Archive
These are the letters of my father, Robert Tighe, who served in Company B, 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, 4th Armored Division—part of Patton’s spearhead through Europe. He wrote home often. Near the end of his life, he went through his belongings and organized what he wanted to leave behind. Among them were two folders, labeled “Me and World War II” and “Me and the Holocaust.” These are the letters that were in those folders.
The letters move between the ordinary and the terrible: requests for cookies and razor blades alongside encounters that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He writes of a young man from Luxembourg who had escaped a German forced labor camp near Peenemünde—where Wernher von Braun’s team was developing the V-2 rocket—and survived for years in hiding in a cave. In April 1945, as the Third Army pushed deeper into central Germany, he tries to describe what he witnessed at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald concentration camps. “These things I have seen with my own eyes,” he writes. “I didn’t read it in a magazine—I saw it.”
After the surrender, the letters continue. Life in occupied Germany slows but does not settle—boredom, rationing, shortages, and the strange routines of peacetime soldiering. He chases all over Germany in search of a friend badly wounded in the final days of the war. He drives to a nearby town to hear Glenn Miller’s AEF band, writing, “In that time I was home.” He attends a U.S.O. show with Jack Benny and Ingrid Bergman, and enjoys his first Coca-Cola since leaving the States—even though it was warm, flat, and watered down. On leave in Switzerland, he steps into a world untouched by destruction. And he tries to make sense of it all, including through conversations with a boy raised in the Hitler Youth who became his “shadow,” and with whom he remained in contact after the war.
The letters are scanned from the originals and transcribed, with photographs and historical materials presented alongside them.
Transcriptions supported by the Transkribus Handwriting and Text Recognition system.
The letters move between the ordinary and the terrible: requests for cookies and razor blades alongside encounters that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He writes of a young man from Luxembourg who had escaped a German forced labor camp near Peenemünde—where Wernher von Braun’s team was developing the V-2 rocket—and survived for years in hiding in a cave. In April 1945, as the Third Army pushed deeper into central Germany, he tries to describe what he witnessed at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald concentration camps. “These things I have seen with my own eyes,” he writes. “I didn’t read it in a magazine—I saw it.”
After the surrender, the letters continue. Life in occupied Germany slows but does not settle—boredom, rationing, shortages, and the strange routines of peacetime soldiering. He chases all over Germany in search of a friend badly wounded in the final days of the war. He drives to a nearby town to hear Glenn Miller’s AEF band, writing, “In that time I was home.” He attends a U.S.O. show with Jack Benny and Ingrid Bergman, and enjoys his first Coca-Cola since leaving the States—even though it was warm, flat, and watered down. On leave in Switzerland, he steps into a world untouched by destruction. And he tries to make sense of it all, including through conversations with a boy raised in the Hitler Youth who became his “shadow,” and with whom he remained in contact after the war.
The letters are scanned from the originals and transcribed, with photographs and historical materials presented alongside them.
Transcriptions supported by the Transkribus Handwriting and Text Recognition system.