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Box of 300 Love Letters Showed Up, What Whimsical WWII Soldier Who Wrote Them?
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Ellen Wexler
| Writer and Special Projects Editor
Louis Weber was learning how to get by in the military: How to wake in the dark morning hours and work kitchen duty until sunset. How to get the 1.5-inch-long haircut required to look the part. How to stay so busy that he wouldn’t have time to miss the life he’d left behind.
“I don’t feel as blue as I did yesterday,” he wrote to his wife, Frances, on June 17, 1942. “They don’t give me a minute to think about anything but Army life, and in a way that’s the best thing for me, because if I stopped to think about home I’d go nuts.”
Better known as “Speedy,” the 23-year-old from New York had been married for only about a year. He’d been in the Army for just a few weeks. But America’s role in World War II was just beginning, and the young soldier would spend the years that followed on the other side of the Atlantic. He passed the time by scribbling hundreds of letters to Frances, who waited at home in the Bronx.
In 2022, a cardboard box packed with more than 300 of Speedy’s letters arrived at a United Service Organizations (USO) office in New York. Nobody knew who’d donated them or what became of the couple after the war ended. The collection eventually made its way to the organization’s headquarters in Virginia, where it piqued the interest of archivist and historian Michael Case.
Now, after an extensive search, an amateur sleuth has helped track down Speedy’s nephew. He was able to fill in some of the gaps, providing more details about Speedy and Frances’ life together.
These breakthroughs arrived after several years of fruitless searching. Case had been hoping to identify living relatives ever since the letters landed on his desk. “We get a lot of donations,” he tells Smithsonian magazine, “but usually it’ll be a photo or two, or a postcard, or a pin, or a button.” The missives were unlike anything the USO had received.
Reading through the box of letters, “I really felt like I started to know Speedy Weber,” Case says. “It’s an everyday guy—not a general, no one famous—just doing his job and loving and being emotional and screwing up occasionally.” Case wanted to know more about him.
Speedy probably never got past high school, but he wrote in an evocative style that Case describes as “everyday elegant.” “He just had this sense of drama,” the archivist explains. He “uses a lot of plain language but really nails the emotion of the time he’s in.” Case loves the titles he scrawled on the tops of his letters—“somewhere in England,” “somewhere in France,” “somewhere in Luxembourg”—and his signature sign-off: “You are always in my heart.”
The pace of Speedy’s correspondence wasn’t unusual. “Of course, there were folks who communicated more and those who sent few letters, but mail was the main communication channel for those on the front line,” Lynn Heidelbaugh, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, tells Smithsonian. During World War II, the government encouraged military personnel to write, often providing free stationary and waiving postage fees. According to a 1944 survey, service members sent some form of mail—including long letters, short postcards and single-page V-Mail—about six times per week.