Just Call Me Soldier Boy: World War II Letters of Andy Bergner, PFC in Patton'sThird Army

On the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day I was given an amazing historical document. Inconspicuously bound in a blue denim notebook was a collection of 273 letters written by my father, Andy Bergner, then an 18 year old GI, to a neighbor lady named Mary Jane. The letters, which lay forgotten in an attic since 1946, provide first person witness to the experience of a boy becoming a man in the crucible of World War II. My father was among the last wave of young Americans to be drafted to the war. He arrived in Europe in early 1945 in time to participate in breaking the Siegfried Line and pushing the Germans to final surrender. He spent only six months overseas. His service was short but brutal. Yet, in reading these funny, homey, often pious, sometimes painful letters, a hero emerges who speaks through these letters on behalf of a hundred thousand other 18 year old heros who left the Boy Scouts and ball fields of middleclass America for the killing fields of war. This is a coming of age story. The story of a boy who had not yet started to shave before being shipped out to reinforce the exhausted US troops in France and Germany. It is the story of a boy confronting issues of patriotism, faith and honor to become a man.