Donna Reed’s Long Lost Letters Capture Soldiers’ Emotions

May 26, 2009

Actress Donna Reed kept soldier fan mail, and answered them as well.

Soldiers and their pin-up girls. During World War II, the more popular of these were the sexpots of the era: the long-limbed Betty Grable, red-headed siren Rita Hayworth, the sensual Hedy Lamarr, the sultry Dorothy Lamour.

And then there’s Donna Reed.

That’s right: it appears that the quintessential Girl Next Door received her fair share of letters from servicemen yearning for a connection with someone who reminded them of life back home.

According to the New York Times, Mary Owens – the youngest of the late actress Donna Reed’s four children – recently discovered a shoebox that contained 341 letters from World War II servicemen among her mother’s belonging in the garage of their family home in Beverly Hills.

Born Donna Belle Mullenger in Denison, Iowa,Reed, who died in 1986 from pancreatic cancer, was a girl of just 21 and newly discovered by Hollywood at the time World War II began.

What these GIs wrote to her from battlefields across Europe and Asia was both heartfelt and personal: things that, apparently, they didn’t feel comfortable saying out loud to their bands of brothers. But the words written in their letters to the actress reflect the depth of their desperate longing to be back with their friends and family.

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Ms. Reed, then 23, that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.” Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Ms. Reed in The Human Comedy made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

Lt. Norman P. Klinker, a 24-year-old serving in the Army’s 91st Field Artillery Battalion, who later died in combat in Italy, tried to convey some of the peculiar emotions and atmosphere of combat: “One thing I promise you — life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the ‘movie’ version,” he wrote. It is “tough and bloody and dirty,” he explained, “quite an interesting and a heartless life at one and the same time,” but without “that grim and worried feeling so rampant in war pictures.”

Most of the letter writers who survived the war are now deceased. But one who is still with us is Edward Skvarna of Covina, Calif. Today he is 84, but in 1943, he was just out of high school and training in Kansas to be a gunner on a B-29. As he told the New York Times, he still remembers meeting Donna Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asking her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” he recalled. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

“It’s amazing to me that she kept so many of those letters,” Skvarna said. “It tells you something about the caliber of person she was.”

Donna Reed went on to have a very successful career. She is best remembered as Mary Bailey in the 1946 film A Wonderful Life, where she played opposite Jimmy Stewart. She won an Oscar for her supporting role in the 1953 war film, From Here to Eternity, and is forever remembered by baby boomers as Donna Stone in the 275 episodes of The Donna Reed Show.

After her long running television series concluded, Donna Reed became an ardent antiwar campaigner, serving during the Vietnam era as co-chairwoman of a 285,000-member group called Another Mother for Peace and working for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential race. During that period she told reporters that she looked forward to a time when “19-year-old boys will no longer be taken away to fight in the battles of old men.”

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