 Dear Adolf, a letter to Hitler. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Council for Democracy presents Dear Adolf, a series of six narrative letters written each week by Stephen Vincent Benet, one of the nation's greatest writers. These broadcasts are based upon actual letters written to Hitler by Americans. Today's program, the fifth of the series, presents the well-known screen actor William Holden, who is now a private in the United States Army Signal Corps at the Photographic Center at Soi, Long Island. Private Holden will relate the views of an American soldier as he addresses a letter to Hitler. Dear Adolf, this is me, one American soldier. My dog tagged numbers in the millions. My draft number came out of the hat in every state in the Union. I'm from Janesville in Little Rock, Monroe City in Nashville. I'm from Blue Eye, Missouri in the sidewalks of New York. I'm from the Green Mountains in the big sky hootin' plains, from the roll of the prairie and the rocks of marble heads, from the little towns where a dog can go to sleep in the middle of Main Street, and the nickel-plated suburbs in the cities that stick their skyscrapers into the sky. I used to be a carpenter and a schoolteacher, a soda jerker and a mechanic. I used to be a hacky and a farmhand, a legman and a bookkeeper, the son of a guy with money and the son of a guy with none. But I'm a soldier now, four and one-half million of us by the end of this year. Listen to the roll call. Adam Oski, Adam, Anderson, Bailey, Rotillo, Brown. That's my outfit. That's us, the biggest and best trained army ever raised on American soil. Ski troops and parachute troops, motorized and mechanized, tank troops and tank destroyers, cooks and cryptographers, bakers and bombardiers. Arcello, Zorati, Seroz, Lupont from Alaska to Australia, from Australia to Ulster, in the cold skies and the hot, under desert suns and clear skies and jungle rains. That's us, the United States Army. And we're not writing letters, Adolf. We're on the job. We weren't picked out for our looks or Nordic names. We weren't picked out to high heels or chew up small countries that never did us any harm. We weren't picked out to sit around on our parking spaces and wait for you to be nasty. Let me tell you a few things about us, about the kind of army we are. They won't make you happy. When my bunch first went in, we had a drill couple from upstate Georgia. He didn't read the papers much. He'd rather go to town and pick a scrap for the MPs. But he drilled us well. Hup! Hup! Hup! Hup! And every day he kept saying, Are you boys there? We're all going to pay attention here. This business is for keeps. That was March, 1941. But he knew what was coming and we listened. But well, most of us had left good jobs and that seemed pretty important. We had a bunch of Italians and they missed their spaghetti and conversation. We had a bunch of main lads and they sweated under the Georgia sun and thought about the lakes beginning to melt back in Maine. We had some poles. They knew the score. Their folks had heard from Warsaw. But they didn't argue much. They just kept humping. Yes, it was all pretty new. But when most of my company at the end of 13 weeks marched off to join a new division, well, some of them were bawling like kids. Because somehow without lectures and orders and editorials, there had gelled a sense of comradeship that would make your well-advertised fine-shut, geist look sick. And then we trained some more and waited. For the answer you gave us that Sunday, you and your access town. It's about time, one soldier said. Alton, Davis, Samborski, Edelton, Edward, Perra. Like to hear from some of them? Here's one from Ohio. Used to drive a bus. Now he's mechanized infantry. In the part of Ohio I come from, lots of people have religious convictions against war. I keep these prayers to the back of my mind every day and believe these prayers. I pray for peace. But I'm not so much like those people in Ohio as I used to be. My convictions are that war is evil. And that the evil men are those who started it. When you ask me what I have personally to be angry against the Nazis and the Japs, that is my answer. They have hurt me and my people. By making this fight a war that in our religion is bad. I don't know if I've made myself clear, but Hitler is my personal enemy. And I am to stop it. And prayers don't make a soldier, Adolf. Not by your book. Well, ask about Lee's army. The army of Northern Virginia. They prayed when they felt like it. Here's another from a Marine. Just back from Atlantic patrol and soar. Soar because he's been made an instructor and isn't with his outfit. All I want to be is where I belong. In a mortar platoon of the Marine. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to wave the flag or become Joe Hero. But surely patriotism is something more than knowing the words of the Star Spangled Banner. I'll admit that ten years hence nobody will give a hoot about what the boys in uniform did today. Those who die in action will be hardly a memory. Those who come back maimed will be an expense, a bore and a nuisance. I've seen death many times recently and dodged it on several occasions. If I get killed, now what the hell? Nobody ever left this world alive and very few of us get to die for a cause. If I do get through, I will have had the satisfaction of knowing that I did try to do a man's job. And here's a letter from Baton, February 12, 1942. Dear mother and dad and Francis, this letter may never be delivered. It will go to Corregidor and their away transportation. I am proud to be part of the fight that's being made here. But time may fall, but the eventual outcome of the war is for all days. I've seen some horrible things happen and had my share of narrow escape. But I've also seen some very wonderful acts of courage, self-sacrifice and loyalty. At last I've found what I've searched for all my life. A cause and a job in which I can lose myself completely. My life and my family have been very good to me and given me everything I've really wanted. Should anything happen to me here, it will not be like closing a book in the middle. In the last ten months I have done a lifetime of living and been part of one of the most unselfish cooperative efforts that's ever been made. Mistakes may have been made, but that has nothing to do with the manner in which my comrades on Baton, both Filipino and American, have reacted to their trial of fire. If that same selfless spirit were devoted to the world's betterment in time of peace, what a good world we would have. And how dull I can hear the younger generation muttering. This letter is written to send you all my love and thanks for just being my family. It is written with no so-called premonition. My chances are pretty good, so I'll send it on its way. Keep them flying, West, your loving son and brother. No, we haven't heard from that Lieutenant. Not since Tragedore fell, but we'll keep them flying. We're not talking about being Joe Hero. There's a long, dirty, bloody job ahead of us and we know that. Wars mean filth and thirst and pain and the scream of dive bombers on top of you and going on to the end of your endurance and beyond. Wars mean seeing your best friend killed beside you and it's only afterward you have time to think about him because the line must be held. All right, mister, you started it rolling. We know the score. We're the guys who take cars apart and put them together just for fun. We're the guys who fiddle with radio sets and are crazy about the comics, Batman and Terry and the pirates and Donald Duck and all kinds of people who do things they aren't supposed to do. The Army wasn't supposed to get away with bombing Tokyo, but they did it. The Navy wasn't supposed to sink four Jap air carriers in the Battle of Midway, but they did it. We don't build armies just to put guys in uniform and show civilians around. We build them to fight and win battles. We build them just the same way we built a boulder dam and out of the same kind of stuff and in back of us all the time there's a roll call and a nollie. Paulette, Pleasure, Garrett, Hamilton, Harkamer. That's the must-a-roll of the Revolution, Adolf. The must-a-roll of free men who fought for their country because she had to be born and they got worse child than ours and they got paid off in paper and if they were living afterwards they went back to their farms and hold corn but they knew what they'd done and they were satisfied. Is it Joan Jacobson, Jackson, Kearney, Lee Situ, Lee R.E.? That's the roll call of the Civil War, Adolf. And out of it the Union lived and a free thing went ahead. It cost blood and toil and long bitterness, but it made us one nation. Lavinsky, Libowitz, Liget, MacArthur, McCook, Magnetti. And that's the last war, Adolf. The Rainbow Division and the First Division and all the divisions, the two million who went to France and we came in late and had to borrow other folks' equipment because ours wasn't ready. But the records written from Cantini to the Argonne, this time we'll have the equipment. Our factories are turning it out and this time we aren't going to stop with just saving democracy and then running out on it. This time we're after a durable peace and that isn't your time. Nathans, Nathans, Ninninger, O'Brien, O'Hare, Orlando. That's a few of the new names, Adolf. No, the roll isn't finished. It won't be finished until you are. Apagos, Patterson, Prokosh, Pryor, Quintanilla, Quesado, Hugh Lung. Chinese, Italian, Greek, Bohemian, British, Mexican. The sons of men who fought six wars and won them. The sons of men who came here to get away from wars. We don't like being ordered around, though we'll take it and like it in wartime. We think that one man's just as good as the next and maybe better. If we feel like going to church, we'll go to the church we pick out and the next guy can go to his. If we want to get married, we'll marry the girl we like and the guy who makes a crack about her ancestry had better look out for his teeth. If we don't like the people who run our government, we'll change them by peaceable election. That's us. That's our platform. And behind us are 130 million Americans. Rakhonsky, Ratry, Rourke, Saltonstahl, Sekofanowitz. All the funny names there are. Yes, Adolf, the old names in the new. The names that made America from Jamestown to the Cherokee Strip and back and forth and across and up and down. Only this time the building will be bigger than anything we've ever tried. This time the roll call will not end with the armistice. Camacho, Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill, Crips, Curtain, DeGal, Litvinov, Kazan, Roosevelt, Stalin, Van Mock, Wallace, Wilkie. Yes, this time it's for a new world, but not for yet. Now it's the march in the mud and the heat on the steel box of the tank and the stutter of a tail gun from a bombing plane. And yet the command is forward. Now it's fever and wounds and the stink of the slit trench. And yet the command is forward. The command is forward. March. Make it a double one with Marchino. You'll need it before we're through. You have just heard dear Adolf starring Private William Holden, the fifth of a series of six narrative letters written each week by Stephen Vincent Benet and presented by the National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the Council for Democracy. The program was directed by William Sweets with original music composed by Tom Bennett and conducted by Joseph Stofack. These broadcasts are based upon actual letters written to Hitler by Americans. Won't you send in your own letter to dear Adolf? Listen next week to a foreign-born American's letter to Hitler with Joseph Schillkraut as narrative. Copies of today's dear Adolf letter from an American soldier may be secured without cost by writing directly to the Council for Democracy 11 West 42nd Street, New York City. This program came to you from New York. This is the National Broadcasting Company.