V-mail, short for Victory Mail, was a process used to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad during World War II. To cut the cost of transferring an original letter through the military postal system, a V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
Life moved fast for Max F. Eysenbach in December 1941. On Saturday, Dec. 6, he married Mary Elizabeth Herron. The next day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Two days later, he was a citizen of a country at war.
For the just-married Eysenbach and millions of other Americans, the war interrupted what should have been the best years of their lives. Friends, family and the familiar were sacrificed for the lonely, usually boring, occasionally terrifying world of wartime military duty.
Letters provided a bridge to home, and some of those letters from nearly eight decades ago found their way into the archives of the Allen County Historical Society.
Eysenbach was born in 1914, grew up in Lima and attended Central High School before his family moved to Lakewood around 1930.
“As a young man,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in his October 2019 obituary, “he had a window treatment business by day and was a Big Band drummer at night.”
By 1944, he was a sergeant in the headquarters of an Army infantry division in the South Pacific.
In August of that year, while stationed in New Guinea, he wrote to a relative in Lima, noting that “it has been a couple of years since I have had a breathing spell” to write. “Soon it will be six months since my arrival on this forsaken country. It didn’t take me long to become acclimated and soon settled down to a life, believe it or not, much pleasanter than the nine month ‘sentence’ I spent in Mississippi,” he wrote.
Five months later, in mid-January 1945, Eysenbach was in the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) when he took time to write his Lima relatives.
“This area in which we are now living is very lovely,” he wrote. “Our office is less than 100 yards from the ocean therefore we usually have some kind of breeze to help keep us cool. The tent in which I sleep is about 50 feet from the water’s edge so that it makes it very convenient for swimming.”
Following the war, Eysenbach moved to the Chicago area where he opened a painting and decorating business and where he and Mary Elizabeth raised five children. He died at the age of 105 in October 2019.
Kent E. McClain was born in August 1916 in Lima, the son of Frank E. McClain, who served as Lima’s mayor from 1939 to 1943. He graduated from Central High School in 1934. In September 1942, he married Eloise Cox.
“Hello Gang,” he wrote Nov. 1, 1944. “Well, here I am at a rest area somewhere in Holland. Boy is this the life! We are staying in a hotel and being treated like kings or something. Sleeping in beds between sheets even. The first time that has happened since I was home, and the first time I haven’t slept with all my clothes on since the 1st of August.”
In mid-December 1944, the Germans launched a counterattack in Belgium in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, which would last until the end of January 1945. Writing from Belgium at the end of December, McClain, a private, sounded a hopeful note.
“Surely the coming year can’t be as bad as this last one,” he wrote. “Though things do look bad over here, maybe we will get going again one of these days.”
Then, he added a cautious note about an enemy many believed was already beaten.
“No matter what your politicians back there say, the Germans are far from being whipped, and the over-optimism has already prolonged the war quite a few months,” he wrote.
McClain, who was awarded the Bronze Star and several other medals during the war, went to work as a safety coordinator and CPR instructor for Marathon Oil Co. in Findlay after he came home. He retired in 1980 and died in June 1983 at the age of 66.
George M. Pugh, of Lima, was 18 years old when the United States entered World War II. He enlisted in the Army in March 1943 and was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division. In mid-May 1945, Corp. Pugh wrote a long letter home about his division’s adventures as they pushed the Germans up the Italian peninsula.
“During the afternoon we were stopped for a short time at a crossroads. While setting there the major riding with me happened to look down the other road and here came a German convoy toward ours. We had advanced so fast that the Germans thought they were still in friendly territory,” he wrote, adding that the Germans were so surprised they gave up without firing a shot.
Pugh was released from the Army in November 1945. In September 1950 married Eileen Mae Altic, and they raised four children. He became chief operator of Lummus Combustion Engineering of Bloomfield, N.J. He died at the age of 71 in January 1995.
John J. Prosser was in his mid-40s when World War II began. Prosser was born in Baltimore, Md., in 1893 and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1919. He was at St. Gerard’s in Lima when he was drafted into the Army in 1942 to serve in a medical battalion. During the war, he corresponded with Mrs. H.B. Longsworth, of the Allen County Historical Society, who was collecting letters and artifacts.
Writing in April 1945 as U.S. troops advanced into Germany, Prosser noted that his unit was quartered in a former Gestapo headquarters.
“Two hundred yards from the home are the stables. About 25 Russian and French slave laborers are quartered there,” he wrote. “Prior to our conquest of this area they lived in these stables and barns sleeping on hay pallets. The master race overseers dwelt in the house next to the stables, but now the former slaves are in the houses.”
In another letter, Prosser wrote of some books he had sent to Longsworth.
“I didn’t, at the time, realize that these publications were on the prohibited mailing list – neither did the censor of our unit,” he wrote.”I gathered up a lot of Hitler youth manuals, films and other training material. The unit censor refused to pass them, and I had to discard the items.”
In the same letter, Prosser wrote of finding some German civilians camping in a small wood.
“They were sprawled out on the ground, their only shelter being the trees overhead and an occasional scrap of canvas,” he wrote. “The group was composed mainly of women, a few old men and about 40 babies totaling in all 300 or so. In five minutes I was nearly swamped. Name any ailment, and you could pick out some person having it.”
Prosser added, “I sorted out five of the most serious cases and drove 10 miles to a German hospital. At first the hospital head refused to accept these patients. I finally convinced them that they were in no position to refuse any request.”
Prosser died in Lancaster, Penn., in April 1969. He was 76 years old.
Former Lima resident Anthony Del Favero, a staff sergeant, saw the other end of the German social spectrum when his unit visited Adolf Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden in June 1945, about a month after Germany surrendered.
“The whole estate was so well camouflaged that the Air Force had to bomb by instrument,” Del Favero wrote in a letter published in The Lima News in June 1945. “I saw so many bathrooms in this house. I wondered if Hitler was actually that dirty. It’s too bad that Hitler couldn’t have been taking a bath about the time of the bombing.”
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
