,” she said. “When I was probably about 9 years old, I found them. My cousins and I would dress up in my mother’s wedding dress and read the letters to each other, acting like we were grownups.”
Reading the letters is a trip back in history.
On Dec. 4, her father writes to her mother that he has just received four letters at once.
“Your precious letters arrived today,” he writes. “I’ve found that by being away from you, I know that the only way I can ever be happy is to be with you all the rest of my life. After all, that was why we were married, wasn’t it dear?
He thanks her for sending him some photographs and tells her to keep him advised as to her chances of coming to see him in Hawaii for Christmas. She was part of the family that owned the Mosquito Fleet (local ferry boats) and therefore had connections to be able to sail to Hawaii.
The next letter is written on Dec. 7, Sunday night at 7:30 p.m.
“Dear Bill: All day long I have been by the radio hearing nothing but the most terrible news I have ever had to take. Please honey…,”
She continues the next day at 8 a.m.
“I meant to finish but I listened to the news. They are saying 3,000 casualties and 1,500 dead. I can’t believe it. One of the reasons I wanted you to go to Honolulu and not to Ireland, was that I thought you would be safer there. The radio has made it remarkably easy to bring everyone to realize that we are at war. Seattle, Bremerton and all up and down the coast, we’re preparing for the same kind of attacks.”
As she writes on, she wonders about whether her letter will ever reach him, and when she will ever see him again. See speaks about blackouts from San Pedro, Calif, all the way up to coast to Alaska.
War time is at hand and soon Gerry receives a letter from the Matson Line dated Dec. 10, letting her know that “all sailings of the Matson Line have been cancelled.” She knows then that she will not be going to Hawaii for Christmas to see her husband.
Hamilton said she recalls that her mother learned that her father was safe through a phone call from family friends who lived in Hawaii. But it was not until Christmas Day that Bill wrote a letter to his wife, to tell her of the events of Dec. 7 and where he was.
“We were at the Beresfords (a family he knew in Honolulu) getting ready for breakfast when we turned on the radio,” he wrote. “They were saying ‘Keep off the streets. Stay calm. The island is under attack. This is not a drill.’”
He writes that he knew there was a Navy officer who lived next-door and he “realized it was imperative for me to get to the base, so I went to him and we drove in his car back to the base.”
As the letters tell, Bill is assigned to work in the commissary store in the Navy yard. He writes that he thinks his duty assignment in Hawaii will be his permanent assignment. But as other letters tell, he returns to Bremerton on the USS Nevada, is sent to California, and then Norfolk, and finally to Ireland. While in Europe, his ship is assigned off the coast of France and he takes part in D-Day in June of 1944.
The notebook includes a diary which Bill wrote during his time in Europe. Some of what he writes is:
May 19, 1944: Today I went aboard the USS Texas to hear Gen. Eisenhower speak. I stood close to him. Eisenhower looks just like his pictures.
May 30: Alerts are sounding due to German planes overhead.
June 4: We are on the west coast of England. Due to bad weather, D-Day has been postponed.
June 6: It was difficult to see if our forces were hitting the beach because of all the smoke in the air. We endured a two hour and 40 minute bombardment. By 1300, we could see troops on the beach. We fired 9,694 rounds.The smoke and debris is so thick that one couldn’t see well.
June 7: Troops are apparently getting along alright and dispatches received say everything had advanced on schedule.
July 4: We are underway to an undisclosed part of the Mediterranean Sea. We are picking up troops in Africa.
Sept. 14: We arrived in New York Harbor at 1300. New York sure looks wonderful after some of the places I have been.
Following this, his letters tell that he is assigned to Norfolk, but then gets orders to stay in New York. His wife and daughter join him and they have an apartment in Brooklyn, until the time comes that they move back to Washington state.
The envelopes for each letter are included in the notebook and all of Bill’s are stamped “Passed by Navy Censor.”
One letter dated May 3, 1944, and written on special V-Mail, which stood for Victory Mail, was written in what Hamilton called her father’s poetic romantic style.
He wrote: My Dear Wife … Is that the proper salutation for after one one’s third anniversary? It seems needless to say that you have been on my mind constantly and my greatest wish is that this be the last wedding anniversary that will find us apart.”
“From reading the letters, I could tell that my parents really loved each other,” she said. “I knew that, but not in the way that these letters say.”
There are many stories that Hamilton remembers of her parents and it is hard of her to speak of some of them. Her parents ended up getting divorced, something which she thinks stemmed from her father’s post war traumas.
“Back then, they didn’t call it Post Traumatic Stress,” she said. “But there was always something there. He didn’t talk about the war. I remember a time when I had to do a report for school about World War II and I asked him about it and he became very agitated.”
Despite that, she recalls her father and mother talking about how they met at the University of Washington, got married, he went off to war, and ultimately came back to Port Orchard to work in the family hardware store. He also served as mayor in Port Orchard from 1949 to 1953.
“After he was in Europe, my dad was assigned to shore duty in New York,” she said. “My mother went there to live with him and they had a small apartment. And when the war was over, I remember my mother telling me that dad took off his uniform and put it down the laundry shoot and they went out and celebrated in the city.”
As for the collection of letters, Hamilton said they are a sign of the times.
“That’s just what people did in those days,” she said. You wrote letters. That kept up until phone calls became cheaper. Back during Word War II, long distance was expensive.”
The letters are something that she wants to share with others even though they are very personal to her.
“Reading them made me feel closer to my parents,” she said. “They helped me understand how much love was there and how difficult it was for them to be apart so early in their marriage.
“My father was a very good writer. And my mother was very devoted to him.”