He was a kid, like so many of the other soldiers who stormed the Pacific island of Saipan to wrest it from the Japanese in June 1944. So it's no wonder Will Yawney's mother worried so much, and sent him so many letters.
Katherine Yawney was Ukrainian and wrote in her native tongue, but in the years since her death her family has translated portions of her letters, including one written in the fall of 1944 when she was yearning for some news about the third of her five sons.
She hadn't heard from him in months, and her anxiety is evident in the letter's plaintive tone:
"Dear my son, if you are still alive write me back. Write me those nice words you always tell me … I had dreams about you twice. Once you fought the Japanese and once you had long hair. My son, I ask you to give me a sign of you."
Will Yawney, it turned out, was long dead by the time his mother penned those words from the family's home in Freemansburg. He had died July 7 on Saipan, one of a series of islands the Allies captured on their bloody Pacific slog toward the Japanese homeland.
He was 23, a U.S. Army private in D Company, 1st Battalion, 105th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division.
"He was shot by a sniper in a tree, then they came down and hacked him to death — that's the story I got," said Yawney's nephew, John Yawney, who lives in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, and has spent much of his life puzzling over his uncle's strange destiny.
Dying in the Pacific Theater wasn't the strange part. More than 111,000 American soldiers and sailors met that fate.
It is Yawney's afterlife, so to speak, that has been strange.
Imagine: The young soldier's mother and siblings sent letter after letter to him, never received replies, contacted the War Department and the American Red Cross for news of his fate and were assured he was in good health but couldn't respond for "military reasons."
"Today the Red Cross notified us and told us not to worry about you because you are in the best of health," Will's sister, Olga, wrote to him Oct. 23, 1944, three months after his death.
There is little to account for this confusion, except for the fog of war. But in December of that year, one of Will's Army buddies came home and told the family that Will was, in fact, dead. The buddy knew because he had been there when it happened.
A short time later, the family received a bulk shipment of all the letters they had written over the months, stamped "undeliverable" and marked with the date of Pvt. Yawney's death.
Dates, actually. One letter indicated he had died in June. Another said August, another September.
Another package contained two ribbons and some photographs, presumably recovered from Yawney's wallet or duffel.
"I remember my grandmother crying," John Yawney said, shaking his head. "She cried until 1948."
Later, Yawney's commanding officer wrote to his mother and offered kind words about him, recalling his quick and ready smile and the skills he brought to his unit's softball team.
He had died of a sniper's bullet, the letter said, and was buried on the island, with a Catholic chaplain officiating and a bugler blowing taps.
This must have given some comfort to Yawney's mother, a devout woman who opened her letters with the phrase "Glory to Jesus Christ!"
But it wasn't true.
