U.S. Army soldier Harold Moss, a gifted observer, wrote letters home from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa. In 2001, his family rediscovered his letters and now share them at mossletters.com. On this 69th commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor, spare some time for Harold’s letters.

Harold Moss’s War

Moss’s journey starts in the States during basic training and leads him throughout the Pacific, all the way to Okinawa. Harold was fortunate to make it back to the States in one piece. Before his death in 2008, his personal reflections of the war were recorded for others at mossletters.com.
This year, take a moment on this day to read

Diantha Parker ‘s piece entitled, “Letters From the Pacific, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa” about the Mossman collection of letters. It is well worth the time of any genealogist with family members who served in World War II.

Parker writes in The New York Times:

On December 2, 1941, an Army private named Harold Grove Moss was a week away from finishing his Morse Code training to become a radio operator. He was stationed at Camp Roberts in California. “Something seemingly a little unusual happened yesterday and that was all the Japanese boys were taken out of our battery,” he wrote that day in a letter to his parents in Minatare, Nebraska. But he didn’t dwell on it; he also mentioned that a homemade cake they sent “wasn’t broken a bit,” and ended with a modest Christmas list, including “a camera” and a “pair of brown civilian shoes (no two tone).” Five days later, as news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was filtering through the ranks, he wrote again.

Letters Home from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa

To read the rest of the story, visit “Letters From the Pacific, From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa.”