Letters, 1945

The collection is made up of letters written by Everett B. Andrews to his sister Lillian in St. Albans, Vermont, while he was stationed on the Island of Tinian in the Marianas in 1945. The letters describe camp life after Allied forces captured the island of Tinian in the Pacific Ocean, which was then used as an airfield due to its proximity to Japan. (Although Andrews doesn't mention this, Tinian was the airbase where the atomic bomb was loaded onto the Enola Gay.) Andrews almost always said his letters were a chance to "visit" with her and as such, are chatty and upbeat. Only after the censoring of letters was lifted did he turn to the horrors of war. After the Allied victory in Europe he wrote about the Nazi concentration camps, "It seems almost impossible to believe that a supposedly civilized people could doe such destruction of human life."