Henderson woman publishes book of father's World War II letters to home

HENDERSON, Ky. − Retired educator Susie Thurman remembers when her mother asked her whether she wanted the letters that were stored in her father’s old Army trunk in the basement of the family’s North Main Street home.

It was about 10 years after her father died and Thurman didn’t take them at that time.

But the bundles of “Victory Mail” (V-mail) and standard air mail letters tied up in pink satin ribbon would eventually claim her undivided attention.

As a result, in February Thurman self-published the first volume of “WWII Letters from England: An American Soldier Writes Home” based on the correspondence from her father Charles “Muggins” Sommers while he served at Burtonwood, Great Britain’s largest Royal Air Force Base, assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Muggins was a Linotype operator for The Gleaner newspaper when he was drafted in May 1942. He was a well-read young man and gifted with language, so he quickly worked his way through Officer Candidate School, then on to Burtonwood, where one of his jobs was to censor soldiers’ correspondence for sensitive details that might fall into the wrong war-time hands.

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When he wasn’t censoring the mail or tackling other administrative duties at the bustling air base, one of the things that occupied much of his time was writing to Catherine Busby “Buzz” Sommers, the love of his life whom he’d married not long before during a short basic training furlough. She collected around 500 of his letters.

Ironically, he sometimes had to censor his own correspondence.

But Muggins mostly just wrote about the everyday life of a World War II soldier, rueing the inconsistency of mail deliveries from home (also care package and the Reader’s Digest) and the consistency of the classically dreary and rainy British climate.

He wrote about making friends at the various neighborhood pubs when his living quarters changed from place to place, and how he and his fellow GIs got invited for holiday and special occasion meals with the locals.

He talks about which American film (some he’d already seen with Buzz) was currently being shown on base, and about occasionally attending USO shows. He talks about faithfully walking in the rain or hitchhiking on a truck to get to a church for Sunday morning Mass.

He observes the absence of fried chicken (and other Southern favorites) and the abundance of SPAM on the mess hall menu, and he reports that the badgering from the locals (children and adults alike) for a donation of “goom” (chewing gum) was more or less constant. American cigarettes were also in high demand and good for bartering.

And he frequently expresses his hope (and doubts) that the war would end soon so he could return home to Buzz.

Thurman started reading the letters in the late 1990s after her mother passed away.

Now, she said, she regrets not having started sooner.

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“There are so many questions she could have cleared up if I had taken the time then,” Thurman said.

In 2019, Thurman and her husband Mike, also a retired educator, traveled to Scotland for a wedding. Since they traveled there via London, they decided to make a side trip to Burtonwood (located between Liverpool and Manchester) to find out what remained of her father’s old stomping grounds.

Though many of the WWII buildings have been demolished, the RAF Burtonwood Heritage Centre is on part of the former base and focuses on the lives of the servicemen, the war and the airplanes at the base.

On that 2019 visit, the director of the Heritage Centre picked the Thurmans up at the train station and escorted them around the site.

“I told him about the letters, that they have tidbits about life at Burtonwood. I asked if he would like me to pass information along,” Thurman said, noting that once she got further into her reading she became curious about whether anyone had published a book about life at the base.

It was that curiosity that inspired the book series based on Muggins’ letters (Buzz’s letters were not saved.) The Heritage Centre now has copies of the first installment.

The letters are in chronological order starting with his basic training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, and Book I concludes with the end of 1944. Two additional books will pick up the story.

“I looked at everything I had and I knew that I needed to cull,” Thurman said. Her challenge was deciding what to leave in to show what he was experiencing, but to eliminate redundancy.

She collected everything that she thought might be interesting, let it rest for three months and started culling.

At that point she weighed whether to approach a traditional publisher.

“I decided I wanted to do it myself. For me it’s an homage to my Dad,” she said. “That’s my main purpose for the book. The secondary one is for any kind of history it might provide.”

For the history purpose, husband Mike suggested framing Muggins’ writings with a World War II timeline to show what was taking place on the front as he was writing.

Thurman said her father deserves to have his experience preserved.

“He was the best father. He was funny and hard-working,” she said. “He didn’t finish high school (he dropped out Holy Name School because his family needed him to work and provide income), but he was the wisest man that I knew.”

She said his work as a Linotype operator provided its own type of education.

“Because he read so much with that, he instilled in me a love of grammar, and it was one of the reasons I became an English teacher,” she said.

Thurman taught at North Junior High School for 16 years, at Henderson County High School for 11 years and at Henderson Community College for 20 years.

She’s no stranger to publishing, having published two books on Henderson history (a postcard book and “Currents” with Gail King), three textbooks with former HCC professor Bill Gary, 500 study guides and articles and a publication titled “Everything Grammar and Style.”

Thurman said that even though she didn’t get to talk to her parents about the letters, she feels like she has been gifted a window into the past that allows her to see them in a different light.

“Their love was young and strong then. He always ended with how much he loved her and how much he missed her,” Thurman said.

“I also found out that I would have liked to be friends of theirs if I had lived in that time period.”

Henderson County Public Library will host a book signing for Thurman’s “WWII Letters from England: An American Soldier Writes Home” at 10 a.m. on June 10. It is Muggins’ 115th birthday. The book is available through Amazon.com as both an eBook and a traditional book.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Henderson woman publishes book of father's World War II letters to home