When twenty-one-year-old Private Charles E. Taylor of Gainesville, Florida, wrote this letter to Barbara Wooddall, he could not possibly have known that it would mark the first of approximately eight hundred letters he would write to her over the course of the next four years. Nor could he have known that as a newly enlisted man, or later as a lieutenant, in the United States Army, he would travel thousands of miles within the United States while he trained for combat. It would also have been difficult for him to predict that he would eventually be called upon to fight...

By the time the Taylors celebrated their public marriage in St. Louis, Private Taylor had served in the United States Army for thirteen months. After Congress passed the draft law in September 1940, Charles had reported to his draft board for classification. He had also taken an Air Corps Cadet examination at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, that fall, but failed it because of poor preparation in mathematics. His experiences as a freshman at the University of Florida, where he received a series of incomplete grades, and a summer in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which taught him the rudiments of...

After Barbara and Charles’s “second honeymoon” came to an end, she returned to Fairburn, knowing that she might never see her husband again. From now on, like wives and sweethearts since wars have been fought, she could only wait and hope. One difference was that she and others like her in World War II maintained close contact with the fighting men through the speed of mail delivery and through widespread reports from war correspondents, often themselves in action with the soldiers. Reporters dispatched copy for newspapers and magazines and provided commentary for home-front radio broadcasts, photographers sent pictures to newspapers...

Just as Barbara’s letters tell much about how service wives made it through the long days of separation, so the correspondence of Charles exemplifies the millions of letters from overseas to families in the United States. He wrote nearly every day, skipping only days in which his combat duties prevented him, and even then he tried to get in a line or two in a serial letter. Charles’s letters were often written on the back of Barbara’s because of paper shortages. This gave him the feeling of actual physical communication with her as he wrote.¹

The letters were filled with...

The end of the “duration” finally came in August 1945.¹ With the war over, the focus of Barbara and Charles’s letters shifted to discussions of the future. There was no longer as much need for reminiscence, for their attention was now directed toward difficult questions about their postwar world. Should Charles apply for a commission in the Regular Army, or should he become a civilian, return to college, or perhaps find a job? Where should they live? When should they have more children? Would they have enough money? How would Charles, Barbara, and Sandra Lee react to each other? How...

Barbara and Charles sent this letter to their children as an introduction to the first installment of the letters which are the basis for this book. The strength of the letters remains. The relationship of their correspondence to life in the United States during World War II, “the duration,” so confidently stated in the Christmas letter of 1984, has become a part of the material which now accompanies our selection of the letters.

Reading and rereading these letters reminds one of watching a 1940s movie, except that this is a real life story. Barbara and Charles really did live “happily...