Jun 27, 2024 - Sale 2675

Sale 2675 - Lot 315

Unsold
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(WORLD WAR TWO.) A soldier's letters, one describing French Jews celebrating the New Year with Jewish G.I.s. 26 Autograph Letters Signed to his parents, including several V-Mail, plus fragments; generally minor wear. Various places, 1942-1944
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Additional Details

These letters are by Private Robert E. Peifer Jr. (1916-2014) of Atlantic City, NJ. Before the war, he was a hotel clerk, and his father was a newspaper advertising executive. He enlisted 13 July 1942 in the 332nd Service Group in the Army Air Force. His earliest letters are written from Camp Kilmer and the Army Air Forces Training Center in Atlantic City, NJ. His unit left New York Harbor on 14 January 1943 and arrived in North Africa. They participated in the Italian campaign; he describes a visit to Rome on 27 June 1944.

Five days after Operation Dragoon, the Allied landing in southern France which opened another front after D-Day, Peifer apologizes for not writing in a letter from "Somewhere in FRANCE!", and described visits to Fréjus and Saint-Raphaël on the French Riviera (20 August 1944).

Peifer wrote the last letter from "somewhere in France" on 18 September 1944: "It was funny, the Jewish people here, most of them well-to-do refugees from Paris, invited all the Jewish boys here to celebrate New Years with them. They had taken an old German headquarters to use as a synagogue. Moreover, they had German prisoners clean the joint up and told them what they were cleaning it up for. Nothing like hearing first-hand accounts of what the Germans did. . . . They actually saw the Germans loading ambulances with ammunition, and that they had a big red cross over a German barracks."