Overview

The letters of Sgt. Percy Smith, a World War II soldier, and his memories as an aging veteran reveal how military training, wartime, and occupation brought out strengths, vulnerabilities, and changing judgments about fellow soldiers, military leadership, the enemy population, and home. Capturing the story of a common enlisted man from embarkation to discharge, the letters and stories in Mother of the Company: Sgt. Percy M. Smith’s World War II Reflections also provide an intimate window conveying his feelings for his wife, though tempered in expression as well as subject to censorship. The letters add depth to the story of this soldier, and they expand the narrative to capture more of the experience of all veterans who felt at risk and needed comfort during and after the war.But these letters provide readers with another, less-expected view into the heart and mind of this member of the World War II generation. In contrast with military training, masculine expectations, and the prejudices of white America at that time, the longer, later memories of wartime and occupation contain strong instances of comforting and caring that sometimes turn the gender experience of war and male camaraderie on its head. In the end, if we ask what constitutes a good soldier, a good survival, and a worthy life, the answer for Sgt. Percy Smith, as suggested by his letters, might encompass the greater value of life-giving and life-fostering instincts as a part of healing the damage left behind by the life-taking experience of war.

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9781648430664

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Percy Smith's letters offer readers perspicacious observations of not just his own fellow soldiers, but also those whom they fought and those whom they liberated and how the absurd realism of war intersected them all fatefully at the end of history's greatest conflict. -- Bradford A. Wineman, Professor of Military History, Marine Corps University--Bradford A. Wineman A compelling read from first to last, Mother of the Company reproduces infantry sergeant Percy M. Smith's letters to his wife from the front lines in France and Germany during the bloody winter and spring of 1944-45. These affectionate letters home, many of them informative of the foot soldier's daily life, are interspersed with gritty reminiscences written by Smith in a calm and understated manner after his return to his native Florida, where he led a quiet life as a municipal bureaucrat. His account of a devastating day for his company during the Battle of the Bulge has the gravitas and poetic beauty of comparable scenes in The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, though Smith was not a professional writer. A southern everyman blessed with remarkable recall, emotional honesty, and an eye for the telling detail, he did not write to be published, he wrote to exorcise the ghosts that haunted him long after the war had ended. It's striking how often in these pages a vivid memory of mayhem will be followed with a whitewashed letter home: 'How are you, dear? Our German cousins are giving us a hard time.' Edited by his son, the historian Philip M. Smith, Mother of the Company frequently juxtaposes such letters home with postwar recollections the sergeant wrote exclusively for himself and fellow veterans of the company who, like he, had slogged through hell but never managed to leave it behind. --David M. Lubin, author of Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War --David M. Lubin

"""Percy Smith's letters offer readers perspicacious observations of not just his own fellow soldiers, but also those whom they fought and those whom they liberated and how the absurd realism of war intersected them all fatefully at the end of history's greatest conflict.""-- Bradford A. Wineman, Professor of Military History, Marine Corps University--Bradford A. Wineman ""A compelling read from first to last, Mother of the Company reproduces infantry sergeant Percy M. Smith's letters to his wife from the front lines in France and Germany during the bloody winter and spring of 1944-45. These affectionate letters home, many of them informative of the foot soldier's daily life, are interspersed with gritty reminiscences written by Smith in a calm and understated manner after his return to his native Florida, where he led a quiet life as a municipal bureaucrat. His account of a devastating day for his company during the Battle of the Bulge has the gravitas and poetic beauty of comparable scenes in The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, though Smith was not a professional writer. A southern everyman blessed with remarkable recall, emotional honesty, and an eye for the telling detail, he did not write to be published, he wrote to exorcise the ghosts that haunted him long after the war had ended. It's striking how often in these pages a vivid memory of mayhem will be followed with a whitewashed letter home: 'How are you, dear? Our German cousins are giving us a hard time.' Edited by his son, the historian Philip M. Smith, Mother of the Company frequently juxtaposes such letters home with postwar recollections the sergeant wrote exclusively for himself and fellow veterans of the company who, like he, had slogged through hell but never managed to leave it behind.""--David M. Lubin, author of Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War --David M. Lubin"

Author Information

PHILIP M. SMITH is a retired instructional associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. An audio essay about the collection and curation of his father's World War II letters was broadcast by National Public Radio on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, May 7, 1995 (https: //www.npr.org/1995/05/07/1005590/-sgt-smith-letters).

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