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Posted by ElizaShaw (U10750867) on Sunday, 2nd March 2008
I'd be very grateful for any cribs to good sites for transcripts of letters sent by soldiers from the Western Front. I've tried searching directly, but get rather too many about non-Brits - maybe the Americans and Canucks etc are better at running such sites, or maybe my search terms aren't good enough!
I've tried the Imperial War Museum but can find nothing there, which rather suprises me. I had rather assumed there would be loads.
Many thanks (now, back to me searching still!)
Eliza
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Not an internet site and not exactly letters, but I would seriously recommend the book "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" by Max Arthur. It's a treasure. Drawn from recorded interviews in the sound archive of the Imperial War Museum.
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Thank you!
I did discover along the way that it was forbidden for Welsh soldiers to write home in Welsh, as the censor's office had no welsh speakers. Wonder if the same was true for Gallic?
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
Books are probably one of the obvious sources, but I have found a seem of rich material in my local newspaper from the period. Soldiers were writing home to the local paper all the time, although obviously censored, some gems do get through!
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Yes, I read on one of the sites taht sometimes officers did not think it 'done' to read their soldiers letters home, and so did not censor them.
I wonder if the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front really appreciated how ghastly life (and death) at the Front was? I wonder when they finally understood what was actually going on?
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Hi Eliza - have you read 'Letters from a Lost Generation'? It's the correspondences between Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton (her fiancee), Edward Brittain (her brother), Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Nicholson (close friends). All four young men were killed in the war.
Certainly letters home were highly censored - self-censored as well as vetted by junior officers. Some people did develop code-words in order to let people know where they were (it was forbidden to mention locations). But I think very few civvies were aware of what trench life was like.
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
, in reply to message 1.
Posted by sleepless-in-battle (U10906104) on Tuesday, 4th March 2008
Hi
Not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for but I have stumbled upon the following blog which consists of letters home from a Harry Lamin to his family and friends back in England:
Hope this helps.
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
, in reply to message 1.
Posted by sleepless-in-battle (U10906104) on Tuesday, 4th March 2008
I have also found the following site which includes letters that were published in newspapers accross the UK regarding the Christmas Truce of 1914.
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
Sometime after the Battle of the Somme, soldiers were issued with postcards bearing preprinted messages.
The meesages included things like -
We are moving up to the front
We are moving back from the front
I will not be home soon on leave
I will be home on leave
I am fine and enjoying life
(I can't recall the actual phrases now).
Soldiers were not allowed to add anything, just delete what was not appropriate, sign their name and mail it back.
My Grandad was very clever and managed to delete most of a phrase and leave a particular word or letters in each phrase, conveying a new meaning. He managed to tell my Granny where he was and when he would be home by judicious use of these phrases on these cards, and the censor didn't catch it.
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
My mother's uncle in WW2 worked out a system correlating popular songs with locales, tricking the censors.
Link to this forum: Good sites for letters from the trenches??
Very many thanks - I found the Harry Lemin one while browsing, and thank you for the Xmas one too.
All help much appreciated. Some of the letters I've found have been so, so sad, with the senders killed within weeks, even days, of sending them, and yet their recipients still sending letters back, unaware they were sending tehm to dead men....
One, however, was lovely - it was from a man who'd written a 'good bye my darling' just before going OTT, expecting to be killed - but he wasn't, and lived to see them again.
It's a shame that the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front on both sides weren't given weekend tours of front line trenches - I'm sure the war would ahve been stopped a lot earlier, had everyone really known what was going on.
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