That Was Then: A War Diary

Adolph Baker, an American battalion intelligence officer in the 83rd Division of the 330th Infantry, landed on Utah Beach two weeks after the invasion on D-Day. He served in combat for six months, during which time he interrogated prisoners in both German and Russian, until he was seriously wounded in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, near the Belgian-German border. This book is a compilation of letters he wrote, mostly to his wife, during his entire time in action.From the Prologue of this collection:“In the course of all the battles, during lulls in the fighting, I somehow managed to find time to write my wife these letters. They tell not only much of what happened during those months, but also what was said in enemy interrogations and dialogues with soldiers on both sides, in and out of combat. Annotations (in italics) fill in details I could not or would not write at the time, and comment on things I said or did then that I might not say or do now."The story begins with a troopship on its way to England in time for the invasion of the continent, follows the war across Europe into Germany, and ends in a receiving hospital in Newport News, Virginia, where my wife and I were reunited after a year of separation. The letters sat in a shoe box forgotten for some 55 years.”

Adolph Baker was a 1st lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was retired because of his injuries during combat service in World War II. He later received a Ph.D. in physics from Brandeis University, after obtaining four previous degrees in various other fields of both science and the humanities. He became a physics professor at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts and is the author of the book “Modern Physics and Antiphysics,” which was often used in introductory collegiate courses in physics for humanities majors in the 1970s and 1980s. He died of a heart attack in 2002 at age 84, shortly after completing his annotations of these compiled letters.