A Teacher's Companion to
Letters from the Front, 1898-1945
Voices of the Wisconsin Past
Background | Vocabulary and Preliminary Activities | Questions
Questions
1. Select letters from the three different wars. Ask students to compare and contrast the content and feelings that service people expressed.
2. Working in small groups, students examine the pictures in the book, paying special attention to background details. Discuss with students the information that the illustrations provide. What additional historical questions do the illustrations raise?
3. Working individually, students each select a letter and write a response to the writer as if the student is the writer's contemporary. Finding appropriate information for this written response may involve interviewing a community member with memories of World War II, reviewing contemporary magazines or other popular reading material, or doing further reading on the topic and time period.
4. Contact a local veterans' group to find a speaker who will visit the classroom and share personal recollections and observations about wartime experiences.
5. Encourage students to ask parents and grandparents if they kept letters or diaries about wartime experiences. Students can contrast that information to ideas expressed in Letters from the Front, 1898-1945. Student observations can take either written or oral form. (Teachers may want to consider these relatives as potential classroom speakers.)
6. Select several letters from Letters from the Front, 1898-1945 that have related themes. Assign small groups of students to read these sets of letters, comparing and contrasting the observations of the writers. Each student group is responsible for reporting their findings to the class.
Five examples of letters with related themes follow:
- Censorship. Compare and contrast the opinions of chaplain Walter A. Beaudette on self–censorship (p. 34) to the observations of Captain Charles F. Sammond, who describes censoring the letters of the men serving under his command.(pp. 40–42).
- Training and Camp Life. Compare and contrast letters and photographs that document camp life and military training in all three wars. Examine the letters of Spanish–American War soldier Glenn Garlock (pp. 7–9), World War I doughboy Harry Trippe (pp. 25–27), and World War II G.I. John Jenkins (pp. 78–79). Compare and contrast the photographs on pages 6, 27, and 78. What information do these images convey about military organization, equipment, and training procedures?
- Death. Compare and contrast soldier Victor Morris's description of death on the battlefield (pp. 56–57) to nurse Margaret Rowland's recounting of death and suffering in army hospitals (pp. 57–59).
- Armistice–, VE–, and VJ Days. Compare and contrast the reactions of Americans to the announcement of victory and peace in 1918 and 1945. Examine the letters of World War I soldiers Harry Trippe and Paul Lappley (pp. 69–71) and the letters of World War II servicemen Tom Thomas and Charles H. Gill (pp. 152–155).
- Postwar Expectations. Compare and contrast the postwar expectations of sailor Donald Gocker (pp. 159–161), to those of soldier Peter G. Pappas (pp. 162–163) and soldier Roy F. Bergengren, Jr. (pp. 164–165).
7. Direct students to the bibliography on pages 167 and 168. The listed sources are available at many public and college libraries. Have students use these books and selected letters to write a research paper on a focused topic. Topics may include:
- patriotism
- censorship
- battle conditions
- conscription and mobilization
- living conditions boredom, sanitation, entertainment in the military
- The United States' reaction to foreign assault, specifically to the ship, The Maine, and to the military base at Pearl Harbor
8. To emphasize the international scale of World War II, ask students to locate on a map the points of origin of ten to 12 letters. Students should find nations in Europe, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, and northern Africa.
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