Wisconsin Veterans Museum

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center research room is oddly welcoming for a state building with the banal name “Thirty on the Square”. Tasked with collecting primary and secondary materials documenting the wars and lives of Wisconsin veterans, it is unique even to similar archives which typically collect materials for particular branches of the armed forces, particular wars, or even particular units. This latitude allows them to cast a larger net but also means they must actively capture the latest aspects of veterans’ lives as wars, times, and technologies change. Reference and Outreach Archivist Russell Horton is preparing a display of postcards from the early 20^th Century which will illustrate their supplemental role in, rather than as, informative communication with their relatives back home and show the richness of their travels as they trained and fought.

Housed with other photographs, some dating to the Civil War, are scores of postcards protected by thin plastic enclosures to retard the decades of deterioration. The writing, whether pen or pencil, is often faded into a nearly illegible scrawl but the vast majority contain no annotation whatsoever; the World War I postcards are typically reproductions of photographs showing little more than a man in uniform with a single annotation, usually (but not always) where correspondence is written: “Dad” is the most common but these are usually personal names with implicit family comprehension. Horton speculates that these postcards served as photographs to commemorate time and place and accompanied letters or other notes. A handful are addressed and stamped with no additional information.

The mass produced postcards are similarly bereft of personal touches but primarily display the environmental circumstances of the soldiers. Marked with the names of French printing companies these postcards capture the rubble of broken cities like Verdun and the corpses of slain airplane pilots, but also the portentous arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces on parade and echoed in the World War II postcards commemorating the liberation of Paris. These World War II postcards, with captions in French and English, are far more celebratory as the people of Paris shrug off the despotism of the Nazis and welcome the arrival of American forces.

Four cards stuck out to me in particular: The first was a World War I era plain paper with a sewn face depicting a purple flower and the words “Forget me not.”

A second and far simpler government issued postcard informed the recipient that their soldier had successfully arrived in France as a part of the American Expeditionary Forces but was an oddly comforting courtesy from the Army.

The third and fourth were more extensive, however. A series of ten postcards documenting the landscape of one 1941 soldier’s training camp outside San Diego was the most annotated of them all. His descriptions of the photographs fall off the edges and fill every square inch of white space and thus there is no room for an address or stamp. They were likely sent with a letter or a small packet. The fourth set of postcards was of the type that Horton is placing in his exhibit; an object stating to be a “Souvenir Folder” and emboldened with Lady Liberty, the unstamped and unaddressed envelope is actually a string of ten postcards depicting the American cargo vessel USS Wilhelmina. According to the online Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, she was built in 1909 by Matson Navigation Co. and impressed into the US Navy during the Great War. She was returned in 1919 and sold to British interests in 1940 only to be sunk by U-boat in 1940.

In an age when Wisconsin was more rural and its residents likely to born, live, and die in the same county, these postcards illustrated their circumstances more than their thoughts. I cannot speak for succeeding generations of veterans but I suspect that sophisticated mass communication, cheaper photographic reproduction, and colored illustrations and photos reduced the need to implant photographs onto postcards or color-in scenic images of exotic locales. With telephones and later e-mail to inform family of the soldier’s circumstances, postcards fell back on commemorating a location or event. Annotations are more extensive today but circumstantial; The Eiffel Tower postcard may describe the poor body odor of the locals, a Vienna one expressing joy over the size of the pretzels available in the Christmas Market, or any number of snippets perhaps unworthy to be sent in a letter, e-mail, or phone call. Personally I am a fan of this bygone era when pictures spoke for themselves and were far more telling.

Images courtesy of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

Entry compiled by: Alex Champion