HOUMA, La. (AP) - In December 1943, when Carole Cotton Winn was 6 months old, her father, W.D. Cotton, was overseas serving as a first lieutenant in the Army Officers’ Reserve Corps during World War II.
While Cotton made his way through England, Belgium and Germany, he wrote letters to his “darling” wife and daughter every night.
One, written on Christmas Eve in 1943, arrived with a picture of a mother looking over the crib of a sleeping baby with a soldier’s portrait on the side table, an image that resembled the Cottons’ experience.
It was the first Christmas W.D. had been separated from his wife, Anna, but also the first Christmas ever for his daughter. And he was not there to spend it with them.
Decades later, Winn found herself reading her father’s World War II letters on Christmas Eve, 2014.
“I was longing on Christmas Eve two years ago to know what my dad was doing on Christmas Eve in 1943, which was the year I was born,” she said. “It was like a real deep desire to know where he was. He was gone my very first Christmas.”
Winn continued reading her father’s letters every night, which eventually turned into a ritual of reading and typing out the letters.
Soon after, she got the idea to compile the documents into a book called “My Darling: A World War II Scrapbook.”
“I would hear him speaking,” Winn said of her father’s letters. “People would say, ’What are you going to do with those letters?’ I didn’t have a clue. It really wasn’t about an assignment. It was something I wanted to know about, where my dad was all those years and days he was apart from us.”
A lawyer and state senator in Rayville, a small town about 30 miles east of Monroe, W.D. was part of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, a military branch that decided where soldiers would land and where the boats and ships would come from.
He had written hundreds of letters, the first dating back to December 1943. They were kept in an Army trunk in the attic of his Rayville home. Winn thought Christmas decorations were the only things in the attic. But after looking through their parents’ things after their deaths, Winn’s brother discovered the trunk.
“My brother brought the Army trunk down, and when we opened it, it felt like treasure. The letters became the treasure that was hidden in the fields that we didn’t even know existed. It was like a gift from God,” she said.
Winn and book producer Carolyn Gorman used at least 90 percent of the letters in the book.
Pages of “My Darling” are filled with words from W.D.’s letters, postcards he sent his wife and daughter from Europe, newspaper clippings that documented the war and a World War II timeline. There are even top secret documents from the war that W.D. couldn’t divulge at the time because of censorship protocol.
The book is certainly about W.D.’s life during wartime, but it isn’t just about that. It tells the story of a man who enlisted in a war on behalf of his country but also longed for two of the most important people in his life: his darling wife and daughter.
Winn, who along with her husband, John, served as pastors at First United Methodist Church in Houma for a decade, now lives in Slidell.
She said she hopes the book will be used in a number of ways for historical background, especially for others of her generation whose parents served in World War II.
“I hope they see it as a day-by-day story about another soldier and his life. It’s not only about the battles. It’s all about the back story,” she said.
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Information from: The Courier, https://www.houmatoday.com
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