Dan Snow's History Hit - Dear John, The Wartime Breakup Letter

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Writing letters to a spouse or sweetheart deployed overseas was portrayed as a patriotic duty, a means to boost the morale of the fighting man. But what of the letter that broke off an engagement, or announced the intention to file for divorce? During World War II, such letters became known as “Dear Johns,” and the women who sent them were denounced as traitors.Susan L. Carruthers, Professor in U.S. and International History, has listened to hundreds of hours of oral testimony from veterans to understand the stories men told each other about these breakup notes. Susan and Dan discuss who wrote the “Dear John” letter, wartime relationships and breakdowns from multiple perspectives and the expectations placed on women across miles and years of absence, and the role of constantly changing technologies in both facilitating intimacies and undermining it in wartime.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On my mind at the moment, as I look out at the endless ice and grey seas of the Antarctic, is what's going on with the old family. What's going on with the family back home? It's the longest I've ever been away from my wife and children, and that's making me very sad. It's offset by the knowledge that they're having a much better time when I'm not in the house, forcing them to go and look at castles and battlefields all day,

and the fact that it's very exciting down here in Antarctica. But, you know, I've got mixed feelings. What can I say? I'm conflicted. So what better time to talk to Susan Carruthers. She is a professor in international history at the University of Warwick. She's been nominated for top history awards. And she's written a brilliant book called The Dear John. Dear John was a slang word for a letter arriving during the Second World War if you're an American from your loved one breaking up with you. And that was something that apparently happened quite a lot for men and women in uniform serving far away from home for extended periods of time. Susan has been to the archives, she's listened to interviews, she's read the letters,

she has immersed herself in the world of Dear John letters. It's completely extraordinary. And it's fascinating as well. She'll bring it right to the present day, talking about more recent wars when combatants have had the ability to live stream, video call their loved ones back home, some of the challenges around that. Fascinating stuff. If you wish to listen to more podcasts, Downsides History Hit, but without the ads, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. It's available. Literally, all you got to do is click on the link in the description of this podcast. You click on there, and then you get taken to History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history, videos, podcasts without the ads, all sorts of stuff, very small subscription.

You're going to love it. Available anywhere in the world, except here in the Antarctic. Not available via satellite in the Antarctic, annoyingly. But unless you're living in the Antararctic not available via satellite in the antarctic annoyingly but unless you're living the antarctic you can sign up wherever you are in the meantime though folks here's professor susan carothers enjoy susan thank you very much coming on the podcast well thanks for inviting me dan before the second world war what is a Dear John letter? Well, we could say that before the Second World War, there was no such thing as a Dear John letter. It wasn't until World War II that American GIs coined this very evocative phrase,

which has stuck around ever since, shorthand for a letter that might have been sent by a girlfriend, a fiancee, a wife, announcing that the relationship was over. So we can be pretty sure that women wrote these kinds of letters in previous conflicts, but they didn't have a name until about 1942. So was the Dear John letter, was it something that they tried to make light of? Was this a way of coping with the sadness of being ditched by their partner back home while they were on some miserable battlefield? I think in part it was. So some of the earliest references to Dear John letters that we have from 1942, 1943 are absolutely bound up with GIs playfully trying to joke their way out of heartbreak and console one another. And in fact, Yank Magazine in January of 1943 runs this brilliant story with a lovely

photograph of GIs in India who have formed a brush-off club, and they've given themselves playful little names like Weeper-in-Chief, Consoler-in-Chief. You have to have gotten a Dear John letter to be eligible for membership. Some of them are wearing turbans. They're obviously appropriating local dress styles and having quite a lot of fun despite being pretty downcast and heartbroken. The interesting thing about your book is you're interviewing the men or you're listening to interviews and reading interviews with the men whilst trying to learn about the romantic feelings and lives of the women left at home. It's a very difficult path that you're treading. Yeah. So I discovered fairly early on in researching the book, having taken this idea that I wanted to explore the Dear John letter, this very

redolent motif in American war law and popular culture that surprisingly no one had written a book about, which was great. Yay, I get to write that book. But where is the evidence? And probably if I had been a little bit savvier at the outset, I would have anticipated that of course, there weren't going to be stacks and stacks of Dear John letters in archives just waiting for me to go and uncover them. So one of the big epiphanies that I had as I was researching the book was that what I was really dealing with in thinking about the Dear John letter and everything that swells around it is that this is a male oral tradition. Most of what we know about Dear John letters, we know because of the things that men have had to say to one another or anyone else who will listen about the letters that they got announcing that

their relationships were over. And of course, they had plenty to say about the women who presumed to write these letters. So a lot of the research for the book was done listening, as you say, to oral history interviews that I myself didn't do, but that all sorts of people had undertaken with American veterans. And they have a lot of things that they wanted to share about Dear John letters from every war from World War II to the present. And when you're reading all these or listening to these interviews in oral archives, what do the men think is the main reason why the women are breaking up with them? I think most men thought that women simply lacked the emotional stamina, the staying power to actually stick with the relationship over the course of protracted

absence. Many of them, I think, have recourse to a very stereotyped kind of understanding about women, about female kind as essentially flighty, fickle, and all the rest of it. And so it comes naturally to them to talk about tear jar letters as simply a product of women not having the same kind of emotional discipline and maturity as they themselves do, which of course is ironic because we know that a lot of men who went overseas in World War II and other wars were busily betraying their wives and girlfriends in one way or another. But they definitely tended to think that women simply had abandoned them, their eye had been caught by some other guy who hadn't yet been drafted to fight a

war. And there they were now swanning around town with this new love interest. In its classical form, the Dear John letter doesn't just announce the end of a relationship. As GI law has it, Dear John does something more and worse than that. It also tells them, hey, it's over with you, but I've also found someone new. So that sort of infidelity aspect of Dear John's storytelling is very, very pronounced. This is obviously hopelessly anecdotal and therefore beneath your consideration, but isn't it fascinating that my impression of masculinity growing up in the 90s and the noughties was of men are the ones whose eyes were likely to be

wander, deaf, flighty, unreliable, hopeless at long-term relationships, especially if there's any kind of sacrifice involved. And how fascinating that this is only 80 years ago. It's the men complaining of these female traits. It's very interesting. Yeah. And of course, we could understand that to be a form of projection because, as I just mentioned, a large number of American GIs serving overseas in World War II, and also think about Vietnam, the American military provided R&R tours a week in Hawaii, a week in Hong Kong, or wherever it might be to get drunk, see the sights, perhaps buy sex on the commercial prostitution market. I mean, this was sort of almost part of the official terms of service of those tours. So women in all the wars I look at from World War II

to the present have tried often in vain to raise their voices and say to journalists, anyone else will listen, but wait a minute, we're getting lambasted for writing Dear John letters, for betraying our servicemen boyfriends. But actually, they are far more likely to betray and abandon us than is the reverse. So I think I agree that we sort of grew up in an era where men's commitment phobia was something that we were endlessly hearing about. But for servicemen, obviously, it was much more serviceable to think that women were liable to have their heads turned at the slightest opportunity. And what about age? Because we now seem to form our monogamous partnership, our child-bearing,

whatever you want to call it, sort of key partnerships later in life. Or do we? A question, are we talking about lots of sort of 17, 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds who are struggling with this, this kind of longevity of these relationships? I think in many cases we are. It depends perhaps a little bit on what war we're talking about. But famously in the Vietnam War, the average age of an American GI was 19. So we are talking about relationships between teenagers who might be high school sweethearts, who might be known to each other perhaps for a very brief period of time before the guy ships off overseas. And like a lot of teenage relationships,

these are not the most durable couplings. They are susceptible to stress, to the pressures of separation, whether one party is going off to college or going to war. A lot of young relationships are quite fragile. In World War II, I would say the average age of personnel there was a little bit older. And of course, the United States enters that war hoping to keep married men and particularly married men with kids out of conflict. But sooner rather than later, it realizes that military manpower requirements are such that they're going to have to enlist married men. But those would probably more often have been older men, particularly the husbands who are also fathers.

But a lot of anxious commentary in that war about young couples who are rushing to marry for what experts saw as the wrong reasons, especially having sex, which, of course, was a major no-no in the 1940s if you weren't already married. So a huge sort of social brouhaha in the 1940s about what was referred to as war hysteria marriage, which again referred typically to younger teenage Americans. And we talked, you know, the sex and the roving eye and all that kind of stuff, but what are the very real other pressures on relationships that you will have studied in the course of writing this book. Absence and very, very different experiences in this period must be corrosive for relationships.

I think absence is perhaps especially corrosive when we remember that for some servicemen, particularly in World War II, they really didn't have a good idea about when they would come back. They and their spouses or partners didn't have a good idea about when they would come back. They and their spouses or partners didn't have a good idea of whether they would come back at all. And of course, that sort of existential dread that couples are left in, will he come back? If he does come back, will he be recognizable as the person who went away in terms of what kind of emotional, psychological damage war may have wrought to the person of a partner or spouse. These things

are incredibly hard to manage. And of course, in some of the more remote theatres of war, think about guys who are stuck on Pacific islands and they weren't getting mail sometimes for months and months at a time. So in that kind of vacuum, if neither party is hearing from the other, it's not surprising that people start to assume that the worst has happened, that the partner may have died, or that one or other of the partner's affections have been sort of alienated. I felt tremendously for many of the couples whose stories that I unearthed in researching the book, because it's hard now in the 21st century. We're so accustomed to the idea that we can keep in touch and we can be in touch with loved ones regardless of separations of huge distances over time, space, that this was an incredibly wrenching phenomenon to have to tackle for acres of time. If you listen to Dan Snow's history,

I'm talking about Dear John letters. More coming up. Hopefully not for me. I'm talking about Dear John letters. More coming up. Hopefully not for me. Ancient history fans, this is our moment. Over on the Ancients podcast, twice every week, we release new episodes covering topics dedicated to our distant past. Check out the Ancients on History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. P.S. Russell Crowe, we're still interested. You get your podcasts. P.S. Russell Crowe, we're still interested. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. I find very interesting is how this was sort of known and manipulated by governments and military high command in Italy in 1943 as far as I can make out the Germans spent their whole time shouting at the British army there British Commonwealth forces that the Americans were having sex with their girlfriends back home in the UK. The UK was obviously pre-D-Day becoming a giant marshalling yard for the American forces this is something that's very much known about and used, isn't it? Yeah, to me, this is perhaps one of the most perplexing and intriguing parts of the story, that fears of infidelity are rife. Every military, perhaps through history, has acknowledged and worried that amongst its own ranks, Esprit is going to be corroded by fears

that women back home will be running off with, sleeping with other men. It's something on the one hand, as you say, that combatants try to encourage in the ranks of their enemies. So Germans were busily dropping pamphlets, leaflets over British and American soldiers, often deploying really grotesque anti-Semitic stereotypes. Sam Levy, the big Wall Street boss is sleeping with your girlfriend. So they managed to wrap an anti-Semitic stereotypes. Sam Levy, the big Wall Street boss is sleeping with your girlfriend. So they managed to wrap an anti-Semitic message around this fear of infidelity. And we find that both sides, Britons and Americans were trying to manipulate fears on the enemy side as well, of course. So that psychological warfare motif is rife regardless of how you're positioned in the

war. But to me, perhaps even more startling and curious to think about is the way that the American military itself in some ways is manipulating and playing on men's fears about infidelity. World War II isn't just the war that gives rise to the Dear John coinage. It also is the first war that gives rise to so-called Jody chants. That's the name that's given to these marching cadences, drills that we probably are familiar with from Hollywood movies, if nothing else, which play on the idea that Jody, this wily, scheming, backdoor man, so-called, has run off with or inevitably will run off with your wife, your girlfriend, your sister. He'll get your job. He'll get your car as well as your girl. And I found it so

fascinating that this is almost the first thing that new recruits into the military were being taught on the parade ground, on the grinder, was the expectation that their women would necessarily desert them. So there's something that's almost a productive force for the military in playing with these fears. This is a way in which the ties between men can be cemented at the expense of women who are presumed to be totally unreliable. Is there a move by governments and families to try and get women not to break up with men at the front. Do young women come under enormous pressure? Yes, they definitely do. So this is one aspect of the story that I spend quite a lot of time unpacking in my book, which is the tremendous amount of work that's poured into disciplining

women's feelings and comportment on the home front. So we talked before about how quite a lot of the research that I did involved hearing men's stories. But some of the most interesting players in this whole picture to me are the people that in Britain we would call agony aunts. I was surprised to find that in the United States, where I lived for a long time, they don't talk about agony aunts, but they definitely have agony aunts. So they tend to be called advice columnists. So women who write sort of syndicated columns, often with a readership in the millions for some of the more successful ones like Dear Abby and so on, to whom young women write in emotional experiments. They don't know what to do about their emotional relationship problems. Would an older, more mature woman kindly offer

counsel and guidance? So what I found over the course of successive decades from the 1940s right through into the 21st century and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was that these advice columnists kept trotting out essentially unchanging guidance, which emphasized very, very strenuously, do not send a dear John to a man at war. This is the absolutely worst thing that you could possibly do. It's cruel, it's cowardly, it'll devastate his own morale. And in the course of doing that, it will also corrode the whole morale and operational efficiency of his whole unit. Because once one man is sort of poisoned and plunged into a state of response, that's going to quickly spread like wildfire around his unit. So it didn't really

matter very much whether I was reading advice columnists in 1943 or 2003. They just kept trotting out that same mantra. And these women weren't being paid by the government. They weren't being paid by the armed forces to give that kind of counsel. That was simply the terms of emotional engagement that they themselves understood to be a patriotic imperative in wartime. And almost sometimes, according to your book, they're denounced as fifth columnists. Yes. So the language is very extreme. So often women were told in totally unmistakable and the most starkly moralizing terms that if they presume to break off a relationship with a man, especially by letter, I mean, the dear John really matters.

You know, it would be one thing if he was home on leave to say, actually, John, I'm really sorry, but things are over. But the dear John is sort of the force multiplier of the breakup, because this has all the sort of connotations that the woman was simply too cowardly to break the news in person. So women get tarred as cowards as well as traitors. Perhaps most notoriously, General Patton, who was renowned, of course, for making completely intemperate statements, announces that women who sent Dear John letters should be shot as traitors. It wasn't surprising to me having encountered Patton before that he would say something like that. But still, I mean, it definitely caused a

sort of frisson of dread when I read this, just to think about how young women must have felt in hearing the most senior generals saying such sort of murderously irate things about things that young women did, and often, I think, for not dishonourable reasons. Honestly, we're so complicated. They can't have sex. They have to stay with each other. They can't do this. They can't do that. I mean, it's so prescriptive. We're bonkers. Can I ask about, you've gone all the way up to the present day. What is all your research telling you about new technology and FaceTime and all the rest of it? Do you think that is something that is lessening the distance? Or is it actually almost sometimes exacerbating the physical remoteness?

I would say more often than not, it's the latter. So this is a fascinating piece of the story. It's about the way in which each successive war seems to have given rise to a new channel of communication that promises to be the latest, bestest, fastest thing that collapses distance between over here and over there. So in the 21st century, the military, I would say, spent the first decade of the 21st century trying very hard to ring fence its personnel from the world of cellular telephony, from the internet, social media, and all the rest of it. They set up their own kind of parallel Facebook for a little while, but that was a losing battle. And in a shortish space of years, every branch of the

armed forces recognized that they were going to have to surrender to the inevitable. They just couldn't stop that tide of social media usage, phone usage that we're all so familiar with. But having read a lot about this, talked to a lot of veterans, I taught for 15 years at Rutgers University in Newark in New Jersey, and quite a lot of my students were also themselves veterans who'd come back from one or two or more tours of Iraq or Afghanistan or both, they had decidedly mixed things to say about the sort of double-edged character of the digital era technologies. So on the one hand, as you suggest, it does make home feel nearer. You can be in more or less round the clock communication. But for many of them, that actually made it much, much harder to do their job and to do their job

efficiently. And I could certainly well understand why it must be, I think, agonizing in some ways to be having to negotiate this sort of head spinning change ofning change of role, affect identity between, let's say, reading your toddler a bedtime story on Skype at one minute, and then the next you're expected to go out on patrol in Iraq. You're kicking down doors, you're looking for insurgents, you're manning a checkpoint. You might face the very real threat of an IED blowing up your vehicle. How do you inhabit those two worlds in more or less real time? Can you actually successfully be a focused soldier, member of the armed forces doing your job, but also be constantly having to toggle back and forth? You're having to figure out how's the mortgage going to

get paid? What do you do about the boiler that explodes? What if your kid's having trouble at school? All of these things that are incredibly distracting. So most of what I heard was actually saying, I envy those guys in World War I who only had letters or female. It must have been so much easier to compartmentalize. And compartmentalization is what makes it bearable to be away from home that you can still stay in touch, but you're not having to manage this almost impossible balancing act. Well, it's very interesting. I've just gone to Antarctica for six weeks and my wife has requested that we don't do video calls with the kids. It's almost too difficult. And she's requested that we write to each other and have sort of more considered

exchange of you know news and feelings and well wishes and everything in that way rather than kind of crashing around in a ship's deck in the middle of a storm and you call when they're all trying to go to school or something it's very very difficult indeed so I think we're going to do that I'll let you know how it goes it's not a war zone but you know I'll get a little sense of the things you're talking about thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What is your book called? My book is called Dear John, Love and Loyalty in Wartime America. I'm sure everyone tells you this, but I've got a lovely bundle of letters between my grandparents

all tied up with ribbon that we found when my grandma died. And I still haven't had the courage to go and read them all, but we all know where they are in Canada. And so that's a job for another day. Yes. Well, I hope that that proves to be a pleasurable journey of discovery. And I hope also that you'll think perhaps about depositing them with an archive so that people like me can go along and read them. Because I'm just so endlessly thankful that people have sat down and recorded oral history interviews or given their letters or parents' or grandparents' letters because I couldn't do what I do if people weren't willing to do that. So maybe something to think about once you yourself have read those letters. Very good point. We will certainly do that. Is it true that lots of the letters that you read are absolutely filthy?

I didn't find too many filthy ones, to be honest. I mean, lots of the stories about Dear John letters, of course, tend, or at least one sub-genre of Dear John stories tends to be kind of filthy. There's a whole storyline exemplified by the movie Jarhead or the memoir, Anthony Swofford's memoir that the movie was based on where women send these pornographic tapes to GIs, in that case serving in the Gulf in 1991. But I haven't actually found any really filthy letters myself. I mean, one of the things that surprised me though about the letters, particularly the letters written in World War II, when anyone who was a soldier writing a letter knew that his correspondence was being read. So almost literally, in some cases, an officer would

have been peering over his shoulder as he wrote. And it took me aback a bit when I first started reading these correspondences, just how freely men and their wives were giving voice to feelings about anxieties around infidelity, was one other of them, sleeping with someone else, falling for someone else. And they were so unguarded despite the knowledge that someone else was a very visible third party in this correspondence. So that was interesting. Thank you very much. Very interesting stuff. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks, Dan. This has been a lot of fun. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours,

our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all of our gods and fish. Thanks, folks. You've met Dinda on the episode. Congratulations. Well done, you.

I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account.

So please don't ever do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.