We Are Going to Be Lucky: A World War II Love Story in Letters

With every passing year, we lost more and more veterans of World War II. All that is left of their experiences are the letters that they wrote home and the letters they received from home. Thankfully, we are starting to see more and more collections of these letters get published. This collection is edited by the daughter, which is rare to see. Lenny and Diana Miller are a young Jewish couple living in New York City when the war starts. Lenny enlists in the Army in 1943, and they vow to write to each other everyday, and do they ever. This is a voluminous collection of letters that spans the last two years of the war. From the time he went to his initial mustering camp near New York to his days at basic training in Mississippi, Lenny finally got to fight to Europe as part of the Army scouts. Along the way, he records his impressions of life in the Army and of the fighting. But it is not just one perspective; we get what life was like on the home front with Diana’s letters as well, which reveal her struggle to raise a young infant in war time alone. A beautiful collection.