Saturday, October 6, 1945

Dearest Gee.

Been neglecting you here lately, kid. Don’t think I’ve written a letter for the last three days. I got three letters from you and one from Coe in that time. Also got a swell package from you, kid, of cheese crackers, candy bars, hair tonic, and some powder to make drinks out of (how come??). It’s much too cold here to make cold drinks. I’m living off of coffee now. It’s been frosting every night here lately. The order just came out that we could wear our parkas on pass. Isn’t it nice to have someone tell you what clothes you can put on? 1st Bn. has been wearing their parkas for the past month but our Bn. C.O. didn’t like the idea. Now I’ve got a hell of a cold.

It looks like we take off from here the fifteenth, kid, and we should hit the States by the 31st. After that you know as much as I do. I’m sure sweating it out. We are getting Liberty tubs so you know what that means. I only hope the ocean decides to stay flat. The low pointers are all going to Germany from here. Guess they leave a couple days before we do.

We turned in our M-8s the other day. I started to go as a first class passenger but wound up driving one there. I had never drove one before but I guess the john didn’t know it, and I didn’t tell him any different. They weren’t hard to drive except for the gear shift being backwards. One thing if I had of run into anything I’d had plenty of armor in front. They can clip off a telephone pole and you’d never know it. We took them to Oslo, I guess the Skiwegians bought them.

We closed the Club Friday night. Need I say more? They had saved back some bottles of Champagne too besides the cognac but I didn’t go for that.

Think I told you last week about the football being played here. I went to the one in Oslo the other night (night game) between 1st and 2nd Battalions. Boy, did we get beat! 21 to 0. I got up and left the last quarter. Anyway, it started to rain.

Last night Prosise and I went to the show. The sign said something about Walt Disney and the rest was in Norwegian. We took it in and it was an hour and a quarter of Disney’s shorts. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Pluto. There must have been ten or twelve of them. They never have a short subject or a news reel with a feature picture here. They show those in the afternoon and then at night they show the feature.

The Norskys are able to buy gasoline now and of all the accidents. They drive like nobody else was anywhere within miles. But there won’t be much driving to do anymore. Everything is being turned in. I have to get rid of all my pistols but one. It makes me sick too as I’ve lugged them around now for so long. I’m keeping a Luger tho. I had them all registered and now they come out with a new registration card so it has to be done over. That’s about the only souvenir I’ll have but what the hell.

This is sure going to be a long old week with nothing to do. I hear they are going to put us all on restriction now. The guys have been going in and tearing hell out of things. Sort of something to remember us by. In Nice we kicked the plate glass windows out and got restricted. Always suthin.

Well, honey, sure am looking forward to seeing you again. Hope you still love me and that I haven’t changed too much to suit you. I may beat you once in awhile but that won’t be bad, will it? [Just to clarify, this is 100% a joke; Gee was without a doubt the tough one in their relationship.] I’m sending you the Spearhead again. I imagine it will be the last one. Sure love you, honey. Keep your fingers crossed.

So long.

Snook

This is the last letter I have from Snook. It was only a few more weeks before he was home in Champaign, safe and sound. This blog will now shift to sharing Snook’s memoirs from the war, a few paragraphs at a time. Each entry should link back to applicable letters, as well as include a short bibliography of related references.

If you’ve enjoyed reading these letters and are either interested in reading more correspondence from the European front, or are a First Special Service Force reference completist, I must recommend this collection of Chick Bruns’s letters home to his parents. These letters were frequently linked here when they corresponded to Snook’s references to Chick, and mention Snook – including when the two men met up at Anzio. (This is not an affiliate link.)