“Given the Dear John’s prominence as both a lived experience and cultural motif, you’d think that someone would have written a book about this most notorious of wartime epistles.”

By Susan L. Carruthers

EVER SINCE World War Two, when GIs first coined the term “Dear John” for a break-up note from a wife, fiancée or girlfriend, these notorious missives have loomed large in American war-lore.

Memoirs, fiction and poetry authored by veterans brim with references to the correspondences and the consequences of being “Dear Johned.” Think, for instance, of those epic blockbuster novels-turned-movies of the Second World War such as Leon Uris’s Battle Cry, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead, and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line.

During the Vietnam War, prominent psychiatrists claimed that American women were sending more — and more viciously worded — Dear Johns than ever before. Vietnam veteran-novelist Winston Groom (best known for his savant Forrest Gump) not only endorsed this proposition but asserted in an earlier novel, Better Times Than These, that an army composed exclusively of jilted GIs would be invincible. More recently, Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead (and the movie based on it) foregrounds Dear Johns and the faithless women who sent them. Their photographs are pinned to a “Wall of Shame” for collective defacement.

Pop culture has done its fair share to immortalize Dear Johns. Many of TV’s most idiosyncratic servicemen — from M*A*S*H‘s Radar O’Reilly to Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.— received their romantic marching orders in the form of a Dear John.

For their part, musicians have given heartbreak numerous lachrymose melodies. Perhaps the most enduring, Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky’s “A Dear John Letter,” was released just as an armistice concluded the Korean War in 1953. Apologetic in tone — “how I hate to write…” — the letter dispatched by Shepard’s character announced not only the end of her relationship with GI John, far-off in Korea, but her shift of allegiance to his brother, Don (who, by the way, wanted John to return her photograph!).

This twist chimed with received wisdom. In its archetypal form, a Dear John didn’t just break things off with the recipient, the author simultaneously announced a new love: abandonment and betrayal rolled into one. As service personnel headed off to the Persian Gulf in 1990, nearly 40 years after Shepard and Husky’s first topped the Billboard charts, their maudlin duet was still believed so potentially injurious to servicemen’s esprit that some local radio stations banned it from the airwaves.

Given the Dear John’s prominence as both a lived experience and cultural motif, you’d think that someone would have written a book about this most notorious of wartime epistles. That, at any rate, is what I imagined a few years ago when I first became intrigued with the phenomenon. Yet, despite intensive bibliographic digging, I came up empty-handed. No one, it seemed, had written a history of this epistolary genre. So, I set out to write that book myself and now it’s in print: Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

So, why did no one write this book before me? I have some speculative hunches. First, much of what’s been published — or commemorated in displays like the Smithsonian National Postal Museum‘s “Mail Call” exhibit — celebrates enduring bonds of love and loyalty between personnel in uniform “over there” and those tending the home fires “over here.” Likewise, edited collections of wartime letters tend to memorialize steadfastness: civilians’ commitment to servicemen and women, the nation, and the cause. The Dear John inverts that patriotic ideal.

What also became clear as I researched the book was that I simply wasn’t going to find hidden troves of Dear John letters in the archives. An anthology of Dear John letters would never be possible (should anyone aspire to produce such a volume). Many archivists I contacted initially imagined their collections contained Dear Johns only to find, on further excavation, that they did not. Creatures of the archive, other historians had perhaps been deterred by this dearth of bona fide specimens.

On reflection, it’s hardly surprising that “authentic” Dear Johns — those we know for sure that women wrote and that men didn’t either embellish or invent — are extremely few and far between. After all, who clings on to the letter in which their beloved tells them things are over, and by the way, she has found someone new? Most Dear Johns are hastily torn to shreds, thrown overboard, burnt, defaced or otherwise “recycled.” A rich seam of veterans’ story-telling documents these inventive forms of disposal, along with other ways in which servicemen coped with emotional injuries incurred in wartime.

Stories lie at the heart of my investigation into Dear John letters — and, latterly, tapes, texts, and social media status updates. The biggest epiphany I experienced in researching this topic was the realization that Dear John letters are best understood not as a female epistolary genre, but as a male oral tradition. After all, most of what we know about the contents of women’s break-up notes comes from tales told by male soldiers and veterans, along with others ventriloquizing their viewpoints. And men have had a lot to say about Dear Johns and their senders.

As we might expect, many military men’s opinion of women who ended relationships with servicemen in absentia has been negative — or yet more incendiary. With his trademark intemperance, General George S. Patton declared that women who wrote Dear Johns “should be shot as traitors.” Already familiar with Patton’s invective, I was more taken aback to find how insistently — and routinely — civilian women weighed in with stern views on the subject of romantic loyalty. None were more energetic in trying to discipline emotion on the home front than advice columnists, figures aptly termed “agony aunts” in British parlance.

Over successive decades, syndicated columnists like Dorothy Dix, Mrs. Mayfield, and “Dear Abby” dispensed almost identical injunctions, warning women — in no uncertain terms — not to send a Dear John to an active-duty serviceman. Doing so, they intoned, was “cowardly” and “cruel.” Such letters would not only torpedo the recipient’s morale but endanger the operational efficiency of his whole unit. So the mantra went — and went on. The same advice first dispensed in the 1940s continued to be issued to the partners of service personnel deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century.

Despite these strenuous warnings, some women nevertheless severed ties with servicemen overseas. But receipt of a Dear John was never the universal male experience of being at war that both veterans’ stories and pop cultural motifs would have us believe. The faithless few have monopolized bandwidth at the expense of the monogamous many. In uncovering the history of these elusive yet ubiquitous letters, I aim to offer readers a more complicated story of my own — one that shifts the emphasis from female fickleness to war’s corrosive impact on all in its orbit, men and women, service personnel and civilians alike.

Dr. Susan L. Carruthers is the author of Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America. A professor of history at the University of Warwick, U.K., she is the author of several books on war and its aftermath, including The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), shortlisted for the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America is published by Cambridge University Press in January 2022.