The WWII Servicemen's Correspondence Collection

Today's anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 warrants a look at one of our wonderful University Archives collections relating to soldier-students at San Diego State. The World War II Servicemen's Correspondence Collection is an incredible wealth of personal war experiences, written by San Diego State students serving all over the world. During the early months of World War II, geography professor Lauren Post began the Aztec News Letter, a highly popular newsletter sent to dispersed Aztecs serving in all branches of the military. Servicemen and their families wrote to Dr. Post to relate news of themselves, and to tell of the war activities of other "Staters" they had encountered. 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 letter, written only three months after Pearl Harbor by football player Wally "Mac" McAnulty, likens his experience at Pearl Harbor to a game: "It was really something on the seventh of December. I'll tell you it was just the same as waiting for a kickoff. Your old stomach was just as tight as it could be but when the first gun was fired, boom, it was gone and you were figgering [sic] how to run one through tackle." Wally goes on to say that the one job he dislikes in his service so far is that of censor: "I once thought that reading other folks mail might be fun but boy was I fooled. Reading a hundred to a hundred and fifty letters a day is no fun."

Currently, Special Collections is working on a project to capture data about each of the approximately 3000 letters in this fantastic collection, in anticipation of its eventual digitization. Selections will be on display beginning next Spring in a small exhibit featuring the collection in the Special Collections foyer. This will accompany the Spring display inside the department, called Sources of Conflict: Researching Wars and the Military in Special Collections, which will feature a number of our war-related collections. And watch out for our Spring Donor Hall exhibit, Echoes of the War: The Civil War Sesquicentennial. We're looking forward to these displays in the coming semester!