Hot off the press — this book follows the life of a young couple (who happen to be my parents) through WWII with hundreds of letters, mainly written from my dad to my mother
during the times they were apart 1942-1945. It is available form Amazon in either Kindle or paperback.
Click here.
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 an Army infantry officer during WWII who was a husband with a one-year-old child.
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Click here to sign-up to receive the E-Forum. Tom Butt is the former mayor of Richmond, CA, having served 27+ years until January of 2023, eight of those as elected mayor. Tom Butt is an architect and founder of the 50-year
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Rosie the Riveter Trust and
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