The first letters: Aboard ship, heading for Japan

The first letters sent by my grandfather, Maj. William Tucker Gillham, were from aboard the transport ship U.S.S. Admiral Henry Thomas Mayo, which had begun escorting occupation troops to Japan beginning in September, 1945, about a month after V-J Day.  The ship left on October 17, 1945, from Pier 45 in San Francisco, California, bound for Yokohama, Japan, a large port city located on Tokyo Bay.

His initial correspondence was written on the day of embarkation, on normal 6"x 10" stationery.  It was just a short note written aboard ship, after having just said good-bye to his family earlier that day at the Monterey station as he boarded his train for San Francisco.  The letter was addressed to Mrs. W.T. Gillham in Robles del Rio, California, a small town in the Carmel Valley about 15 miles east of the city of Carmel.  Major Gillham and his wife, Frances, and their three daughters, Emily, 10; Monty (my mother), 7; and Martha, 8 months; were living there in a small vacation cabin owned by friends who lived in Oakland. The Gillhams had been there since February 1945, while Major Gillham was stationed at Fort Ord, about 20 miles away.

The Gillhams, Christmas 1943

Monty and Emily hold their dolls

Monument Beach, MA

 

San Francisco, Calif.
17 Oct 45
1500

Dearest Love,

Well, I am aboard ship and it is a very nice one -- a big new Navy transport about 600' long.  There are nine of us in a stateroom (Majors and Lt Cmdrs).  It is a little crowded, but we have good beds and plenty of room on deck to roam around.  It should be a fairly quick voyage.

I hated to leave you and the children this morning.  You were very brave and cheerful.  You have a big job to take care of our family while I am away, but I know you will do a good job of it.

I will remember last night as long as I am away.  You are a very sweet wife.  I love you with all my heart.

Don't forget to change the oil in the car.

I am not sure that I can get this mailed before I get to the other side or not, but am writing it just in case I can.

Remember, I love you.

Bill

**********

His second letter was in the form of a V-Mail, or Victory Mail, which was a standardized system for delivering mail between troops and the homefront during the war and thereafter. V-Mail used standard 7" x 9-1/8" stationery that had a glue flange on one side so that the page could be folded in such a way as to become its own envelope.  This letter was written five days out to sea.


22 Oct 1945

Dearest Darling,

We are now about halfway across and I thought I would write this so I would have it to mail at the first opportunity. I have been keeping up my diary and I feel like I have written to you after I make an entry. We cross the date line tomorrow and thereby get an extra day's pay. So far it has been a fairly rough voyage but I have eaten three fine meals every day and kept them all down. This is a fine ship -- one of the best in the transport service. I will write several letters before the end of the trip. I am well and hope you and the children are too.

Lots of love,

Bill

************

The U.S.S. Mayo was named for Thomas Henry Mayo, a Navy admiral who served in the Spanish-American War and World War I.  The Mayo was a so-called Benson-class Navy transport ship that was commissioned in the last days of World War II.  She transported over 5,000 released American prisoners of war from Le Havre, France, to Boston, and then moved nearly 5,000 troops from Marseilles, France, to Okinawa.  Once in the Pacific, the ship was used as a part of Operation Magic Carpet, transporting U.S. troops from the Western Pacific back home to the U.S. mainland beginning in September, 1945.  Major Gillham was aboard the Mayo on one such return trip to Tokyo.  Below is a photograph of the Mayo taken in 1945.

Welcome to "Letters from Japan"

A little over a year ago, in the fall of 2008, I made the short trip from Atlanta to visit my Aunt Martha and Uncle Jack in Dalton, GA, a small city located just south of the Tennessee state line near Chattanooga. The main reason for my visit was to have dinner and take home a basket of bounty from their prize-winning vegetable garden; Martha, my mother's sister, had also arranged to hand over to me the correspondence of her father, William Tucker Gillham, with her mother, Frances Holsenbeck Gillham, written while he was stationed in Japan just after World War II. Martha had started transcribing into a Word document her father's side of the correspondence, which contained interesting descriptions of Japan and of his work there with the U.S. Army, and she had subsequently emailed the various installments of her efforts to members of our family. Since I had earned the reputation of the de facto family historian of my generation, I offered to help her with the transcription, and she seemed only too pleased to hand the work over to me.

After dinner, my aunt mentioned that she also had the other half of the correspondence; that is, the letters written by her mother in Atlanta back to her father in Japan. I immediately asked her if I might have these letters as well, as they would create the full correspondence and add the home-front element to my grandfather's journal of a soldier's work overseas.

Upon reading the correspondence in full, I was struck by many things, not least of which was how effectively it complimented my own knowledge and remembrances of my grandparents, making them into human beings more fully than I was able to do as a boy in my teens. By the time one is aware of one's grandparents they are fairly well situated in life, and it's hard to imagine them having once had to cope with the thirtysomething angsts of child rearing, mortgages, absence, etc. Beyond that, though, I also discovered several universal elements in the letters that would be of interest to non-family members as well -- the operation of the U.S. Army in Japan after the war, the typical problems of a "single" wife raising three children, and the human drama of a loving couple trying to keep their relationship alive while on different ends of the earth.

Maj. and Mrs. William T. Gillham, 1943

These letters will be of most interest to the Gillham-Holsenbeck family and their friends, and it is primarily for them that I have set up this blog.  Of course, the general blog-reading public is welcome to participate as well while I systematically transcribe this correspondence. My Aunt Martha has already done much of the typing of her father's entries, and for that I am very grateful. As you can imagine, these are letters written by real people, so they will not read like a Rousseau novel or other literary contrivances like Love Letters or the sort. I have not edited any of the grammar or style of the letters, but I have taken the liberty of correcting misspellings. For all of my grandfather's mastery of any number of subjects during the course of his life, he was a notoriously bad speller; I fear that the constant stumbling of the average reader over my grandfather's howlers would prove distracting in the long run.

Major Gillham's first letter is dated October 17, 1945, and unfortunately I have not located any letters written by Frances Gillham until just after the new year, in January, 1945.   This is one of the pitfalls of historic research.  However, due to the military transition from wartime to occupation and the change of Major Gillham's APO address upon arrival in Japan, he didn't actually receive any letters from Frances until mid-November, 1945.  Once he begins answering her letters, though, it becomes fairly clear from the context the sort of questions and news Frances has included in her letters.  If I ever do get my hands on the missing letters from Frances, I will of course post them in sequence retroactively and announce this in the most recent post.

I will also add occasional notes and clarifications, which will be inserted before and/or after a letter. My explanatory sections will appear in this font, and the letters will appear in italics, to help differentiate the two. After all, italics does make typeface look a little more like cursive handwriting.

I will make every attempt to update this blog on a daily basis; in any event, the entries shouldn't appear more than two days apart. This is my very first blog, so please feel free to send me criticism (constructive or otherwise), tips, advice, encouragement, or even complaints. I will be gradually finding my way through the world of blogging as I go, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

So, to begin your journey, just click the 01/13/10 link below to the left, which will take you to the first letter.  After you read the first letter, simply click on the date of the next post (always located below left) to proceed to the next letter, and so on.