In October 1944, as General George S. Patton’s Third Army pushed through France, the pace left little time for anything unrelated to the advance. 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. Patton was inspecting a forward artillery unit during a surprise visit when he noticed something inside the company administration tent.
A sergeant was sitting 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 officer on duty whispered the explanation before Patton could ask. Sergeant First Class William Oakes, a 31-year-old from Georgia, was writing letters home on behalf of the men in his unit who could not write themselves. He did this in his own time, after his regular duties were done, and had told no one because he did not consider it worth mentioning. There were eleven men in his unit who were illiterate.
He had written for all eleven, once a week, for seven months. Patton stood at the tent entrance for a long moment without saying a word. Then he told the officer on duty that he wanted to speak with Oakes as soon as he was finished with what he was writing. Patton waited.
Oakes finished the letter he was working on, a message to a woman in Mississippi from her son, who had spent the previous week trying to describe a particular sunset he had seen over the French countryside. The soldier had given Oakes enough detail across three separate conversations to produce a text that, when Oakes read it aloud, sounded as though the son had written it himself. Oakes addressed the envelope, added it to the pile, and looked up. He did not seem surprised to see Patton standing at the entrance to the tent.
He stood, saluted, and waited. Patton told him to sit down. Oakes had grown up in a small farming community outside Macon, Georgia, the third of six children. He had studied until the seventh grade before leaving school to help support his family.
He was literate enough for the needs of his daily life, and had taught himself additional skills in his adult years by reading whenever work and time allowed. By the time he was drafted in 1942, he had developed the practical writing fluency that comes from sustained independent effort rather than formal education. He knew from his own experience how it felt to be without that fluency and what it cost, particularly in a setting like the army, where the inability to write a letter home could not be explained without disclosing something most men of his era 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 a possible deployment to France. He had been reviewing personnel files in his administrative capacity and noticed that a significant number of men in the unit had backgrounds that included little to no reading and writing. He thought about it for several days, aware enough to know that approaching the men directly would not work. They could not ask him without disclosing something most of them were not prepared to reveal to their fellow soldiers.
So he made the offer quietly, 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 would tell him what he wanted to say, and Oakes would write it down.
Some composed the letter in their heads for days before sitting down with him, and could deliver it in one nearly continuous expression. Others needed time and prompting, and he had learned over seven months which questions produced useful responses and which were met with silence. He would ask about the names of children, about the weather back home, about specific things that had happened to the man the previous week and were safe to describe. Patton listened without interrupting.
When Oakes finished explaining, Patton asked whether Oakes ever had to put words in the men’s mouths. Oakes said he tried not to. He asked the men what they wanted to say, and when they could not find the words, he would offer a phrase and let them accept or reject it. Sometimes they accepted the first phrase he offered.
Other times they would shake their heads and he would try again until they nodded. Patton asked how long the men usually took to compose a letter with Oakes’s help. Oakes said the first time was the hardest. A man who had never tried to express himself in writing did not always know where to begin.
Some sat in silence for a long while before they started. After the first letter, it became easier, because the men knew what a letter looked like and understood the kind of information that was expected. Patton sat with Oakes for nearly an hour, asking about the details of the arrangement, the men, and the letters themselves. He asked whether the men ever received replies.
Oakes said they did, and that when a reply came addressed in an unfamiliar hand, the man would bring it to Oakes to read aloud to him, and Oakes would then write a response in the man’s own words. Patton asked what the men’s families made of the letters. Oakes said he did not know for certain, but he supposed they were grateful to hear from their sons and husbands at all. He had never asked whether any family had noticed that the handwriting changed or that the phrasing was not quite what a man with little schooling might have produced on his own.
He did not think it mattered to them, as long as the letters kept coming. Patton stood up to leave. He thanked Oakes for his time and told him he was doing important work. Then he walked out of the tent and continued his inspection of the unit.
Later that day, Patton ordered a formal commendation for Oakes, citing his exceptional service and his dedication to his fellow soldiers. The recommendation was processed through the usual channels, and Oakes received the Army Commendation Medal, the first of its kind awarded in the unit, recognizing his work writing letters for the eleven men over those seven months. Oakes served through the remainder of the war, continuing his administrative duties, and continued to write letters for the men whenever needed, although after Patton’s visit, the arrangement became an open secret within the unit. Men who had once been embarrassed to ask now saw nothing shameful in sitting down with Oakes and dictating their words, and some of them began trying to learn to write themselves, encouraged by the example of a sergeant who had never made them feel small.
Patton never mentioned the visit again, and Oakes never brought it up on his own. But years later, Oakes told the story to his family, describing the moment the general had stood in the tent entrance, the long silence, and the quiet conversation that followed. He said he had never expected to see Patton again after that day, and that the commendation had surprised him more than the visit itself. He had not considered what he was doing to be out of the ordinary, only necessary.
The eleven men he wrote for came from different states, different backgrounds, different circumstances. Some were farmers who had never left their home county before the war. Others were factory workers or laborers who had learned to sign their names but little else. All of them, by Oakes’s account, were good men doing their duty, and all of them wanted the same thing: to let their families know they were alive, that they were thinking of them, and that they hoped to come home.
Oakes kept writing for them until the unit was disbanded after the German surrender in May 1945. He returned to Georgia after the war, married, raised a family, and worked for the rest of his life as a clerk. He never sought attention for what he had done in France, and most of the people who knew him in later years had no idea that he had once written letters for eleven men who could not write their own. He died in 1987, at the age of 74.
Among his belongings, his family found a small box containing the commendation Patton had ordered, along with a stack of copies of letters he had written for the men of his unit. The originals had been mailed long ago, but Oakes had kept copies, carefully folded, in his own neat handwriting.