September 6 and 11, 1943.Two letters from Dad to home. He spends a good bit of the September 6th letter advising Anna on the status of his income tax payments. He essentially tells his sister that she should advise the IRS that he is in the Army. “…it would be a good idea to let them know about it. We don’t have to pay any installments or file any declarations until March 15th. I didn’t even have to pay that June installment….Give the internal revenue my address and tell them not to bother you people with such trash. We have our own lawyers on the base who take care of any [of] our matters and these officers know their business.”
As far as a transfer overseas, Dad writes that at this time it is unlikely. “Around here it seems that we will never see the other side. Several fellows have requested transfers into overseas training units…at they felt they would never see foreign service.
He mentions that it is unlikely that he will advance beyond buck sergeant “unless some unforeseen things happen. Anyway, we will be able to tell our generation that we were Sgts. It sounds a lot better than Pvt. 1st Class.”
In his P.S. of the letter of the 6th he mentions that he will be receiving 6 hours of training in “Decontamination and Incendiary Fighting against Chemical Warfare by enemy means.” Although he is not certain why he is receiving the training he says “That’s the Gov’t Army way of doing things.”
P.S. form Dad;s Sept. 6, 1943 letter detailing the additional training he will be receiving.
His letter of the 11th is written while he is on CQ duty and has “a lot of time and plenty of typewriters”. He is in a pretty good mood and makes a few jokes, even one at the expense of a cousin when he writes, “Now that Vicek Morawski is in the Army the War shouldn’t be too long. He never held a job for more than 6 months, remember?”
Dad encloses a clipping about a show that he saw at the Service Club featuring actor Walter Abel “you might recall seeing him in pictures and I did see him in the one we had at this post in ‘So Proudly we Hail’ in which he played the part of a chaplain.” Dad also includes a clipping for Eddie about how to care for guns, but writes “I doubt whether Eddie needs any instructions because he is an old hand at shotguns.”
He goes on to comments on Anna’s letters that Albany now sounds like “Mama’s former days when babies were sprouting out from the most unexpected places and baby carriages practically outnumbered cars. I guess it is what the war brought about.” He contrasts the situation with that in some European countries, “in Poland and the other countries quite a toll of male lives have been taken that they figure that in Poland alone it would take 50 yrs. to bring the total population to what it was in 1939, and serious talk by some experts and people that polygamy could be legalized… I wonder how the Church would stand on such matters.” As far as the news that Anna is not pregnant, Dad comments, “Perhaps your expected baby, although it may not come now, maybe it will come around when this war is over and your brother Stanley is around. Wouldn’t that be worth praying for?”
Dad also gets around to some of the war news. “You probably know about Italy surrendering and the Germans trying to take over part of Italy so’s that fighting would be mostly on somebody elses soil and not their own. As soon as their Dam ed ground is attacked, they think its time to quit war until they take the countries for another sucker ride in a few years. They ought to give Germany over to the Jews for a punishment…then perhaps they would realize how it feels to be subjected…”
New York Times front page of September 9, 1943 with the news of the surrender of Italy.
It’s late at night as he signs off “I think I will try to get a little bit of sleep as it is 1:00 AM.”