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- May 10, 1943 envelope
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- May 10, 1943, p. 1
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- May 10, 1943, p. 2
Letter transcription:
May 10, 1943
Lieut. R. S. Yegerlehner USNR
Navy 60
F.P.O. San Fran.
Dear Mother,
Today is wash day as any good household would have it but instead of doing it ourselves we have a laundry now and all we have to do is take the wet wash and hang it up to dry. Last week it was a little hard to get dry but today there shouldn’t be much trouble. I had an unusual big wash because I had just changed sheets last week when my bunk got saturated so I had two extra sheets. So much for the good old housekeeping difficulties.
We were able to have a movie in camp last night but I didn’t go due to the fact that I had seen it before so I’m not interested the second time. Commander Fredricks and I just sat and shot the breeze for the duration of the show.
We had “cutting” meat twice yesterday. Roast beef for dinner and liver for supper. The meat is a little tough we get here but it has a good flavor and it gives something to chew on. Spam and all its derivities [derivatives] are not cuttable – just plain gumming food.
Geo. said he saw a rat in our tent the other night but I’ve been unable to find any but we are planning on a trap to see if we can
[page 2] trap the critter – I don’t like rats for tent mates although we call each other that once in a while. That is all but the chaplin, and he probably thinks we are all rats and he might be correct.
I’ve been trying to figure some way in which I can make a pillow – so far all I’ve been able to use is an extra blanket folded but it gets pretty hard during the night. In an area like this it’s pretty hard to manufacture anything suitable. Of course our bunks for that matter are not too good – Just plain cots with a mattress about 2 inches thick and after a few months in certain places the canvass has bulges at the places of most stress so at night one has to get into the grove in order to be comfortable.
Our news here the past few days has been very good – I mean what little news we are able to pick up over the radio. We do have a one page mimeographed news paper that keeps us informed to a slight degree.
Well guess I’m at the bottom of the well,
So solong
Love Daddy.
Russell Islands
Image by Kelisi at Wikipedia.com (Wikipedia Commons license)
© 2014 copyright owned and transcribed by Deborah Sweeney
Post originally found: https://genealogylady.net/2014/06/03/a-rat-in-our-tent-roscoe/
Genealogy Lady 
Funny that he calls Spam “gumming food” –I saw Spam on sale in Costco’s recently.
Yes, that was a funny line about the chaplain thinking they were all rats.
“We do have a one page mimeographed news paper” ….historians wince at this kind of information, because there was probably good information there, and it’s unlikely that any copies survive. During WWII, there was a librarian at the NYPublic Library who made it his business to collect as many such military newsletters as he could. These proved quite valuable to Barbara Tuchman as she was writing her book “General Stilwell and The American Experience in China” –for which she won one of her Pulitzer Prizes.
The National Archives have quite a lot of military documents. The one in San Francisco has a lot of the Navy’s papers from WWII (although not for the Russell islands. They are housed somewhere on the east coast). Someday….I hope to dig through some of those documents….
I got a chuckle out of this sentence – “That is all but the chaplin, and he probably thinks we are all rats and he might be correct.”
Glad that it just isn’t me! I thought that was pretty funny too.