Veteran's Day this week warrants a look at one of our wonderful University Archives collections relating to soldier-students at San Diego State. During the early years of World War II, geography professor Lauren Post began the Aztec News Letter, a highly popular newsletter sent to Aztecs serving all over the world. Servicement and their families wrote to Dr. Post to relate news of themselves and war activities of other "Staters" they knew of. Many soldiers express, in poignant terms, their personal difficulties in dealing with combat, with suffering, with loss, and with the war atrocities they were seeing. This soldier writes in 1945, "...[I] have glimpsed some of the prison camps
and talked to the inmates. The stories of Nazi atrocities are subdued rather than exaggerated and I know that you can hardly believe what has been told."The newsletter was a critical link to their families, friends, and their lives back in San Diego, and many soldiers express their deep appreciation of Dr. Post's efforts in their letters to him. Each issue of the News Letter is a powerful document, and each shows the huge effects of the war on both the SDSU homefront and the servicemen writing. The World War II Servicemen's Correspondence Collection is a valuable collection for anyone researching the impact of World War II on lives and families.
