In October 1944, General George S. Patton’s Third Army had been advancing through France for weeks. The rapid pace of the offensive left little time for anything that did not directly support the push forward.
Mail was delayed, supply lines were stretched, and the administrative machinery connecting soldiers to their families back home was running at a fraction of its usual capacity.
During a surprise inspection of a forward artillery unit, Patton noticed something inside the company administration tent. A sergeant sat at a field desk, writing. Judging by the pile of completed letters beside him, he had been at it for hours.
He was not writing orders or filling out official forms. He was writing personal letters.
The duty officer whispered an explanation before Patton could ask. First Sergeant William Oakes, 31, from Georgia, had been writing letters home on behalf of the men in his unit who could not write themselves. He did this on his own time, after his regular duties were finished, and had told no one because he did not consider it worth mentioning.
There were 11 men in his unit who were not proficient in writing. Oakes had written letters for all 11 of them, once a week, for seven months.
Patton stood at the entrance to the tent for a long moment without saying a word. Then he told the duty officer he wanted to speak with Oakes as soon as he finished what he was writing. Patton waited.
Oakes completed the letter he was working on, addressed to a woman in Mississippi from her son. The soldier had spent the previous week trying to describe a particular sunset he had seen over the French countryside. Over three separate conversations, he had given Oakes enough detail to produce a text that, when Oakes read it back, sounded as though the son had written it himself.
Oakes wrote the address on the envelope, added it to the pile, and looked up.
He did not seem surprised to see Patton standing at the tent entrance. He stood, saluted, and waited. Patton asked him to sit.
Oakes grew up in a small farming community outside Macon, Georgia. He was the third of six children and left school after the seventh grade to help support the family. He could read and write well enough for daily life, and he had taught himself additional skills over the years by reading whenever work and time allowed.
By the time he was drafted in 1942, he had developed the practical fluency that comes from years of steady independent effort rather than formal education.
He understood from his own experience what it felt like to lack that fluency and what it cost. In the army, a man who could not write a letter home had no way to explain his situation without revealing something most men of that time and place found extremely difficult to admit.
Patton asked Oakes how the arrangement had begun. Oakes said it started in March, shortly after the unit arrived in England in preparation for possible deployment to France. While reviewing personnel files in his administrative role, he noticed that a significant number of men in the unit had educational backgrounds that included little or no reading and writing instruction.
He thought about it for several days. He understood clearly that approaching the men directly would not work. They could not ask him for help without disclosing something most were not ready to reveal to their fellow soldiers.
So he made the offer secretly, man by man, during other conversations, in a way that made it possible for each man to accept without having to admit anything to anyone else. Eleven of the men he approached accepted.
Patton asked about the process for each letter. Oakes said each man told him what he wanted to say, and Oakes wrote it down. Some men composed the letter in their heads for days before sitting with him and could deliver it in nearly one continuous expression.
Others needed time and guidance. Over seven months, he had learned which questions produced useful responses and which were met with silence.
He asked about children’s names, about the weather back home, about specific things that had happened to the man the previous week that were safe to describe. He did not edit what the men told him. He wrote what they said in the voice he understood to be closest to the way each man would have expressed himself if he could write.
Patton asked how he knew which voice to use for each man. Oakes said he had been listening to them talk for seven months, and that voice was something you learned by listening.
Patton did not speak for a long moment after that answer. He later told his aide that the response was unexpected and that it was the most expressive thing about what was happening in that tent and about the person who had created the situation.
Patton asked how many letters Oakes had written in total. Oakes said he had not counted. He estimated it was close to 300 if the calculation of 28 letters per man over seven months was correct, though the number varied.
Some men requested letters more frequently during difficult periods, and a few asked him to write to multiple family members, including parents, siblings, and wives.
Patton told him to continue what he was doing. He instructed the service officer to officially record Oakes’s letter-writing in the unit log as an approved administrative activity and to give Oakes access to whatever paper and envelopes the unit had available for that purpose.
He told his aide to make a note in the inspection record stating that the unit had an informal correspondence assistance program under Sergeant Oakes’s supervision and that the army’s welfare and morale section should be alerted to the program as a potential model for other units facing similar needs.
Before leaving the tent, Patton quietly told his aide to record the names of the 11 men who were receiving Oakes’s help. He wanted to send letters to their families on Third Army letterhead, informing them that their family member was serving with distinction and that the army was grateful for the family’s sacrifice and patience. He wanted the letters signed with his name.
The aide later wrote that these final instructions were the clearest indication of what Patton understood about the situation in the tent. The men who could not write had families back home who had been receiving letters from them, or had been receiving them for seven months through Oakes, and those families did not know the letters had not come from the men themselves. The official letters Patton ordered would not change that.
But they would arrive at addresses where people were waiting, and they would be signed by the commanding general of the Third Army. The families would know, even if they did not know exactly why, that someone at the highest level of command was aware of their family member and valued him.
Oakes was promoted to first sergeant three months later, in January 1945, through standard personnel procedures. No document in his promotion file mentioned the letter-writing or Patton’s inspection visit. The promotion was attributed entirely to his service record and the evaluations of his direct superiors, which were uniformly positive.
He continued writing letters throughout the rest of the campaign and into the early weeks of the occupation. By that time, the army postal service had largely recovered from the disruptions of the autumn advance, and most men were sending and receiving mail through normal channels. The arrangement faded naturally rather than coming to a formal end.
Oakes was discharged in the summer of 1945 and returned to Georgia. Over the following decades, he worked in a variety of jobs: school bus driver, church custodian at the church he had attended since childhood, and eventually deacon of that church, a role he held for 22 years.
In his later working years, he volunteered at the county library’s adult literacy program, working with men and women who had reached adulthood without learning to read or write, helping them develop the skills the educational system had failed to provide. The library program coordinator wrote in a personal file after his death that Oakes had a special gift for this work because he understood, without needing to be told, what it felt like for a person to lack those skills and what it meant to finally have them.
He never gave recorded interviews about his wartime service. His daughter, in a family history written after his death, described him as a man who never discussed what he did in the war in any specific detail. Once, when she pressed him the way children press aging parents about matters they sense are important, he told her the most important thing he did there was write some letters.
She asked whose letters. He said they were letters for other people. She asked why.
He said because they needed to be written, and because he was the one who knew how to do it.
The 11 official letters Patton ordered left Third Army headquarters within a week of the inspection. They were written on standard Third Army stationery in formal military language, addressed to the family contacts listed in each soldier’s file, and bore Patton’s signature. The letters did not mention anything specific about what the men were doing or the circumstances that prompted the letters.
They stated that the soldier was serving in the Third Army under General Patton’s command, that he was performing his duties in a manner that honored himself and his family, and that General Patton wished to personally convey the army’s appreciation for the family’s contribution and sacrifice.
The aide who drafted the letters based on Patton’s instructions knew exactly what had prompted them. In his postwar memoirs, he reflected on what the families who received those letters would have thought. They would have understood them as form letters of a type they might have received before: official acknowledgments issued by the military bureaucracy, signed by leaders who had no special knowledge of their family members.
That understanding was largely correct. But the aide noted one small thing that would have made these 11 letters different from others of the same kind, although the families who received them would not have known it. The commanding general had requested these letters specifically after sitting in a tent and being told that their family member was receiving a letter written in his own voice by a sergeant who had spent seven months learning how to imitate it.
The official letters were not a substitute for that fact and did not convey it. But in a sense, they were a result of it.