This week marks the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945: the only use (to date) of atomic weapons in warfare, and ostensibly the place in history where the Pacific portion of World War II was leveraged towards an end (Japan wouldn't surrender until August 14.) It seems appropriate on this anniversary to view the immediate time and space through an improbable piece of found media, preserved within a book for forty years before being discovered… then lost… then found again.
I hang on to pieces of ephemera that interest me. I suspect this is something instinctual creatives do. For me, it’s usually something that invokes an idea - maybe the short message on the back of an old postcard, maybe an especially compelling bit of photography, maybe an old piece of art board with an interesting piece of work. As Bill Watterson’s hyper-imaginative tiger-lover Calvin once opined, “There’s treasure everywhere.” Treasure is of course subjective - it is, as another old saying goes, another man’s trash - but if one pays attention and has a curious mind, you never know what will turn up. There will be future posts in this vein, including ‘the Henry Miller letters’ (no, not that Henry), and a slide carousel full of orphaned work. Today is a topical ‘things found in books’ story.
When you collect books second-hand, all sorts of nifty bits surface. Everything has been tucked into books. Back in the day you grabbed the family bible as much for the birth records written inside the cover as the money slipped in the pages. There’s also grotesqueness. People press odd things in books. While I’ve never discovered anything as esoteric as old lunch meat (an absolutely true story told by a bookman friend of mine), I can lay claim to fossilized snot. I’ve encountered bits from the mundane and reader-related (sales receipts, bookmarks from defunct stores, airplane boarding passes) to photos (including a couple from a Navy missile exercise, or the one of a pet snake tucked in the pages of an inscribed-to-a-friend copy of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors), to retyped inspirational pieces and other oddments.
Occasionally, one piece rises above the rest by dint of its where and when. In today’s case, it’s a personal letter written by USMC reservist Corporal Martin Mangan, somewhere in the south Pacific, caught between Okinawa and Japan, between Little Boy and Fat Man.
-o-
The letter was posted with a common red 6 cents US airmail stamp featuring a Twin Motor transport plane, (Scott catalog #C25). It’s noted as “Inter-Island” in two places on the face of the envelope, with an additional initialed ink stamp identifying the letter has been “Passed By Naval Censor”. But it was the postmark that fired the imagination: a round, clear U.S. NAVY cancellation, noting it was received into the mail on August 10 1945 at 10 a.m.
-o-
Somewhere in the Western Pacific
August 9, 1945
Dear Ed,
Well, if you feel any earth tremors over your way, it probably won't be a quake or a tidal wave, but just the repercussions from this place seething with scuttle-butt. The report came in early this morning about Russia declaring war on our honorable inhabitants of the land of the rising sun, and that much at least seems to be fairly well confirmed at this stage, with all the wonderful implications it has.
And now, with the concurrent advent of this new bomb that they’ve unloaded on the Son of Heaven comes all kinds of “straight dope” on pursuant developments. The quartermaster boys are wandering around offering to lay bets to the effect that the war will be over by Saturday of this week. My first impulse is to ask them where they’re acquiring their opinion, but since they have access to a radio, maybe it’s prospectively a more wonderful world than I think it is.
Received a letter from Rita today, chronicling the latest developments within the clan. I suppose Jeanne must have mailed to you the clipping about Robert M.’s citation for being a civilian hero, by this time. This gang around here is a bunch of civilian-haters, and I’m afraid that the rank (phew) and file would lend much credence to the event; but I’m glad that the lad is doing well for himself - and, I hope, for others. I’ve been given to understand that he is soon to equal your prolificacy in the way of offspring. I hope that you’ll soon get back to yours, and give him a good tussle for the lead.
Sorry to hear that you’ve run into red-tape obstacles to your projected airplane jump this way. I hope that you’ll eventually get your wings unfouled and make it all right. If you do, try to let me know a little in advance in order that I can try to make sure that I’ll be accessible.
Well, best of luck, and keep your fingers crossed on the scuttle-butt.
Yours,
Marty
-o-
Corporal Martin Mangan, the letter’s writer, was a Marine Corps reservist in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division; his recipient, his brother Ed, a Seaman 2nd Class in the Navy and somewhere on or around another island (based on the envelope markings). It was an auspicious day in a world that didn't know if war was winding down or heating up: mankind was only three days removed from the first use of the atomic bomb and still reeling; Russia - perhaps sensing an end-of-war territory-grab - declared war on Japan so late in the game it can only be seen now as more cynical than strategic; and while Mangan was writing and mailing his brother, the B-29 bomber Bockscar was headed to its secondary target - Nagasaki - to drop its atomic payload.
It’s doubtful Mangan would have heard about Nagasaki until after his letter had posted. Word traveled slowly among the island-hoppers, where everything depended on radio chatter. The delivery of Fat Man wouldn't have been openly discussed for easily a day; by some accounts, it was two days before word of Hiroshima reached some sailors just a few islands from Japan. Mangan references Hiroshima, but it's clear from his words no one yet knows what the bombing means in the grand scheme.
That Mangan was writing a letter at all on August 9th is a testament either to his assignment or his luck: K/3/5 had just a few weeks earlier completed a grueling months-long campaign capturing Okinawa and now found themselves in a holding pattern, fortifying, waiting to hear if there was going to be what everyone expected would be a catastrophic invasion of the Japanese mainland, or if one of the effects of dropping ‘the bomb’ would instead bring about a surrender. One expects somewhere between posting his letter and lights out, Martin Mangan might have heard a great deal more scuttle-butt. But the quartermaster boys betting on an end to the war by Saturday - August 11th - missed it by three days.
Mangan sounds world-weary, which it to be expected if he fought his way across Okinawa. But for all the history taking place around him, Mangan’s letter is otherwise brief and oddly sedate, mostly added small talk at Ed about family and Ed's possible trip in Martin's direction. One suspects he was trying not to find hope in the possibility of an end to the war. Of note is his mention of his brother Robert’s recognition for his civilian wartime contributions; the article he mentions appeared in the July 30, 1945 issue of the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin (pictured left). According to the 1940 census, there were six Mangan siblings, three boys and three girls, who grew up with their parents on Mary Street, a couple of blocks from Binghamton Hospital and a about a thousand feet from the banks of the Susquehanna River.
Edward was discharged in February 1946. He would return to Binghamton where he would become a linotype operator with Triple Cities Typesetting, and take over the family homestead at 75 Mary Street with his wife Jeanne, where they raised two sons. Jeanne would predecease him in 1981. He followed in 1989 at age 70. One might presume the letter was left in a book he owned that was disposed of after his death.
Martin spent three years total in the Marine Corps before he mustered out. Following his discharge, he finished college, got married, and traded his experiences in the military service for the civil service. After working as a legislative analyst with the War Claims Commission, he took a job with the Office of Territories at the Department of the Interior, where he'd become assistant director overseeing the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Micronesia) and American Samoa. In 1966, he became deputy high commissioner of the Trust Territories, a post he held for three years before retiring with his wife Dorothy to Hawaii. He died there at age 80 in October 2000.
-o-
I no longer recall where or when I found the letter. It fell out of a book, probably from the Book Cellar on Court Street in Binghamton, possibly from something I picked up at Fat Cat Books - the used book pickings were fairly slim in the Triple Cities back in the eighties. I do know that after I found it, it lived in the pocket of a teal-color covered Mead notebook that I carried around the SUNY Binghamton campus that semester. The notebook is probably in a tote in the garage. I only remember it because it was the notebook in which I began a short story based around the letter’s content. And I got maybe a page, page and a half into it when the letter went missing. Not that is was a classic of western literature in the making; best I recall, it started with my character already drafting a very different letter home when word of Hiroshima comes over the radio. But there was little else behind the initial scribble, and then the trigger was gone. Such is life.
I looked everywhere for it, without success. I presumed it went wherever my grandfather’s alligator skin wallet went when it was lost on the Binghamton campus (the finder of that was gracious enough to throw my ID in a campus mailbox. Even today, I hope he gets paper cuts often and deeply.) I ultimately chalked its loss up to a whim of the fates - here’s your story, kid; we’ll take that prompt back now. Fade out about 1989.
Maybe someday I’ll see if I can track down one of Ed's eight grandkids - Martin’s nieces or nephews - to see if one of them would like this small, history-adjacent piece of correspondence between them back. You’d be surprised how gratifying that can be when it happens. That's a story for a future post.
Because I like a name with a face, I did a little poking around online for a photo while researching the Mangan brothers, just to see if I could get lucky. As it happens, Martin appeared in the Press & Sun Bulletin in August 1940, when he received a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin (Robert's alma mater).
I've stopped wondering if maybe, just maybe, someone else occasionally asks for me to tell a story. Especially when they seem to pitch in with the piece I'd like to have. So here's Martin: four years before he put pen to paper to write his brother on the heels of months of marching through hell, standing on the cusp of the atomic age.
Coming 8/20: The Art of Decoding First Editions
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