My mother, Cecilia King Butt would have been 103 years old today. I wrote two books about her, both available on Amazon,
Cecilia King’s Extraordinary Senior Trip: Honolulu 1940-41 – Before Pearl Harbor and
A WWII Romance: Tom and Cecilia Butt.
Cecilia King’s Extraordinary Senior Trip: Honolulu 1940-41 – Before Pearl Harbor Paperback
– May 5, 2024
by Thomas
King Butt (Author)
I found this project compelling and spent several months organizing and compiling it for several reasons. First is personal
– this is about my mother before she was my mother. She was thousands of miles away, both literally and figuratively, from the mother I eventually knew. Second, it describes one of the most pivotal times in American history, when the United States emerged
from the debilitating Great Depression politically isolationist, but began the rapid transition from an almost insignificant military power to become in a short five years the undisputed world military and economic leader. The attack on Pearl Harbor, which
catapulted the United States into WWII, happened only a little over five months after Cecilia left Honolulu and the social milieu of military families that would be most affected. Third, Cecilia’s documentation of immediately-pre-WWII life in Hawaii is extraordinarily
detailed and colorful and describes many places that I have had an opportunity to visit over the years. I spent the summer of 1966, twenty years after she was there, in Honolulu in a summer job with the National Park Service Historical American Buildings Survey
(HABS).[1] In subsequent years, I have visited four Hawaiian Islands, some several times and visited most of the places described in my mother’s letters.
A WWII Romance: Tom and Cecilia Butt Paperback
– July 1, 2025
by Thomas
(Tom) K. Butt (Author)
For over 80 years, the letters written by my father, Thomas Franklin (Tom) Butt (1917 – 2000), to my mother, Cecilia
(Celia) King Butt (1922 – 1991), during two and a half years of absences in over three and a half years of Army service in WWII were stored away in an attic. Thankfully, they were rediscovered in 2023, and I felt compelled to find a way to save them for posterity.
If they had remained in a box somewhere, they surely would have been unread and eventually lost as family members passed on and the detritus of years was discarded.
Probably the only way to provide even the possibility of access by future generations and anyone else interested, would be to compile them into a book, making them more user friendly by arranging them chronologically, transcribing my father’s almost indecipherable
handwriting and adding photos, also saved by my mother in several scrapbooks.
I struggled to justify why saving years of personal letters would be interesting, important or relevant to anyone other than immediate family members and a few descendants. Although encompassing all of the WWII years, these letters describe no heroics, battles,
bloodshed or narrow escapes. This is not a combat chronicle, as most war-related books seem to be. Maybe because it does not involve combat is what sets it apart. According to the National WWII Museum, there were 12.2 million Americans, including nearly 300,000
women, serving by 1945. 73 percent served overseas. About 40 percent served in non-combat jobs, which would be about 5 million. Their stories are important, too.
In 1939, a year before my father was called to active duty, the Army had only 189,839 soldiers, but by 1945, that had ballooned to 8.3 million. Someone had to train those 8 million soldiers and turn them into effective fighters, and that job fell to people
like my father. He once wrote form Europe to Cecilia about several men he had trained who were later killed in combat, “I wrote Barton not long ago, talking about these boys, and I pray God their deaths were not due to anything I might have failed to teach
them that might have made a difference.”
After four years of training infantry soldiers, my father eventually was ordered to the European Theater of Operations, after having been assigned, because of his legal background, into a small and somewhat elite organization that processed non-combat related
claims of French and Belgium civilians against American soldiers. He spent a few days in Scotland and England before disembarking at Omaha Beach and passing through Le Havre only a couple of weeks after its liberation. From there, he lived and worked in a
number of both small villages and large cities in France and Belgium, getting to know the locals, investigating, adjudicating and processing claims ranging from road-killed livestock to drunk GIs ramming a truck through a shop. His interaction with the locals
included dinners with local leaders, and, particularly after VE Day, the opportunity to attend operas and other musical events.
He was able to visit his brother, Major Jack Butt, a physician in the Army Medical Corps, in Reims. He traveled to Paris to visit his brother-in-law, Captain C.P. Reid, who was involved in clandestine operations and was one of the first Americans to enter Berlin,
where he seems to have made a small fortune on the black market. As victory in Europe, and later Japan, occurred, there was an understandable obsession with going home. The logistics of shipping millions of Americans back across the Atlantic was regulated
by a complex point system, but Tom’s number finally came up in December of 1945, and he was home by Christmas.
This book is "a day in the life" over six years of of an Army infantry officer during WWII who was a husband with a one-year-old child.
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Tom Butt is the former mayor of Richmond, CA, having served over 27 years, eight years as mayor. Tom Butt is also the founder and president of Interactive
Resources, an architecture-engineering firm founded in Richmond in 1973.
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