Piecing Together Babe’s Last Stops Before He Went to North Africa

Babe’s last letter appears to be his last from basic training at Camp Wheeler, where thousands of young men were prepared as replacements for troops overseas. In that letter, he writes that he expected “to be out of here in two or three days.” He wrote that letter on June 4, 1943.

The next few letters are from his next two stops before he went overseas himself, to North Africa. But the letters themselves are opaque about his whereabouts. They have no postmark, they are censored, and he’s apparently not allowed to write about where he went.

Only later — in a letter from the War Department to my grandmother on Oct. 8, 1946 — did she learn that her son left Camp Wheeler for training in Transfer, Pa. That’s the location of what was called the Shenango Personnel Replacement Depot. The site was also known as Camp Reynolds, according to one Pennsylvania history site: Read more of this post