My mother-in-law Madelyn possesses an amazing institutional memory. In her eighties now, she grew up the second youngest of ten children born to an Irish immigrant and a woman raised in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. Her uncle Patrick served in the Confederacy--yes, the Confederacy!--in the 7th Virginia Cavalry.
Three of her brothers were drafted and served during World War II. Barney served in the European theater. Mike, stuck at Fort Bragg despite his desire to go overseas, and wounded when, as an instructor, he threw himself on a grenade carelessly activated and mistakenly dropped by a trainee. He lost an arm and a leg, and never did get overseas.
Then there was Clayton.
Clayton was among the first fathers of children conceived before Pearl Harbor to be drafted. Despite prevalent rumors that all men over the age of 26, especially fathers, were going to be kept stateside, he was sent to Europe and took part in the advance across France. On December 18, he was taken prisoner and killed in the early part of the Battle of the Bulge.
Clayton was married to Hazel and, in 1944 when he went off to basic training, their daughter Sue Ellen was two and a half. Hazel and Clayton were devoted to each other; they were passionately in love even after seven years of marriage, and wrote to each other as often as they could. On Jan. 22, just after he left for induction she wrote to him
This sure has been one lonesome Sat. & Sun. nite. I don't even feel like listening to the radio. I guess it will be one of many. But I'm doing my best not to worry too much. I try to hold my chin up and smile.
All through basic training they wrote almost every day. Hazel kept his letters.
After he was killed, his effects were shipped home. Hazel boxed everything up and put the box away. She remarried and had more children. Sue grew up and had children of her own. Somewhere along the line, the box disappeared. Whenever I heard about Clayton, what I heard was that he was a natural mechanic, loved airplanes, and died in the Battle of the Bulge. Clayton's brother Wilson once told my husband Andy that he had tracked down a guy in Clayton's company who had been taken prisoner with him.
The Germans who captured Clayton and his buddies in Company A, 9th Infantry, were commanded by a hastily-promoted and extremely nervous former Hitler Youth, who panicked and shot Clayton after capture, wounding him. The guy Wilson talked to said he carried Clayton as they were marched away to a prison camp behind the lines. By the time they stopped for the night, the wounded man he'd picked up was dead. When his buddies asked (as Wilson later asked) why he carried a dead man all day, he answered that Clayton had died around midday, but there was no way he was going to leave him lying on the side of the road.
That was all we knew, and what we knew was quite a story.
Then, a few years ago, one of Sue Ellen's grandchildren stopped at Madelyn's house and brought the box of his effects. Someone had found it in the family barn, and no one wanted it. But everyone knew that Madelyn had adored her brother and collected local history. She took the box gladly, asked Andy to look at it with her, and Andy told me it was an amazing collection of letters and documents, everything from Clayton's birth certificate to his death notices. Even letters that family had written but Clayton had not received before he was killed were there, still unopened.
A few months ago, Madelyn brought the box to us. We glanced through it; Madelyn had tried to organize the documents into different periods of Clayton's life--school years, his first job with the railroad, Hazel's sympathy cards, but the bulk to the collection was an unsorted pile of letters. She had tried but stopped because, despite the passage of time, it was just too painful.
I told her I would organize it as soon as I got through with the project that was then occupying me--a jumbled archive of local history documents inherited by a friend whose great-aunt had written her family's genealogy. It was the perfect project to let me re-sharpen my neglected archival skills before tackling the Clayton archive.
I started by sorting the letters . The first one was written on January 16, 1944, right after Clayton left home for the induction center. He died on December 18 of that year, but official correspondence continues through 1945. There are around 500 letters, covering almost a year.
While in Basic Training, Clayton kept all the letters he received, so letters from his wife Hazel, his brothers and sisters, his mother, and friends, are all there. Hazel kept all his letters. When he was shipped overseas, apparently he couldn't keep correspondence, because only his V-Mail letters home are in the collection.
I've read 250 letters so far, and am not quite through Clayton's basic training. This first half of the archive is a time capsule; Hazel's letters provide a window into life in a small rural town in 1944, while Clayton's give a day-by-day account of basic training, albeit somewhat limited to the subjects a wife would find acceptable. Clayton and Hazel both write about the pending European invasion and the disposition of new soldiers, local politics, homesickness and their longing for each other. When either of them got discouraged, depressed, homesick, lonely, they would write, "My chin is up." It was their way of assuring each other they would find a way through; they were both living for the day they would be together again.
The second half of the archive are composed of the letters that Clayton wrote home while he was overseas, using V-Mail . I've barely looked at them yet. Presumably soldiers on deployment couldn't keep letters from home, because there are no letters from Hazel or other family members from that period, not until Clayton was declared missing and the letters returned.
V-Mail is an amazing letter system. A V-Mail is a 1-page letter that a soldier would write on a form. It would be reviewed and passed by a censor, then shrunk and photocopied onto a 4" x 5" form, which was then mailed.
Monday, Aug. 28 - 44
Dearest Hazel,
Will write a few lines today. I did not get a chance to write yesterday, we were on the move and I got to see a good deal more of France. We are near a small town. Looks like a couple dozen houses, a large Church and very little activity. Most all small towns look alike and they are all off Limits to us so there is very little I can say about them.
We have a good bit of fun bartering and buying, Eggs, Potatoes and anything to eat. I sure wish I knew some French. If I did I would get anything I wanted to eat. I will close here and start another letter.
Love,
Clayton
One thing I've noticed in these letters is no mention of anything strategic: location, troop movements, numbers of men, etc. Of course that would be so, because everything had to be cleared by Army censors. And Clayton, anyway, seemed anxious to keep his wife and family reassured that he wasn't doing anything dangerous so, despite the action his unit was involved in, all his letters home were like the sample above.
Once all the letters and documents are in the database, and everything is read, and the cross-references are done, what will happen to it all? That I don't know. It doesn't really belong to me. I know the archive will be taken care of. As I process each piece, I'm putting it into archival-quality storage media for now. I am sure that, whatever disposition the family decides upon, it'll be one that keeps the collection intact and makes it permanently accessible to researchers.
For now, if I can pull the ancillary materials together (and I don't see why I couldn't), I want to assemble it into a book. Part one will juxtapose basic training and the home front, especially the colorful background about Elkton, and part two will recount what Clayton wrote home versus what he and his company were experiencing, because I expect there's considerable tension between the "I'll be home soon honey," letters and the reality of pushing through France and into Germany. I'll be doing primary research for some time.
Despite the unfinished status of this archive project,(only 250 of some 500 letters read and a ton of newspapers, photographs and the 9th infantry's official record left to research) I did not want this Memorial Day to pass unremarked. I didn't want Clayton's life to spend another year in the shadows.
Because Clayton wasn't exactly a heroic figure. But he was a normal guy, like thousands and thousands of replacement troops who were reclassified in successive waves until they were draftable. He didn't volunteer--he was drafted, and most definitely did not want to go overseas. None of that matters. He lived, loved, answered the call, trained and did not complain. He was an Everyman, who had everything to live for, but gave it up because it was his duty. All the while, he told Hazel, "My chin is up," and she told him the same. That Everyman kind of sacrifice is most definitely worth honoring.