Love Letters Straight from the Heart

By John Brug, Jacob Brug and Jean Brug

This memoir is based on four years of love letters by a young couple, Jake and Jean, during World War II. It provides insights not only about the experiences of Marines during the war but insight into life for their fiancees and wives on the homefront. It also deals with political, economic, and morale conditions during the war,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678199241

Book preview

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Love Letters

Straight From

The Heart

Jake Brug

Jean  Brug

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Love Letters

Straight From

The Heart

Jake Brug

Jean Brug

with John Brug

Copyright Page

VJ Holmes Publishing

3652 92nd Place

Sturtevant, WI  53177

Copyright © by John Brug 2021

Printed by Lulu

ISBN 9 781678 199241

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Prologue

This book tells the story of one family’s experience during World War II. It is woven around the letters of Jake and Jean, which were written during the four years from 1942 to 1945 when Jake was serving in the US Marines. During the first two years, Jake and Jean were looking forward to marriage. In the middle of Jake’s four years in the Marines, Jake and Jean got married. Near the end of the four years, while Jake was 7,000 miles away on his way to Okinawa,the last great battle of the war, Jean gave birth to their first child, a son, Johnnie.

This is not the story just of Jake and Jean but also of other members of their families, both those left behind on the home front and those who served in other theaters of the war. How did the members of these two families try to remain calm in the midst of the swirl of emotions caused by the war? The letters never directly mention the horrors of war that surrounded the deployed soldiers. The letters all try to carry on ordinary daily life in a world that had gone mad. The letters focus on preserving the routine activities of daily life and on developing a measure of patience and compassion for other people even during the storm of war.

In his letters from the battle zone, the deployed Marine Jake regularly says, No news from here. Everything is fine, but the reality swirling around him was quite different. Woven between the calm of the letters are descriptions of what was really happening on the battlefields where Jake and his brother Fred were deployed. These descriptions, gathered from other sources, provide context for the letters.

This book also conveys the feeling of what life was like for those who remained behind on the home front. Although nothing can compare to the burdens borne by those on the front lines of battle, those left behind at home were also bearing the burdens and feeling the pressure of war. Things were much tougher on the home front during World War II than during America’s more recent wars.

With the last World War II veterans now leaving the scene, it is a good time for Americans, especially the youngest generation, to reflect on the wartime experiences of what has been called the Greatest Generation.

Though this account contains much history, it is not a history in the strict sense of the word. It is more of a memoir. Or to put it another way, it is a blend of memoir and Wikipedia level history. It has to record events, but its focus is more on the feelings of those who lived through these events.

This book is different from many of the other outstanding books about the war in the Pacific, such as Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed, which focus on the horrors of frontline infantry combat and on the bravery of Medal of Honor winners.

This book focuses instead on the experiences of ordinary Marines who stood behind the infantry, both those who kept them supplied on the battlefield and those who contributed to the war effort in safe places far from the front lines. It is addressed not so much to the generations who experienced the war and those who knew the participants, but to their grandchildren and great grandchildren, to help them meet and remember those who served to preserve liberty not only for America but for the world.

For readers who want footnotes and details, a list of resources is provided at the end of the book. But for now, let us just relive the experiences of those caught up in this terrible war.

This is the story of one of the thousands of Marines, who were just ordinary people with no desire to be soldiers, who served in good places and bad places, who served in battle zones but not on the frontlines of infantry combat, who did not receive a Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart, but who volunteered to do their duty for their families and their country.

Formatting and Notes

The letters

The surviving letters are only a small portion of the hundreds of letters written by Jake and Jean during those four years. The letters that Jake received from Jean during his overseas deployments have not survived.  A cross-section of Jake’s letters to Jean, which she received in the United States, has been preserved. Creating a narrative from these letters is like trying to reconstruct a telephone call when you have overheard only one half of the conversation. Though the letters provide only partial coverage of the four years, they are clustered around key points, which is probably why those particular letters were saved. They are enough to reconstruct Jake and Jean’s experience, an experience shared by thousands of others.

Format

The letters are set off by indentation to highlight them.

Paragraphs that serve as footnotes to the letters, explaining points in the letters for the reader, are indented so that they line up with the letters.

Paragraphs that provide narration between the letters are indented two spaces like this one is.

For the most part spellings and idiosyncrasies of the letters are left as is, but occasionally punctuation or words are added to assist the reader.

Love Letters Straight From the Heart

Love letters straight from your heart

Keep us so near while apart.

I'm not alone in the night

When I can have all the love you write.

These words from a 1945 popular song describe the emotions faced by thousands of young men and women between 1942 and 1945 as they were torn apart from each other by World War II. Many of them were newlyweds, who had recently married on the eve of the groom’s deployment to a war zone, even though they both realized that there was a good chance that the new husband might never return to his bride. For many of them, their first child was born while the father was on a far-away Pacific island, out of touch with his pregnant wife for long periods of time because it was not possible for their letters to keep up with the island-hopping moves of the troops. Fathers sometimes did not meet their first child until many months after his or her birth. Some, of course, never returned home to see that child at all. Sometimes neither letter-writer knew where their partner was because of the secrecy of troop movements, the inability of the mail to keep up with the troops, and breaks in the communications from the stateside partner.

Many couples lived with a fear common for newly-weds at the time—a young wife awaited the birth of her first child alone while her husband was far away at war, neither of them knowing whether the father would ever return to meet his child. This book tells the story of one such couple based on their wartime letters.

The feeling of being torn apart that was experienced by these World War II couples was not entirely different from the separations faced by couples during more recent deployments due to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the separations during World War II, especially in the Pacific Theater, were much more stressful in an era when long-distance phone calls were not readily available or affordable even within the US, and there was no email, no texting, no Zoom, and no Skype. An exchange of letters sometimes took a month or more. Men were enlisted for the duration, and some of them served overseas for up to three years without leave.

Letters, which in many circumstances were limited to a pencil-written page or two, were written on small military stationary, and passed through military censors. They were the life-line that connected these men and women through these four years.

The letters that form the basis of this book were written by a young couple named Jean and Jake between 1942 and 1945. As we re-tell the story told by these letters, we will refer to Jake and Jean only by their first names so that they can more easily represent the thousands of other women and men who shared the same experiences.

One Nation—Many Tensions

There were still strong racial divisions in America during the war, especially in the South (but not limited to the South). These divisions had an impact on the military. It was also commonplace for different European ethnic groups, even those who were American citizens, to refer to each other by ethnic names that would not be considered politically correct today. Most Asians were completely banned from immigration to America. The war did not cure these problems, but the experiences of Jake and Jean’s families during the war show how some movement was made in the right direction toward greater understanding and sympathy for others.

The one nation was faced with many divisions and polarizations, not only between blacks and whites but between rich and poor, between the Eastern establishment and those who lived in the West and Midwest, between those who idolized President Roosevelt and those who hated him, between those who blamed capitalism for the Depression and those who saw the might of America’s  capitalistic industrial system as the savior of the world from totalitarianism.  There was intense support for the troops and the war effort but questions about the way the war was being run and the competence of those running it. Most people were willing to endure hardships, but many were skeptical of the fairness of the system. Each of these tensions and the many others we can’t mention here challenged America during the war to be not only a melting pot of peoples, but a melting pot of ideas that were struggling to find common ground.

New Citizens in the Melting Pot

Before we jump into the story told in the letters, we need to see how Jean and Jake came to be American citizens and how they fit into the melting pot of peoples and ideas. The immigrant backgrounds of many of those who fought in the war and the story of how their families became Americans are an important part of understanding the participants’ feelings about America and the