"A Very Personal War"
The World War II Participants Collection By Martin M. Teasley

"The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you ..." So began the official telegram to Mrs. Laura Woellhof of Clay Center, Kansas, notifying her that her son, Aviation Radioman Second Class Lloyd Richard "Dick" Woellhof, was missing in action. His dive bomber, flying off the USS Yorktown, had been shot down by the Japanese over the Bonin Islands on July 4, 1944.

Thus, like thousands of mothers during World War II, Mrs. Woellhof learned that her nineteen-year-old son had made the supreme sacrifice for his country. The Woellhof materials, as poignant as they are, tell just one of several hundred stories to be found in the new World War II Participants Collection at the Eisenhower Library.  It is an eerie feeling, say Eisenhower Library staff members and researchers, to sift through the personal letters, diaries, V-mail, ration stamps, snap shots, training booklets, and captured war booty.

  Some have likened the experience to opening a young G.I.'s long- lost footlocker from fifty years ago and in some instances, that is indeed the case. Here, you can see the face of combat or sense the loneliness of a young person overseas, thousands of miles from home for the first time. There is the tedium of military training and the off-color humor of barracks life, or the excitement of seeing new worlds and the longing for a girlfriend back home. The collection also documents the lives of those who served on the homefront.

When Larry Woellhof brought his brother's papers to the Library this past fall, it was a somber, but proud occasion. He went through the documents and artifacts one by one, describing them to the staff. There were Dick Woellhof's letters home to his mother before the shootdown, a New Testament he had been issued shortly after entering the service, photographs of days during shore-leave, the MIA notification telegram itself, his aviator's flight log book with the last entry "missing on attack on Bonin Is.," and the Purple Heart medal his mother later received when he was officially declared dead. The Eisenhower Museum received Woellhof's navy wool coat, sweater, and stocking cap that had been cleared out of his locker aboard the Yorktown and shipped home some fifty years ago.

There was one final item; it was Larry's letter to his mother in August 1944 when he first learned his brother was missing in action. Serving on the other side of the world with the Army in Europe, he wrote, "The whole thing makes me feel so useless and also makes my part in this war very insignificant...I wish I could be with you now or there was something I could possibly do."

There was nothing Larry Woellhof could do at the time, but fifty years later he has. By preserving this story for future generations, he presented his brother with a lasting memorial.

Editor: You might also consider contributing your memorabilia the Yorktown Museum




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