In October 1944, Patton's Third Army had been advancing across France for weeks. The pace left little room for anything not directly tied to continuing the attack. Mail was delayed, supply lines were stretched, and the administrative machinery that connected soldiers to their families back home was operating at a fraction of its normal capacity.
Patton was inspecting a forward artillery unit on a surprise tour when he noticed something inside the company's administrative tent. A sergeant was sitting at a field desk, writing. He appeared to have been at it for hours, judging by the stack of finished letters beside him.
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 Oaks, a 31-year-old from Georgia, was writing letters home on behalf of men in his unit who could not write for themselves. He did it 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 could not write well. Oaks had written for all 11 of them once a week for seven months.
Patton stood at the entrance of the tent for a long moment without saying a word. He then told the duty officer he wanted to speak with Oaks as soon as the sergeant finished what he was writing. Patton waited.
Oaks finished the letter he was working on, a letter 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. He had given Oaks enough detail across three separate conversations to produce a text that, when Oaks read it back, sounded as though the son had written it himself. Oaks addressed the envelope, added it to the pile, and looked up.
He did not appear surprised to see Patton standing at the entrance of the tent. He stood, saluted, and waited. Patton told him to sit down.
William Oaks had grown up in a small farming community outside Macon, Georgia. He was the third of six children and had attended school through the seventh grade before leaving to help support his family. He could read and write well enough for the needs of daily life, and he 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 written fluency that comes from years of sustained independent effort rather than formal schooling.
He understood from his own experience what it felt like to lack that fluency, and what it cost a person, especially in the Army, where being unable to write a letter home could not be explained without disclosing something most men of his time and place found very difficult to admit.
Patton asked Oaks how the arrangement had begun. Oaks 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 role and noticed that a large number of men in the unit had educational backgrounds that included little or no literacy. He thought about it for several days, recognizing clearly that approaching the men directly would not work. They could not ask him without revealing something most of them were not prepared to disclose to their fellow soldiers.
So he made the offer privately, one man at a time, 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. Oaks said each man told him what he wanted to say, and Oaks wrote it down. Some composed the letter in their heads for days before sitting with him and could almost deliver it in one continuous statement. Others needed time and guidance, and over seven months he had learned which questions produced useful responses and which were met with silence. He asked about the names of children, about the weather back home, about specific things that had happened to the man in the past week and 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 how each of them would express himself if he could write.
Patton asked how he knew which voice to use for each man. Oaks said he had been listening to them talk for seven months, and that the voice is something you learn from listening. Patton said nothing for a long moment after that answer. He later told his aide that the answer was unexpected, and that it was the most expressive thing about what was happening in the tent and about the man who had created that situation.
Patton asked for the total number of letters Oaks had written. Oaks said he had not counted them. He said it was close to 300 if an estimate of 28 letters per man over seven months was correct, though the number varied. Some men asked for letters more frequently during difficult periods, and a few asked him to write to several family members, including parents, siblings, and wives.
Patton told him to continue what he was doing. He told the service officer that Oaks's letter writing should be formally recorded in the unit log as an approved administrative activity, and that Oaks should be given access to whatever paper and envelopes the unit had available for that purpose.
He told his aide to note in the inspection record that the unit had an informal correspondence assistance program under Sergeant Oaks's supervision, and that the Army's welfare and morale section should be made aware of it as a possible model for other units facing similar needs.
He also quietly told his aide, before leaving the tent, to write down the names of the 11 men who were receiving Oaks'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 had understood about the situation in the tent. The men who could not write well had families at home who were receiving letters from them, or had been receiving them for seven months through Oaks, and those families did not know the letters were not coming from the men themselves.
The official letters Patton ordered would not change that, but they would arrive at addresses where people were waiting. They would be signed by the commanding general of the Third Army, and 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.
Oaks 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 his immediate commanders' evaluations, which were uniformly positive.
He continued writing letters throughout the rest of the campaign and into the first weeks of the occupation period. By then, Army mail service had largely recovered from the disruptions of the autumn advance, and most men were sending and receiving mail through the usual channels. The arrangement faded naturally rather than coming to a formal end.
He was discharged in the summer of 1945 and returned to Georgia. Over the following decades he worked in a variety of jobs, as a school bus driver, as a custodian for a church he had attended since childhood, and eventually as a deacon of that church, a role he held for 22 years.
In his later working years, he volunteered with the adult literacy program at the county library, where he worked 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 said in a profile written after his death that he had a special gift for that work, because he understood without being told what it felt like to lack those skills and what it meant to finally have them.
He gave no recorded interviews about his wartime service. His daughter, in an account she wrote for a family history compiled after his death, described him as a man who never discussed what he did in the war in any specific detail. She said he once told her, when she pressed him the way children press elderly parents about things they consider important, that the most important thing he did over there was write some letters.
She asked him whose letters. He answered that they were letters for other people. She asked him 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 went out from 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 signed by Patton. The letters said nothing specific about what the men were doing or about the circumstances that had prompted them. 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 brought credit to himself and his family, and that General Patton wished to convey personally the Army's appreciation for the family's contribution and sacrifice.
The aide, who drafted the letters on Patton's instructions and knew exactly what had prompted them, reflected in his postwar memoir on what the families who received those letters would have thought. They would have understood them as form letters of a kind they might have received before, official acknowledgments issued by a military bureaucracy and signed by commanders with no particular 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, though 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 they were in a sense a result of it.