Dearest Letty: The World War II Love Letters of Sgt. Leland Duvall

TWO - Waiting for D-Day

T W O WaitingforD-day By early December , planning for the invasion of Normandy was well underway, although the great amphibious assault would not occur for another seven months. The Fifth Armored Division loaded its gear and headed for Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which, although it was  miles from the Port of New York, was an embarkation point for the army. Leland Duvall’s Eighty-Fifth Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron boarded the British ship Athlone Castle in the New York harbor on February , , and the convoy threaded its way across the Atlantic, by now largely cleared of German submarines , to southern England. Because of the enormous number of men, vehicles, and supplies on the ships, the soldiers bunked six deep in stifling quarters below deck and ate two sparse meals a day. The Athlone Castle arrived two weeks later in Liverpool. The men of the Eighty-Fifth Cavalry spent weeks drawing supplies and engaging in small-unit training there and then went by train on April  to the southwest tip of England for D-day preparations. The armored division would not be in the first assault on June  because it depended upon the installation of artificial harbors at Utah and Omaha beaches to get its heavy equipment on shore, but it helped run the training and marshaling camps for the first invasion force. Censorship would become more rigid once the men were headed for Europe, and until the final weeks of the war Duvall’s letters would not again say where he was or what he had been 3-DUVALL_final_pages:Layout 1 9/16/11 10:33 AM Page 129 doing, with the rare exception of when he was ensconced away from his unit and the censor. The opportunities and materials to write became far more scarce when his cavalry troop was dashing across France, Luxembourg, and Belgium or holed up in outposts distant from the headquarters. No longer could he scribble twelve pages on letterhead stationery either, at least until the Germans were in full retreat, his division went into repose, and he found real stationery. Soldiers were confined instead to the tiny forms of Victory Mail, or V-mail, which allowed you to pen one hundred words if you had a fine hand. V-mail shrank the massive volume of service correspondence and sped mail delivery. V-mail stationery functioned as both a letter and an envelope. Having completed his message in the space of about four square inches, the soldier or his correspondent back in the states wrote his return address and the recipient’s at the top and folded it into a self-mailing piece. It was microfilmed and turned into a letter again at a processing center. While Duvall could not specify the town, region, or country he was in, his unit’s location on any day can be established by the secret action logs kept by the commander and from military maps. Where he does not list it himself, Duvall’s approximate location in Europe is shown in brackets. h Indiantown Gap, Pa. Dec. ,  My Dearest Letty: Well, here I am in a new camp. I am full of surprises since I am doing the Army job. The element of surprise wins a lot of battles, you know. Maybe when the war is over and I come home I can come in suddenly and with great surprise so that you will be swept off your feet and marry me before you have time to think it over. We got here yesterday.That is, I got here yesterday. Most of the troops arrived a day earlier. They came down by cars while I stayed behind with a few men to clean up our area, ship the remainder of our equipment, etc.  Dearest Letty h 3-DUVALL_final_pages:Layout 1 9/16/11 10:33 AM Page 130 Then we came down by train. The trip took  hours, but we traveled rather slowly. It is really not so far. The trip was pleasant enough for me, but it was plenty tough for the poor guys who had to stand guard on the flatcars. It was around zero and you can imagine how that would be. I was sergeant of the guard so I only had to check when the train stopped. At that, it was plenty cold. To give you an idea of how bad it was, one chap had his goggles adjusted too tightly so that...