Robert Holmquist World War II Letters

Robert Holmquist World War II Letters

Bob was a major in the US Army air force during World War II. He was a veteran of four major European and African campaigns: Africa, Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. Bob was one of three officer brothers overseas during World War II.

Bob wrote home from locations in the USA and Europe during this time. The letters here are an invaluable addition to the family archives both in providing an insight into the life of Bob during a signifiant time in the history of the USA and Europe, and in providing a personal insight of a soldier during World War II. We thank Caryl Holmquist for providing these letters to us.

Bob enlisted in the U.S. army according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs on May 30, 1942 and left on February 12, 1946.

See also Robert's section in:

Johannes & Johanna Holmquist & Family

Footnotes

For those of you who are technically inclined:

These letters are scanned from copies of Robert's WWII letters. The copies measured approximately 4.25 x 5.20 inches. I scanned the letters on an Epson flat bed scanner in color, saving them as jpg files. I used the 'Preview' application on the Apple Macintosh computer to enlarge the jpg file images to 10 inches in height, which should allow each of the files to be printed on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I adjusted the exposure of each file, and sharpened the text as much as possible to be more readable. I created PDF format files of each jpg file, and combined letters of more than one page into one PDF file. I ran each PDF file through Adobe Acrobat's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool, which I hoped would convert any machine-readable text into ASCII, thus allowing that text to be searchable. However, little if any of the text converted to ASCII for two reasons. First, Adobe Acrobat's OCR function is not good enough yet to recognize hand-written text. Second, the printed text of each letter was too blurred for Adobe Acrobat to recognize - as far as I know though I didn't check each file. However, Adobe Acrobat automatially straightened each image which makes reading of a letter easier.

I gave each file a prefix of year, month, day, e.g.,19430722, which sorts the letters chronologically.

If you have any family letters or any other family-releated documents you'd like to add to the family website contact me at family@earthwander.com.

Lennart Holmquist