Letters to Don

By Denny Stokes

Like millions of his peers, Clint leaves farm, family, budding career, and flies into World War II, a new pilot in a new arm of the Army Air Corps, known as TROOP CARRIER COMMAND. Over a nineteen month span, Clint’s letters to his oldest brother chronical elements of training, deployment, combat, hi-Jinks and outlandish experiences, all while doing his part to bring down the Nazi war machine.
Limited by censorship and operational tempo, LETTERS TO DON follows Clint’s path, annotated by the larger saga of events and places swirling around the tale, as he shared it, with his big brother. Hidden in his words are anecdotes of deployed life, the stuff of war, a romance, and the experiences that forged soldiers like him, and those who soldiered on the home front, into the Greatest Generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387854455

Book preview

Letters to Don

LETTERS TO DON

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Denny Stokes

© 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Denny Stokes

All rights reserved.  This book or any part of this publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.  For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: 2018

ISBN: 978-1-387-77712-9

Book design by Denny

PREFACE

December 25, 1965, Alexandria, Virginia

20 years after the end of World War II

Smokey Stokes, known to his parents as Clint, received a photo album from his brother Don, the second oldest of the five Stokes siblings.  In addition to a couple of dashingly handsome photos, the album contained letters Clint had written to Don during his deployment in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) during World War II.  For the next 50+ years, the letters remained in the background of family memorabilia, until newly discovered photos, and renewed curiosity brought them forward.

November 2016, Fairfax, Virginia

Reading Clint’s letters to Don, seventy+ years after they were penned, is a bit like hearing one end of a telephone conversation, before the days of speakerphones, leaving one to ponder what the other side of the correspondence included. Donald Stokes was a brilliant man with significant impact on the world of business and agriculture, who enjoyed a distinguished career at the United States Department of Agriculture.  Don and his wife, Pauline, or Paul as she was often addressed, were new parents in 1943. Jimmy, their first of four children, was a toddler when Clint deployed in April of 1944.

Over the years, Clint shared many, but clearly not all stories from his combat service with close family.  His interest in aviation was life-long, though he never renewed his instructor’s license to give his son lessons, something that had often been discussed. 

Life had other plans.  We knew Clint as the man he had become, the father and husband that he was.  Through these letters, we have a glimpse of the young man we never met, and the challenges he, his wife Marilyn, and their generation stared down.

Clinton was the youngest of five siblings born in four calendar years to Lena and Glenn Stokes, family farmers just outside of Greenville Michigan.  In these letters we will meet, if obliquely, his oldest sister Velma, married to Rex, Don, Pauline, and Jimmy, Brother Alvin and his wife Hattie, Sister Vivian, her husband Dick, and Rance Dewitt, the youngest of Vivian and Dick’s three children.  These letters present a tantalizingly incomplete picture, a literary painting off the page, of family tree and times. 

So, we are left to wonder much, guess at some details, and read between the lines to discern what Clint’s life was like while deployed.  In addition to the one-sided nature of the process, there is the heavy hand of wartime censorship, only vaguely referred to, but ever present.  In addition, the Midwest can-do work ethic and uncomplaining stoicism reflects a writing style that, at times, is almost a code.  Clint was more than a bit circumspect and self-effacing in much of his language about shyness, overcoming shyness, relationships, fear, homesickness, love of family, a dog…. 

In the following pages I have come to know, to a small degree, Clint: a farmer, business economist, pilot, budding entrepreneur, flirt, loyal friend, family man, and a son who was particularly solicitous of his mother’s well-being.  More than anything, I have become aware of him as a very young man, farther from home in the world’s worst war than he, or any of his peers would have ever imagined, thanks to his…

Letters to Don.

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Edgar Clinton (Clint) Stokes

NOTES

Twenty-five letters were written by (Edgar) Clinton Stokes to his oldest brother Donald R. Stokes between the dates of February 23, 1944 and August 15, 1945, an interval of five hundred, thirty eight days. His letters arrived from several states, and spanned a deployment that included at least ten countries.

In this presentation, every attempt has been made to faithfully transcribe the writing, word for word, caps, punctuations, and phrases of the era, as written.  Where helpful, punctuations have been modified, and, at times, words in [brackets] are included to help clarify the text.  The variety of capitalizations, salutations and closing words reflect the un-edited, hand-written text of Lt. Stokes. 

Photos while deployed were taken by Clint.  No effort has been made to conform to 21st century style or sensibilities; with regard to content and sentiment…it is, what it was. 

Interspersed among the letters are comments, supplemental information and historical notes in italics, which will hopefully clarify the setting and/or the context of the letters.  The impact of war-time censorship cannot be overstated: events of major historical significance are referred to in such an off-hand manner as to minimize the impact of the moment.  Lt. Stokes notes this in one letter, implying that he had far more interesting things to report than that which was in his letters.

George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army, once said that the aircrews in their planes, and sailors in their ships faced the possibility of horrible deaths, but that if they survived the day, they slept in their own bed.  His point was that the soldier in the field bore special hardships even without facing mortal danger from across a line.  Whether because of that dynamic, or because he could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, Smokey was less reticent than some in sharing stories from the 19+ months of his overseas deployment.   His son was a willing listener…after all, airplanes were involved.

Those stories, plus recently recovered photographs, help fill in some of the gaps in this one-way conversation.  Relevant historical anecdotes, selected stock photos, and an overview of events unfolding at the time of the correspondence have been included to help illuminate his writing, and the personal, as well as global story Clint was unknowingly telling to future readers.  Knowing what was really happening in their world over there, even if the letters were about more mundane topics of deployed life, presents a dramatic contrast. All text noted in boldface reflects a person, place, date, event, or phrase, all imminently searchable, each representing a significant element of the World War II narrative.

This story is not a history of Troop Carrier Command in