Division and hurried to the Front as a response to the German offensive in the Ardennes.
Carl Lavin and I served together, though we did not know each other at the time. He and I were both foot soldiers, not just in the same division, but also in the same regiment and battalion, though in a different company. And shortly after he joined the division, I was transferred to Division Headquarters.
Yet reading this book, and his letters, I have the sense that I knew him intimately. We sometimes forget that the US Army was, and is, essentially a force of teenagers and young men who are required to grapple with the exigencies of combat even as they are attempting to grapple with adulthood.
I have a special place in my heart for the men of the 335th Regiment of the 84th Division. They saw some of the Second World War’s more coruscating moments. They served capably and with enormous losses. And their story deserves to be told. Thankfully, this book has done so.
For me, the war was the opportunity to repay my adopted country for the safety it offered my family after we had been driven from the land of our birth. It was also a journey back to that country of birth to witness firsthand the devastation wrought by that conflict.
It was in the 84th Division that I first met Fritz Kraemer, the staid Prussian aristocrat who helped start me on the road of serious academic work.
I believe Carl also made some key decisions because of the war. He cherished the comfort and settled environment of his upbringing. He contributed to the vast postwar economic boom that propelled America to superpower status.
After the war, we went our separate ways. My calling was academia, and eventually public service. Carl returned to a family business in the Midwest and raised his family.
Though I never knew Carl directly, I got to know his son Frank through public service, as he served as US Ambassador to Singapore and later as the Under Secretary at the US Department of Commerce, and we had the chance to collaborate several times.
I am grateful to Frank for his public service, but more importantly for his work in putting together this book. He put in the work to edit and research the work therein. As I see the strength of the man in his letters, so do I see a reflection of those strengths in his son.
—Henry A. Kissinger
Preface
“There are really two wars,” John Steinbeck wrote, “and they haven’t much to do with each other. There is a war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions, and regiments,—and that is General Marshall’s war.
“Then there is the war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food . . . and lug themselves and their spirit through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage.”1
This book concerns that second war. This is the war as seen by one foot soldier, Carl Lavin, an American teenager who becomes a combat infantryman.
This is Carl’s story but it is also a broader American story, for what comes through in this narrative is how ordinary, and yet how extraordinary the tale is. Sixteen million Americans served in the military during the Second World War. They were overwhelmingly young adult males, with all the strengths and shortcomings of that group. This is a story that many of these sixteen million—or their family members—will find familiar.
This book involves only a few years of Carl’s eighty-nine-year life, from Pearl Harbor through training, combat, and finally to V-E Day and the Allied occupation of Germany.
Carl enters the war step by step. Too young to enlist on Pearl Harbor Day, he signs up for the reserves when he enters college the following fall. Spring of that freshman year he is called up. The reader journeys with him through his adventures and impressions of America at war as he completes army training, is sent to Britain, then gets thrust into combat and fights his way across Europe.
From my perspective as his son, my father always struck me more than anything else as serene. A bright man, he grew up in a world of limitations, shaped as it was by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Yet he led an active and optimistic life, perhaps in part due to the trials of combat and the luck of surviving.
This book started during the summer of 2004. That year saw the dedication of the National World War II Memorial. Then came the telecast of Steven Spielberg’s masterful Band of Brothers. Finally, there was a Library of Congress exhibit on the American soldiers of World War II. I knew, of course, that my father had served. We had talked about it intermittently over the years, and he occasionally shared a story when the lesson was pertinent. But he never seemed to particularly relish the discussions, and I never consciously sought them out.
Like many veterans, my dad seemed somewhat reticent to talk about his experience. Natural humility was part of it. His awareness of the shared sacrifice made his personal efforts not particularly noteworthy in his mind. Others suffered worse or contributed more. The goal of the war, after all, was not to revel in triumph, but to return to civilian life as rapidly as possible. In many ways, this was a typical American view of war. As the poet Karl Shapiro stated, “We all came out of the same war and joined the same generation of silence.”2
But the events of 2004 reminded me that he had a story to tell, if only to our family, and that none of us were mortal. So I purchased a tape recorder, and sat down with my father for many hours of discussion.
Then I received a lucky break. In the furnace room, in an old cardboard box, I uncovered a trove of over two hundred letters from that period, almost all written by Carl to his mother, Dorothy. Thus his recollections were aided by a contemporaneous account—a flowing narrative containing Carl’s thoughts and dates, as well as spellings and punctuation from that era.
As military mail was censored and prohibited any discussion of combat, I used official military records, government documents, private papers, and conventional histories of the period to place the material in historical context.
While Carl Lavin isn’t a household name, his letters and recollections capture an extraordinary time in American history.
Let me begin the story by introducing our four main characters, the members of the family:
Carl Lavin, born 1924. A seventeen-year-old high school senior on Pearl Harbor Day, and by all accounts not a particularly motivated student.
Dorothy Lavin, born 1895, Carl’s mother. Dorothy is the correspondent for almost all of Carl’s letters, so her concerns, emotions, and principles run through his letters as well. Dorothy does not believe in a hands-off approach to raising her children.
Leo Lavin, born 1895, Carl’s father and the family patriarch. Leo runs the family meat-packing business, Sugardale Provision Company, along with his two younger brothers. The company was started by Leo’s father, Harry, an immigrant from Kiev, then part of Czarist Russia.
Fred Lavin, born 1922, Carl’s only sibling. Fred is two years older than Carl and as a result of his age is able to qualify for officer’s training. He is commissioned a US Navy Ensign and sent to the Pacific.
At times, the impression generated by this book is one of mistake after mistake after mistake. Readers should not let the anecdotes in this tale, even the horrific ones, obscure the fact that Americans and our allies fought honorably and with valor. Only in isolated cases did they not fully live up to their cause. The American fighting man was, and remains, the finest in the
