Take a look at this telegram from 1942 informing a woman that her husband(age 28) has died and they’ll give her $50 to bury him.
I thought by 1942, in person delivering of the tragedy was required. And yet, according to the person who posted this on the internet, this is how his grandmother found out her husband was dead.
I can not imagine the pain of reading that first sentence.
Am I right they require in-person informing, now? When did that start?
The main driving force to change it did come from Julia Compton Moore. With a little poetic license it was shown in the movie We Were Soldiers. Her husband was the battalion commander of the first major ground battle in Viet Nam. When casualty reports started coming in she set up an informal notification network. She actively fought for it to become policy with the Pentagon which it did.
I don’t know the exact date but it changed in the mid 60s.
During Desert Storm I was part of our casualty notification team. The team was an officer, a chaplain and me, the driver. At the time we were told to not wear dress uniforms while doing it because word of a team in dress uniform driving around the housing units would cause a panic. Fortunately we were never used. My division (8ID) wasn’t deployed so the number of troops that went from my area were small and casualties were relatively light.
The example in the OP cruelly blunt. All the other examples of death notices in WWII I can find online, use, at the very least, words like “deepest regret”. Starting in 1944, commanders were required to write a letter of condolence whenever anybody under their direct command was killed.
A very touching read is “Final Salute”, originally an article in the now-defunct “Rocky Mountain News” by Jim Sheeler. It won the Pulitzer in 2006, and he later turned it into a book.
The book is available on Amazon, but I can no longer find the article itself, since the Rocky Mountain News folded and their archive is now a 404.
Perhaps it made a difference in how the OP’s notification was handled because the death was from an auto accident in the US, not a death while deployed or on base duty.
Going mostly off of memory about Julia Compton Moore and the movie and book it came from.
As I mentioned above the movie took poetic license. Reality was even worse than what was shown. The Army sent the death notices in telegrams delivered by cab drivers. The cabs were seen as the Angel of Death around Columbus Georgia. In the movie Mrs Moore had the cabbie bring the telegrams to her. In reality it was still his job and he couldn’t hand it off but she started to ride along with the cab drivers. The worst part was that when the unit deployed to Vietnam the families were told since the soldier was no longer at Fort Benning the families had to move out of base housing. Some moved to the surrounding area and at least had the support of other Army families. Many moved back to where they came from and received their telegram alone with zero support.
I can’t remember the movie but it was about WWII and it’s impact on the US home front. It showed Western Union messengers on their bicycles being feared that they would stop at their house with a death telegram.
One young woman was married but living at home while her husband was overseas. Her little brother thought it would be a great idea to send a happy birthday telegram to her. She would have killed him had she caught him.
The uncle of Thomas Childers, himself a historian of WWII, was one of the last American soldiers killed in the European theatre - late enough that his family was notified of his death (by telegram) while the rest of the nation was celebrating VE day.
Famously, the Sullivan family was notified in person of the death of their five sons - when the Navy officers came to their door, Mrs. Sullivan asked, “Which one?” and received the worst possible answer.
In the movie A League of their Own (1992) the women were playing baseball while their husbands were off at war. In one scene a Western Union messenger came into the clubhouse and the women were stricken with fear, hoping the telegram was not for them.
I thought the same thing. No “regret to inform you”, “grateful nation” or anything. Basically just “your husband died, we’ll send you the corpse. Don’t try to spend more than $50”
Another good (television) film about a related subject is Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon. As I remember, the Kevin Bacon character was an Iraq War-era Marine working behind a desk in Washington who volunteered to escort the body of a Marine home, from the Dover base where the bodies were prepared, across the country to the funeral in Wyoming.
During WWII when a merchant ship was sunk the merchant sailor’s pay ended. All the family received was any wages due to the sailor. If he became a POW at the end of the war he had to find his own way home. Even though they sailed under articles and if the jumped ship they could be tried for desertion in the face of the enemy in a military court.
In the late 60’s, casualty’s families were notified in person with a team consisting of a driver and an officer. I will never forget having that duty as a young USAF officer. It was a horrible extra duty, but paled in comparison to the grief of the relatives of the young airmen who had lost their lives. There was a followup by other AF personnel, but the initial notification was face to face. I am saddened to remember those times even today.
In a way I’m impressed that this was something the US managed to implement before the end of the Vietnam War, what with the high number of casualties. I’m sure the scale of the undertaking would have been impractical for most European countries during WWII.
That was my thought. If I were asked the OP question with no prior knowledge, I would still have confidently guessed post-WWII. Even considering as lightly-impacted as the US was compared to Europe, the scale of conflict and casualty in the World Wars and the Civil War would have made the aspiration of in-person notification very difficult to achieve.
