Michigan soldier’s daughter finally took a long look at his 250 WWII letters

Edward Martin's letter to his wife began "Dear Princess," wondered how his "little pigeon" was doing, and told her there was "a burning in his heart" at the mere thought of her.

Oh, and it was too bad about their friend Walter: "He wasn't in the Army very long was he? Where was he killed?"

There was love in the air on April 23, 1945, but there were also P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers growling overhead as Sgt. Martin wrote to his bride, Sophia. He was in France and she was in Michigan with their infant son, and he was repairing the machinery of war as he dreamed of the simplicity of home.

From the time he enlisted in June 1942 until the U.S. Army Air Corps turned him loose in November 1945, Edward addressed at least 250 letters, postcards or even telegrams to the two-story, two-family, cookie-cutter house in Hamtramck, Michigan.

We know that because Sophia saved them, in a plain wooden box, through his absence and return and their life together and then after he died in his sleep four decades ago at only 67.

Across the past few years, the Martins' surviving daughter, Barbara Martin Dziadosz, has taken on the correspondence as a cause, preserving and annotating every piece in acid-free clear protectors that fill three thick three-ring binders.

They are an emotional historical record of pride, sacrifice, patriotism, struggle and adoration. They are awash in passion, hand-in-hand with insecurity.

They are of another time, but they are as universal as conflict and separation.

Monday marked the 80th Veterans Day since the end of World War II. That was the World War after the Great War, also known as the War to End All Wars. The weaponry and ease of communication has changed considerably. Soldiers can make phone calls and send emails now from combat zones.

Edward mostly made do with pencil or pen on paper, pledging and re-pledging his love as the boy he called Sonny learned to point at a black-and-white photo of his father and say, "Da-da."

“Sophia my sweet," he wrote in mid-July 1942, when he was in California learning to fix airplanes, "I am not hinting but if you could buy me a good pen & pencil set you know that Eversharp guaranteed forever set.

"Then it will be like my love for you. ‘Guaranteed forever.’ “

Who they were

The last letter you sent me darling, I've read it for the 30th time. Is the baby sleeping with you? I don't want to worry but I was reading in the paper where quite a few babies are suffocating when they sleep with their mothers, and I want you to be careful.

— March 13, 1944

Sophia could multiply a pair of three-digit numbers in her head and dispense the answer in seconds.

She was organized and likable, she told great stories and she could melt hearts with a violin solo. After Edward marched off, she took her talented hands to the production line at Briggs Industries and, honest to goodness, worked a rivet gun, like that woman in the famous poster.

"If my mom was born when Mary Barra was born," Dziadosz said, "she would have Mary Barra's job."

Edward was an autoworker before the war and owned a gas station after it for 20 years, near what's now the U.S. end of the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Then he became a mechanic with Parke-Davis, the old pharmaceutical company.

"He could fix anything," said Dziadosz, 77, a retired paralegal in Macomb County.

Agreed, said Roger, 80, her husband of 57 years. "I thanked him many times."

He was quiet by nature, even when he was drubbing his son-in-law at pool at the VFW. An enthusiastic outdoorsman. A graceful dancer: "My parents would waltz and polka, just glide across the floor," Dziadosz said.

In his too-brief retirement, he bought a metal detector, and he'd salt a field with coins before he ventured out with his grandkids.

He never talked about the war.

First glances and first letters

Next week is our anniversary. Four years of married bliss. Honey, do you still love me as I love you? Gee, it is great being the father of a lovely family.

We have to go on a hike now. Will close and send you a letter later. Take care of my little boy, won't you, my love?

— Jan. 24, 1944

Sonny — Edward Jr. — turned out to be the oldest of four children. He's an 80-year-old retired radiologist in Florida.

Dziadosz, pronounced DZIGH-dose, is the second, born 17 months after her father came home from the war. Adonna May, everyone's favorite, didn't make it through the COVID-19 pandemic; she was 68. David, the youngest, died of cancer three years ago at 63.

Their parents met before the wedding of Edward's older brother, at the bridal shower. Intrigued on sight, he asked Sophia to help tally the money offered as gifts.

She was quick enough to have counted it faster by herself, and smart enough to not let him know he was in the way.

He was 24 when they married, Sophia two years younger. At 26, not quite a newlywed but still giddy, he signed up to help save the world.

The Army put him on a train to the Fort Custer Training Center near Battle Creek on June 2, 1942, and he sent his first postcard home on June 3.

There was nothing major to report; the new privates had taken IQ tests and been issued clothing, and he asked after his two beagles.

By June 6, he was at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, 30 miles south of St. Louis. The Army had routed him into the Air Corps, forerunner of the Air Force, and wisely decided that he would be a mechanic.

From there, he went to Southern California, for training so intense that "when I get through with this course I will know everything about an airplane except how to fly one."

Then, unexpectedly, came six months of bliss — further training in Michigan at what's now Selfridge Air National Guard Base, in Harrison Township. He and Sophia both had jobs to do, but they were able to see one another often enough that two postings later, by the time he shipped overseas, he was a father.

Regretting that she had squandered years of opportunity to ask questions of her dad, Dziadosz recorded some of her mother's recollections in 2001, two years before she died. In the moment, she was young again.

A busload of young wives, she said then, would pay 25 cents apiece to rattle from Detroit to the distant base after work.

"Bumpy roads and all," she said, "but you didn't notice them because you were going to the one you loved."

The blemish on his record

Am sure leading a monotonous life. Same thing, every day. I have visited Cherbourg. We sure gave the Nazis a good plastering.

But my Sweets, to return to a more pleasant subject, how are you and Sonny getting along? Did his teeth protrude from the gums? Is he still crabby? Tell Sonny that I'm seriously considering a playmate for him when I get back home.

— July 19, 1944

Edward Martin came ashore at Normandy 10 days after D-Day.

That would have been June 16, 1944, but he couldn't tell his wife until 11 months later, when the war had clipped far enough along for the Army to stop censoring mail.

"We were strafed and bombed," he wrote, and to picture him splashing ashore through the cold waves is to understand why, for as much as he treasured Sophia's letters, none came home with him.

He was a crew chief in 405th Fighter Squadron of the 371st Fighter Group, leading half a dozen men whose job was to keep a P-47 called Mumblin Joe in fighting shape. Its pilot, Arthur W. "Bud" Holderness Jr., flew 142 missions and retired in 1971 as a brigadier general. Mission accomplished.

A staff sergeant by the end of his service, Martin wrote after every promotion to tell Sophia the latest stripe was for her — unless it was for Sonny.

His demotion was for them, too.

The one time he'd met his son, on leave shortly after Sonny's birth, he spent an extra day in Detroit and was busted from corporal to private for going AWOL. His rank was restored within weeks, and he told Sophia that he had no regrets.

Dziadosz never knew that until she finally sat down with the letters.

Diving into the past

I love you as I'm writing this it seems that my heart is going to burst. I don't know if I can stand this much longer. My God, why do people want to destroy each other and cause all this misery and suffering?

As I'm writing this I can hear the planes going up on a mission, some of the pilots might not return. It's hard Sophia, hard.

— Jan. 24, 1945

Most of the letters are still legible. Some, reduced on microfilm to 5¼-by-4¼-inches in a space-saving wartime process called V-mail, were barely readable when they were delivered.

Dziadosz had glanced at them before, but didn't take a long look until the last few years.

A D-Day anniversary was approaching, she said, and her eyesight isn’t getting any better, and she didn't want her kids to lose their connection to her parents.

Donna Hembree, 53, is the activities director at an assisted living center in Grand Blanc. Mark, 48, works in air quality for the state of Michigan.

"Mark was my dad's fishing buddy," Dziadosz said, and it’s good for him to know that his grandpa was awarded a Bronze Star. That he saw gruesome things in the war, but remained gentle when he came home. That in 3½ years of separation, he needed reassurance sometimes that his wife was being true.

So Dziadosz started opening the envelopes, "and I couldn’t stop. I thought, 'I need to do this right.' "

A final landing spot

IN ENGLAND BE HOME WITHIN MONTH DONT WRITE WILL PHONE ON ARRIVAL LOVE EDWARD

— Telegram, Sept. 20, 1945

It's ancient history about ancient history, but in 1981, director Francis Ford Coppola restored the 1927 silent classic "Napoleon" and sent it on the road, with the score played by local orchestras.

At Ford Auditorium on the Detroit riverfront, Dziadosz's father leaned over during "La Marseillaise," touched Sophia's hand, and whispered, "That's the French national anthem."

"I didn't ask how he knew it," she said, or why his eyes seemed misty. Until she embraced the letters, she had no idea he'd been stationed in France for more than a year.

She knew nothing of the men he served with, the ones he referred to in his letters as "swell fellows," part of the 16.4 million Americans who helped restore peace to a world that never seems to value it for long.

As 2024 dawned, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, only 66,143 of them remained to tell their stories, if anyone asks and if they'll speak.

Knowing now how much the war lived on in her father, she's grateful for a decision she and her mother, the love of his life and his beacon of hope amid chaos, made after he died.

They chose a crypt at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Detroit, figuring the hunter in him would appreciate all the pheasants on the grounds. And the soundtrack every day is the hum of well-tuned engines, passing overhead as pilots find safe harbor at City Airport across the street.

Reach Neal Rubin at [email protected].