Love Letters From a War

By Len Johnson, Sydney: ABC Books, 2003, 282 pages, paperback, $32.95. Reviewed by Shannon Schedlich-Day in the October 2003 issue.

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Len Johnson is in a sound position to be the author of Love Letters from a War: Not only has he served in the Australian Armed Forces, and received a PhD in history from the University of Tasmania, but also Love Letters is the story of his family. Johnson's father, Corporal John Johnson, was killed in action at Tobruk in 1941. In Love Letters, Johnson combines reminiscences, reports from 'The War Diary', action reports, action diaries, history, the letters that Corporal Johnson sent to his family as he trained and participated in the war against Germany, and the letters he received. The effect is a human perspective on a tragic chapter in Australian history.

Love Letters from a War is a revised edition to Johnson's previous work, An Australian Family, Volume III: War Letters 1940-1941, which he published in a limited edition for family members. Opening up this story of an everyday family coping in extraordinary times to a wide-ranging readership is an advantage to those interested in war and social history. It is also courageous on the part of Johnson (and his siblings, who assisted with the production) to release such a personal family history for the general public's gaze.

Given recent events, and our involvement in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Love Letters is a timely reminder of the human face of our military. Love Letters does not focus on the heroic deeds of men in combat (although they, too, are mentioned), but instead focuses on the human side of war. Before his death, Corporal Johnson misses birthdays, Christmas, an anniversary, and the birth of his youngest child, who he never has a chance to meet. It is these everyday occurrences that weave the narrative in Love Letters.

Australians are enthralled with stories of our Anzacs, nearly sixty years since the end of the last world war. The experiences of Corporal Johnson are very real, and his letters honest and loving. The letters he receives from his wife, children, family and friends combine the angst and tenderness they feel. The letters are simple expressions of a families' concern for one of their own.

While the letters to and from the children are sweet, the really heart-breaking moments happen within the letters between husband and wife. John and Josephine Johnson were most definitely in love.

The huge number of people mentioned in Love Letters makes it, at first, a little hard to follow. As many of these people are introduced with little or no background information, we do not have anything to base their character on, or any way of remembering these characters. As the story progresses, though, the reader comes to know those people in the text who are important to the story, and to skip over those who are not. Some characters also reappear without a reintroduction, which can be a bit confusing, but the general flow of the story is not interrupted.

The Johnson family are presented as a very tight-knit family group, with very few interfamily squabbles. One assumes that a bit of sentimentality has sugarcoated these relationships but, given the subject matter, this cannot only be expected, but forgiven. More tension occurs after the death of Corporal Johnson, which plunges the family into dire straits.

It is no wonder that Len Johnson's sister, Josie, writes of the letters, 'Although I began many times to read them, sadness always forced me to stop. The faded handwriting, the thin, crinkly paper, the strong feeling of life lost overwhelmed me' (p 15). Without having ever met any member of the Johnson family, I felt their pain and anguish as I read the letters in this text. While not consciously tugging at the heartstrings by over-sentimentalising events, parts of Love Letters do just that.

The family's letters are now held by the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, to be preserved for all time. Their simplicity, love, affection and loss is captured candidly in these love letters from a war.

Citation

• Shannon Schedlich-Day. 'Review: Love Letters From a War by Len Johnson' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 21 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• When World War II broke out, John Johnson was a carpenter in Walwa, country Victoria. Although he had a wife, Josephine, and seven children (with another on the way) and was almost 38 years old, John Johnson enlisted as an infantryman in the Second AIF.
  
  Throughout training, embarkation, desert war training in Palestine and difficult months holed up in Tobruk, John, a corporal in the Carrier Platoon of the 2/23rd Battalion, continued to exchange letters with his family. They were letters of love and reassurance despite the privations they suffered: John was in the midst of one of the most famous campaigns of that war; Josephine was struggling to bring up eight children on a soldier's meagre salary.
  
  John Johnson was killed in the devastating counter attack against Rommel on 17 May 1941.
  
  Carefully treasured by Josephine Johnson, much of the correspondence survived and, in a labour of love, Len Johnson, John and Josephine's second youngest son, has gathered them together and combined them with the memories of family members and soldiers who were at Tobruk.
  
  Love Letters from a War is a moving account of love and loss, of the daily minutiae of family life in a small rural community, and of the hellish conditions of the Siege of Tobruk. It is an extraordinary story of an Australian family at war.

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