Letters from Dartmouth Men in the Armed Forces

AIR CADET ARTHUR H. STEIN JR.'43 was killed last July in an air accident in Missouri. Art was a great fisherman and trapper but he was also something of a poet, and I want to publish thisone short poem of his at this time.

FROM WITHOUT AND WITHIN

Can we forget how the song of the rain Tumbled and rumbled and laughed at the pane? We so carefully planned to take the bright sun In the mornings of April before peace was done. Now who can remember to dim out the light That shines from within on the darkest wet night? The sun and the shadows have both had their say* Yet we burn the bright light from within night and day.

MAJOR TRUMAN T. METZEL '23writes an interesting note from NorthAfrica:

You are undoubtedly well aware that almost every army vehicle has painted on it the name of somebody's sweetheart or a; comic strip character or some crack like "Hirohito, Here We Come." But perhaps you have not been advised until now that there is a truck in Algiers named WAH WHO WAH. To date this correspondent has been unable to dig up any background information bearing on this situation, except that the truck totes garbage from the officers' mess and that no one knows who named it. Perhaps the propagandist will reveal his identity in your columns or by contacting the undersigned and we can get together in one of the local bistros for the purpose of dedicating a couple of vinos to the Old Mother.

SERGEANT JOHNNY MORRIS '37wrote this fine letter home before he waskilled in action in the South Pacific:

Greetings again from the South Seas. It has been about a week or so since I've written. In the future if you don't hear from me for a little while it will not be because I don't think of you daily, but because of circumstances which are beyond my control.

Give my love to Dickie, my gal Laurel, and Ralph. Tell Dickie to always remember what I told him long ago. We are now fighting to preserve our country as it is with its almighty freedom and opportunity for all. Let him and Laurel, too, make the best use of this priceless heritage and carry on in such a manner that their own consciences never reproach them for their personal conduct. In this way they can partially atone for the sacrifices, hardship, and suffering that their fellow men, only separated from them by a few years differences in age, are making on distant fronts all over the world. If in preserving our own so-called "American way of life" lives are lost then, although the price may seem high it is, in reality, very low when you take into consideration the ideals that these men safeguarded for posterity.

I may seem pretty long-winded in this letter but these are my feelings and I want to convey them to all of you now.

What the future may hold is a mystery. However, we do know that this will be a better world because God has willed it so, and because he has seen fit to place men upon this earth who were willing to fight for ideals which took man centuries to develop and to put into practice. If I can count myself as one of these favored men then I shall deem myself lucky, and I do.

Tell Mother not to worry about me as I will be o.k. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of her, our lives with her in the past, and our glorious existence together when the war is over and we have all faithfully performed our duties.

Give my best to Marguerite, the Daileys, etc. May we all sing "Noel" together this year. So-long for now! Good luck! May God bless us all.

Following is an excerpt from a letterfrom RALPH THOMPSON '25, Staff Sergeant, Infantry:

Recently in a course of duty I had to spend several hours at Dartmouth—the original place, I hasten to add, lest you think I'm so important that they fly me back and forth across the Atlantic. Being in a mildly sentimental mood, I was afraid, as we neared the town in a jeep, that it would turn out to be either a smelly fishing village or a mere adjunct to the Royal Naval College (which is, by the way, literally the only "Dartmouth College" anyone has ever heard of around here—a state of affairs likely to take the wind out of the sails of even Dean Bill).

But the place is, in fact, utterly charming and not smelly at all, and although the R.N.C., for obvious reasons, bulks large in local affairs, you still have the town itself much as it was before any such thing as a R.N.C. was ever heard of. The River Dart winds down to the Channel through that part of Devonshire between rolling woods and fields, and Dartmouth itself lies in a cleft of the hills perhaps two miles up from the mouth, superbly situated on what amounts to a little harbor, with old houses rising from the water level up very steep slopes, and patches of woodland and cropland covering the summit.

There's not much going on in the streets, but even so they struck me as far from provincial, for there were soldiers and sailors of a half dozen different nationalities strolling around past some wellpreserved Tudor or Elizabethan buildings; and, of course, in the harbor—well, I suppose I'm not allowed to tell you what was in the harbor, but doubtless you can make a fair guess. Our jeep, by the way, was an amphibious job, and having business on the farther shore, we simply rolled down into the water and chugged across, much to the consternation and delight of all and sundry, coming up on the farther shore in the midst of a small crowd of people waiting for the ferry, some of whom thereupon all but fainted dead away. 1 didn't see much of the Royal Naval College, which is holy ground, but I was lucky enough to be escorted into one of the main buildings, and there, by God, polished up to beat the cars, was the biggest German aerial bomb I've ever seen, standing about five feet high, with a brightlyshined brass plaque attached to it. My escort told me that it was a dud dropped by raiders earlier this year and that it had come plumb through the roof and landed in one of the wardrooms. The thrifty British salvaged it, shined it up and now have it on display, the legend on the brass plaque reading appropriately as follows: "This trophy was presented to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, by Adolf Hitler, on Feb. 13, or thereabouts, 1943. It had been commissioned in Germany several hours earlier, and come to rest, after a short voyage, in the" (etc. etc. I find I don't remember it all, but that will give you a general idea of the display, also of the fact that the dear British haven't lost their sense of humor).

All of which doesn't have much to do with the American Dartmouth, but there really isn't any visible trace of the American Dartmouth in the town—at least I didn't find any, although I might have done better had I been able to take time off for a cup of tea with the current Lord Dartmouth, if indeed any such magnificent character still exists in the neighborhood. I had my job to do, and having done it, I gave a silent Wah-hoo-wah and departed. But I'd like to go back again after the war to look around more carefully and piously.

LESTER TALBOT '26writes an interesting letter:

Since I must be my own censor it becomes my duty to say nothing of what I'm doing and little of my whereabouts, but I shall try here briefly to do a short outline of an intensely interesting and fortuitously arranged career.

After a course in communications at Noroton Heights, Conn., which wound up last December, I was ordered to Miami and attached to the Gulf Sea Frontier, remaining with that command until recently. Hemingway would have given his right arm for my stations. For the first few months I spent most of the time in Miami.

For some time my duties carried me frequently to Nassau in the Bahamas, to Key West, to Havana, and in a couple of small ships through much of the Caribbean area. Finally I was ordered to an advanced base in Cuba where I was stationed when I hit the jackpot and was sent here. At that time my tribe accompanied me back to New York whilst I threw my gear into a sea bag and set off on an eventful voyage.

Not often have I made this crossing in two ships, but this time I did, and although the whole thing was a very calm sort of an affair, it will be one for the book, and without a doubt will grow to monstrous heights of excitement when I tell my son about it in the mellowing years.

England is the same beautiful and genial country which I believe you loved so well, with new features added retaining the best of both. Somehow the trial has left the people with somewhat less of their old complacency, but with everything you have heard of in courage and determination. The pictures of the destruction that you have seen can give a pretty good idea of how the bombed cities look, but you cannot easily imagine the enormous extent of the smashing. I am not a vindictive sort of a guy, but if you will credit me with pity for German children, I shall say that I look forward to the chance to see the results of the plastering they are taking now.

Three others and I took a flat in one of the swellest streets in town. We're having a hell of an interesting time. I've been down to the country to see Herb (Herbert Talbot '25). He is a Major in the Canadian Army, and doing a good job.

JIM KENDALL '42writes an amusingletter from a foreign station:

It's been rather a long time since I've written you but I know that Frank has (Frank Bartlett '42), and that amounts to a letter from the three of us so I hope you'll take it as such. Right now we're having the most pleasant time we've had since joining this man's army, more or less a Cook's tour with everything pleasant thrown in, and how we're lapping it up! We left our old Port about three weeks ago and ever since have been loafing along, stopping here and there in port, anchoring some of the time and meandering along the rest of the time as only a Liberty ship will meander.

So far our luck in the army, as far as personal progress, has been all on the red side of the ledger, but the Gods must have thought it was time to even things up a bit so while most of our outfit was shipped out on transports, and after being in the last war you know how horrible they can be, ten of us were put on this freighter to more or less take care of our outfit's equipment, and it certainly has been a great break. I can see why cruises in this part of the world were so popular because it certainly is a beautiful sea with its deep blue color, its gentleness and its beautiful orange-red moons. We've taken it along very slowly and right now we're anchored in a great bay of green water with the dusty arid hills of North Africa receding in the distance in a great circle all around us. The sun is very hot during the day but at night it cools off and makes for beautiful sleeping.

We stopped for about a week in one port, one of the largest here and after being in our last place for almost ten months you can imagine with what avid interest we began to look around, and what a lot of laughs we had. It's a beautiful town and coming in from the sea looked almost fairylike and very Eastern with its white buildings seemingly growing up right on top of one another out of the clear blue water. It's almost as if you cut Harvard stadium in half and built houses on all the seats. Everywhere you go in the town you see steps and everytime you want to hit another level you have to climb, just like Quebec, only more so.

The town is run by the British although there are a lot of Americans there, including the first WACs that we had seen, and as usual we pulled a faux pas when Frank rather ignorant of British rank pulled the mustache of a captain, mistaking him for an enlisted man, all in the interests of comparing his growth with that of Jim Erwin's '42. Of course, we thought it worth quite a laugh, a fact which quite overcame any nastiness the British Captain might have had. This was a very pleasant change from our old port which for filthiness and dirt and beggars always under foot couldn't be equaled. I imagine they have them in this town but they manage to keep them all in their own section. In our wanderings through the town, and we never knew whether it was off limits or not, we ran into some of the narrowest streets, really not more than four or five feet with the buildings seemingly closing in over your head. One of the funniest sights we saw was a huge sign, it should have been in neon lights for it was one of that kind, right in the middle of an island where three big streets joined reading, "American Forces Pro station," no one could ever miss that one.

Just as our interests had worn off and our pocketbooks diminished we pulled out of there and have been loafing here ever since, and I mean at our leisure. We have a skipper who is a white man, lets us swim all the time and use the boats to go ashore and sailing, so it is very pleasurable. The ship's library has been completely devoured by all three of us and now we're starting all over again. Unfortunately, there is little of interest but we make out. Ran into Green Mansions which was one of your Nature books as I remember and I've reread it.

Before we left (censored) we had a couple of good evenings with Jim Ingersoll '42 and ten gallons of Moroccan beer. For the last month one of us would go up to the Brewery and fill our five-gallon can and put it on our ice-box for the evening. With an Irishman named Mahloney, who went to Dublin and Georgetown, and a couple more, we really had some fine sessions and even managed to do a little serious thinking because we certainly don't want this to happen again and it's about time to start thinking of it.

The leaves are just about starting to turn and you are probably looking for your first frost and we'd like to be there with you, but I guess we'll have to postpone it until the three of us start working our farm, "Powder-house Hill" in Maine. Perhaps you haven't heard about that but it is a serious thought. The boys send their best and say "hello" to Hanover.

MEDICAL SCHOOL STUDENTS who graduated on October 23 include, front row, I. to r., Bishop, Harry C.; Hunt, William; Lena, Hugh F. Jr.; Behringer, Glenn E.; Wierman, William H.; Wilson, William W.; Carlson, Berger H.; Taylor, Warren J. Second Row, I. to r., Hoffman, David L.; Frost, Harold M. Jr.; Copeland, Bradley E.; von Wedel, Jerrold O.; Solez, Chester; Regan, William J. Jr.; Porter, Edward C.; Schumacher, William E.; Rider, George L. Back Row, I. to r., Costello, Paul J., '42; West, Franklin H.; Kramer, Henry F. Jr.; Clarke, Charles W. Jr.; Kane, Charles F.; Delaney, Forbes; Burke, George H. (Unless otherwise indicated all are class of 1943).