★★★★½
An epistolary memoir of a fractured family in the throes of World War II, Searching for Harold: One Family’s World War II Story in Letters by Stephen Watts presents a stirring and timely picture of unity, support, and grace under fire.
Primarily comprised of letters exchanged between members of the Carleton and Watts families between the years of 1934 and 1948, this chronological account intimately connects Harold and Wilbur Carleton in Europe, their nephew Wayland in Texas, Bernice in Georgia, Gladine in Washington, and other disparate family members across the world. Echoing an entire generation that saw its fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles deploy into the violent unknown, this book is a testament to the power of family, faith, and the deeply human need for our existence to be witnessed.
The Carletons and Watts exchanged letters religiously, maintaining a closeness and intimacy with one another’s experiences, despite their distance and dire situations. The years pass in a flurry of carefully penned updates on training schedules and long-awaited leaves, familiar stories from home, and the raw bewilderment of young men on the frontlines. When these intertwined lives are faced with a shocking loss, they look toward one another in comforting words, just as they celebrate each other’s achievements and successes in the years after the fighting stops.
From musings on the existential weight of violence and the minutiae of life as a serviceman to quietly borne burdens of grief and guilt, the book is both sweeping and intimate in its scope, revealing the staggering human cost of separation and war. There are references to soldiers going “batty” after combat, and comments about the constant censorship of communications, along with casual reports of air raids, shelling, polio outbreaks, and deadly clashes with Germans. Military history is often distilled into casualty numbers and the strategic significance of specific battles, but raw accounts like this one humanize those big-picture analyses.
The amount of research and curation to craft this book is immediately obvious and admirable; the author meticulously pored over his family’s archive to render this incomplete but compelling portrait of heartache and homesickness during the greatest conflict our world has ever seen. Even in the most banal exchanges of pleasantries and daily routines within these letters, there lies the pain of familial uncertainty, the disquieting torture of imminent deployment, and the unspoken longing for return to the peace of home.
There are also more lighthearted moments in the missives, detailing the quality of the food on the front lines, irritating health issues, bits of hometown gossip, and travel frustrations. Uniting the traumatic and the trivial are also musings on the larger events of the time, the significance of news articles and the overall momentum of the war, and the repercussions and global fallout in the years that follow, for a full picture of the war from every emotional angle.
At times, the formatting and arrangement of the letters can be visually cluttered, with the sign-offs, senders, and return addresses running together in an unhelpful blur, and some of the letters are less engaging or insightful than others, but readers who appreciate the larger purpose of such a work will forgive these meandering tangents. All told, this book is a wide-ranging portrait of the past distilled in all its beauty and horror through the lens of one indomitable clan, resulting in an intimately compelling historical portrait.
July 21, 2026