Robert D. Welch, 93, is a man of art and letters.
The Buckhead resident, who landed on Omaha Beach in the first wave on D-Day 67 years ago Monday, drew sketches on almost all his correspondence home.
The many letters that still exist paint pictures of a lonely, determined soldier who misses his fiancé and parents, but who is far from certain he’ll ever see any of them again.
His first post home after D-Day opens like this:
“I’ll start this letter now, and I hope to make a long one out of it — but one never can tell — especially in combat, what will happen the next minute.”
Apparently, nothing happened for a while, for he continued for eight full pages — describing not the fighting or bloodshed, but his feelings just before the landings.
“There’s no fear of death but a feeling of wonder,” he wrote. “Most of us went to bed early that night, but I don’t think many of us slept.”
Welch won eight Bronze Stars for heroism, according to official records. After the war, he became a commercial artist and advertising executive, marrying Mary Jean Whitehorn, the girl who waited for him for three years.
He was afraid to marry, says son Rob Welch Jr., 62, of Salt Lake City, because he didn’t think he’d survive. And when he came home, he hardly ever mentioned the harrowing details that he only recently told his family about.
Lately, the elder Welch has shown more interest in gathering his medals and letters and dog tags, as if he feels he’s running out of time.
“A couple of Sundays ago, he said he needed to talk with my sister and me as soon as possible,” says daughter Cindy Welch, 59, of Lavonia. “He called us together like it was a meeting, and said, ‘Can I have y’all’s attention?’ We were scared to death. And for the next two hours, he told stories about the war.”
Some were bone-chilling, like the time a good friend, riding in a Jeep, was decapitated by a piano wire that German troops had strung across a road. Or the time a man was “torn apart” by a shell in the “exact” same spot he’d just left.
“On all the cards he sent, he’d draw things,” she says. “Like on Christmas and Mother’s Day. He’d draw on one side and write on the other.”
One Mother’s Day card shows a helmeted soldier looking at a drawing of his mother ...
“Have to imagine the flowers, mother, but my thoughts are always with you,” he wrote in a florid headline, adding, he hopes “this is the last Mother’s Day I’ll be away from you.”
His “V-mails” — photocopied and shrunken versions of GI correspondence, short for “victory mail” — reflected his mood. One shows Hitler’s head on a plate, headlined “Greetings for 1945.” Another depicts a lonely soldier sitting atop an Easter egg, with a bunny behind another. “Dad has always been a great artist,” says daughter Becky Jimison, 63, of Lawrenceville. “He spoke through art.”
He didn’t like war movies, and Becky’s mother, who died in 1984, “told us as kids” not to ask him about it. They are just now discovering cards he boxed up after the war.
Still a rabid fan of Auburn University in Alabama, his alma mater, Welch plays bridge almost every morning with three friends and sometimes his wife of 22 years, Elizabeth, 97. The two enjoy dancing and keeping up with his three kids, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
Welch fought in Europe, Sicily, Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa, the former Czechoslovakia, and in the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge. He was overseas for 38 months and spent 533 days in combat, winding up a captain in the field artillery.
He recalls almost drowning before making it ashore on D-Day.
“We were coming by sea on a boat landing craft with six jeeps and 12 men,” he says. “As we were getting close to the beach, the captain of the boat, a British man, saw Germans up on the cliffs firing and refused to go farther. I told him we had to keep going. If we didn’t, we would all drown.” In the end, all his men survived.
Welch once wrote that before going into combat, men find ways to cope: “You can talk about anything to anybody just as if you were expecting to live another hundred years.”
Most soldiers realized that “some of us wouldn’t make it” and that “it would only be luck .... that would say whether it would be you or him. Men go down, never to rise, and that’s all there is to it.”
Gordon Jones, senior military curator at the Atlanta History Center who oversees the local Library of Congress effort to record veteran experiences, says letters were a lifeline that made soldiers feel connected.
“There’s a similar tone to many of them,” Jones says. “We have recorded about 400, but it’s down to a trickle now. And that’s really a shame.”
The Library of Congress has collected more than 50,000 recordings, and historian Ronald Drez, who has interviewed close to 3,000 D-Day veterans, says letters like Welch’s will keep being uncovered in attics and safe deposit boxes.
“As more and more of what they’ve left behind is found, we’ll know more about what these guys really thought and did,” Drez says.
Welch interrupts his card game one recent morning to show his fellow players a picture of himself as a young captain, and his medals and citations.
“We did what we had to do, what needed to be done,” he says. “I think it’s as simple as that.”
