The Mystery of PFC Breslen's World War II Letter

After my parents died a few years ago, my brother and I found among their possessions a diary that revealed a family secret we didn’t know. Our paternal grandfather had a wife and child before he married our grandmother, and it appears he left the first wife under less than honorable circumstances. Likewise, a World War II letter I found on eBay a while back held a surprising secret for a family in Vermont. Let’s start at the start.

I periodically search eBay for postcards and letters written by soldiers during WWII. If I see an item where I can identify and locate descendants of the soldier, I alert them to it in case they want it. Over the course of this year I’ve connected several families with letters and postcards, along with one heirloom Bible carried by a pilot who was killed in the war.

A few weeks ago I spotted a letter that was written by Marine PFC George Breslen in 1943. The letter was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Allen C. Greer in Indianapolis, parents of one of PFC Breslen’s Marine buddies. The salutation was, “Dear Mom and Pop Greer,” and the letter went on to assure them that their son Johnny was doing fine in the Marines.

My research showed that PFC Breslen survived the war, married, and had children. His wife, Josephine, died in 1974, and he died in 1979 at age 56.  With a little more research I located his son, Jeff Breslen, who lives in Vermont, and sent him an email telling him where to find the letter on eBay. He replied with a very cordial note thanking me for the information. He said the letter was especially important to him because he was only 11 when his dad died and he knew very little about his father’s WWII service.

Jeff and I both wondered why PFC Breslen was writing to the Greers. He contacted the eBay seller and learned that the seller had bought a group of letters from an estate sale for the Greers, and had even more letters from PFC Breslen to Mr. and Mrs. Greer. Jeff bought all the letters, and they contained a surprise. As Jeff tells it:

“The most perplexing thing in the letters was when my father references ‘his new wife June!’  My older sisters recall that my father was engaged during the war to a June from Australia but they were, according to them, never married.  In fact they remember occasionally when my mother was angry with my father making comments like “You should have married June!”  He references June as his wife several times in the letters.  We’re all curious if in fact he was married to her and that little fact wasn’t made known to anyone else.  I guess maybe one day we can ask him!!”

As for why PFC Breslen was writing to the Greers, the letters were inconclusive. Jeff explained:

“(The letters) were very interesting.  Unfortunately they didn’t shed any light on why he was writing to the Greers.  It sounded like their son also wrote to them so I think my father also did to emphasize that the Greer’s son was doing well.  I sensed that maybe their son asked my father to do it to ease some fears of the war and to confirm he was safe. The letters didn’t have a lot of details about the war or what they were doing.  Quite a few comments about how important it was to be serving and that they were hopeful it would end soon.  There were two letters from late 1943 and two from 1944 – April and June.  It appears that based on what he talks about there must have been more letters but for some reason they weren’t in the box that the seller bought at the estate sale.

Jeff said his brief searches for a “June Breslen” in Australia have not turned up anything. Maybe I’ll join the search . . .

The Long Journey of Private Walter A. Riggs and His World War II Postcard to Mary

For several years now I’ve been finding long lost WWII postcards and returning them to the families of the soldiers who wrote them. I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m the only person who does this. Turns out there’s at least one other – Arden Anderson of Palo Alto, California. He and I have never met in person, but we collaborated online to return a postcard to a family in Texas who lost a loved one in Italy in World War II. Here’s how it happened.

I recently spotted a card for sale on eBay postmarked Feb. 8, 1943. It was mailed from Italy by Private Walter A. Riggs to Miss Mary Clausen in Spokane, Washington. The photo side of the card depicts a "Femme Maure" (Moorish woman). In his return address, Private Riggs included his Army Service Number (38111307). Having that number makes it much easier to track down a soldier. From the National Archives database of WWII enlistments I learned that Private Riggs was born in 1918 and was from Lavaca County, Texas. Further searching revealed that he died in Italy on July 16, 1944, and is buried at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy. When I learn information of this sort, I sometimes pass it along to the eBay seller to add more detail to the listing. I sent the seller (who turned out to be Arden Anderson) a message through eBay, giving him a link to Private Rigg’s memorial listing on the web site of the American Battle Monuments Commission.  He replied:

“Thank you for pointing this out and for the great web address. I bought this post card in an antique shop in Spokane, WA. After getting home I thought that it should go to this guy’s family. I searched the internet and found a Walter A. Riggs from Seattle who died at 92 years old and I tried to contact his family without any luck. I will search for a Walter A. Riggs from Texas. Thanks, again.”

I was pleased to find another person who shares my interest in returning these postcards to families. I began searching, and from information on Ancestry.com was able to identify some of Private Riggs’ relatives in Texas.  I passed this information along to Mr. Anderson. He's even more diligent than me, because a few hours later he emailed me:

“This morning I spoke to a nephew of Walter A. Riggs and I am sending the postcard to him. The sister of Walter A. Riggs is still alive at 96 and so is the girl he was going to marry. The nephew told me that he was killed in a truck accident in Naples, Italy. They were just about to go home after the war and they were sightseeing before heading home.”

The nephew sent Mr. Anderson a collage of photos of Private Riggs, and he forwarded them to me. They show a handsome, strapping young man. In one photo he's posing with a car, and in another is with a group of friends, wearing a letter jacket.

Photos of Walter Riggs provided by his family.

I was curious as to how Private Riggs, from Texas, was connected to Mary in Spokane. Mr. Anderson's research showed that Mary was about 19 years old at the time. I did some more searching and learned that Mary married Howard Grimsrud in 1946. She died in 2012 at the age of 90. Her obituary (http://tinyurl.com/omoqszr) revealed that she volunteered at a USO and worked in personnel at Galena Field in Spokane during the war. It's likely that she met Private Riggs at the USO or Galena Field, he asked for her address, and she obliged. I contacted Mary's sons in Spokane, and they confirmed that she received and wrote a number of postcards to soldiers during the war.

So the story of Private Riggs and his postcard has come full circle. He survived combat, only to die in an accident before he could return to the States and marry the girl back home. Mary married a soldier and lived a long life. Walter and Mary briefly crossed paths, and the postcard that connects them is with his family. And now I know at least one other person who shares my interest in the stories behind these WWII postcards.

With Love From Mother -- A WWII Soldier's Bible

During WWII, it was common for newly enlisted soldiers to be presented with a pocket Bible given by their family or church. Many of these Bibles had a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the front. Some had a metal cover and were called "heart shield Bibles." Such Bibles seem to be appearing on eBay with increasing frequency. The soldiers are dying out, and these Bibles are probably being sold at estate sales, especially in cases where the soldier had no children who would want to keep them.

A couple of times recently I've purchased one of these Bibles and returned it to the family. Today I ran across one that struck me as particularly poignant. It was a tiny New Testament and Psalms inscribed with the name "Robert H. Thompson, Co. K, 12th Infantry." It was signed, "With Love From Mother."

Any thought of returning it to the family disappeared quickly when I started researching. There was no indication of his Army Service Number, where he lived, or when he joined the service, the clues that help find people. The unit number is little help, because soldiers changed units often and there are no comprehensive databases that list that information. My primary source of information is the National Archives' database of WWII enlistments, which contains more than nine million names. Unfortunately, there are 75 men named "Robert H. Thompson" in the database. Four men by that name were killed in the war. I suppose this Bible will become one more piece of lost history for some family.

Gene and Adeleen Bangs -- A WWII Love Story

It took more than five years, but I finally found "the rest of the story"
of an intriguing WWII postcard that I

Scrapbook with Gene Bangs' postcard and postmarks

picked up in an antique store.

 

Sometime around 2009, while living in Richmond, Kentucky, I found a scrapbook page in an antique store near Lexington, Kentucky. The page contained a postcard written by Corporal Eugene Bangs to his wife, Adeleen, in Lexington, along with a photo of a man in uniform, presumably Corporal Bangs. The page also contained about 70 postmarks that were meticulously cut out and pasted on the page.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find information on Gene or Adeleen. The scrapbook page and postcard went into my “too tough” pile, and there it stayed for several years. A year or so ago I revisited the file and, with information found in obituaries, located Corporal Bangs’ niece, Barbie Freed, who lives in Lexington, Illinois. (There are too many Lexingtons in this story.) Barbie provided information about Gene and Adeleen and sent a selection of photos from family albums.

Eugene was born in 1918, grew up in Dows, Iowa, earned a degree in engineering, and was working for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad when he was inducted into the Army in April 1942. He was assigned to an Army unit in Lexington, Kentucky, housed at the Phoenix Hotel, a Lexington landmark that is now gone.

 While in Lexington he met Adeleen Gilbert, a local girl who worked at the University of Kentucky. They were married in Lexington on December 19, 1942. He must have shipped out in the next few weeks, because the scrapbook contains postmarks from Texas dated January 1943. Adeleen stayed in Lexington and continued working at the university while Gene served his country. I don’t know much about Gene’s service, except that he served in engineering units. In one photo he’s wearing a Staff Sergeant’s stripes, and at the end of the war he was in France.

After the war he went back to work for the railroad as a bridge inspector, and he and Adeleen lived in Skokie, Illinois. They did not have children. One of the photos Barbie sent me shows them on a cruise ship in 1960, and in another photo Adeleen is standing in front of a group of totem poles in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gene died in 1968, and Adeleen passed away in 1980.

During WWII, letters and postcards were the primary link between men in the service and their wives back home. There was, of course, no email or Facebook, and even a phone call was rare. I find it touching to think of Adeleen sitting home in Kentucky, carefully cutting out every postmark from Gene’s postcards and putting them in a scrapbook. I also marvel at these wartime marriages. Gene and Adeleen only knew each other a few months before they married, and less than a month later he was off to war and didn't return for nearly three years.

We’re rapidly losing “Greatest Generation” people like Gene and Adeleen Bangs. I’m glad we still have postcards and photos to tell their stories.

Adaleen (top left) and Gene (top right) in undated family photos; on a cruise in 1960, and Adaleen in British Columbia..

Bible Belonging to Downed WWII Pilot Returned to His Family After 71 Years

I recently had the rewarding experience of tracking down the nephew of an American aviator who was killed in WWII and returning a New Testament that was presented to the pilot by his church in 1942.

The Terryville (Connecticut) Congregational Church presented the pocket-size New Testament (see photos below) to Lt. Earle Gilbert Metcalf in June 1942. Lt. Metcalf flew B-24 Liberator bombers in the 703rd Squadron, 445th Bomb Group, 8th Army Air Corps. He and his crew went missing and were presumed dead when their bomber, “Billy Babe #427523,” disappeared over the North Sea on Feb. 2, 1944.

The bodies of Lt. Metcalf and his crew were never recovered. He is honored with monuments in the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in England, and the Hillside Cemetery in Terryville.

Marker in memory of Lt. Metcalf in Terryville, CT.

In April of this year, I noticed the Bible while looking at World War II items on eBay. While I generally focus on postcards, this item piqued my interest. I bought the Bible and, with a little internet research, located Lt. Metcalf’s nephew and namesake, Earle Robert (Rob) Metcalf of Waunakee, Wisconsin, and gave him the Bible.

No one knows for sure where the Bible has been for the past 70 years. Rob Metcalf says it might have been inadvertently left in the family home in Connecticut when Lt. Metcalf’s parents moved out or, more likely, Lt. Metcalf passed it along to a comrade whose family eventually disposed of it.

Rob Metcalf has done a great deal of research on his uncle. Lt. Metcalf’s unit was commanded by the actor Jimmy Stewart, who served in the Army Air Corps during the war. Lt. Metcalf and his crew flew a bomber named “Nine Yanks and a Jerk” from the United States to Britain via South America and Africa. Rob Metcalf’s research indicates Stewart sometimes flew that aircraft. Read more about Jimmy Stewart's service here http://www.historynet.com/mr-stewart-goes-to-war.htm.

The story of the 703rd Squadron is told in the book, “A Reason to Live,” by John Harold Robinson (1921-2011), who was a Staff Sergeant in the unit. Robinson shared a hut with Earl Doggett, who was a member of Lt. Metcalf’s crew. One of Doggett's relatives has a blog that includes photos of Lt. Metcalf and his crew. http://www.charliedoggett.net/joomla/index.php/family-history/family-history-intro/earl-doggett-war-hero/47-earle-s-flight-crew-by-lena-degregory


These pocket New Testaments were common during WWII. They included a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some had a metal cover and were called "Heart Shield Bibles."

A very similar case of a WWII Bible being returned to the family occurred in England a few months ago. Read about it here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/11457056/Pocket-Bible-lost-during-World-War-Two-lands-home-after-70-years.html

The person who sold me the Bible said he got it from a veteran in Maine who collected WWII Bibles. He had several other, similar Bibles for sale, but so far I've been unable to find any family members of the men whose names appear in them. But maybe if I keep searching . . .