Author Tells Moving Story of Parents' Lives During World War II

Wilber Bradt, on the right, as a freshman at the University of Indiana. The second photo is of Norma Bradt from about 1937.

Local author Hale Bradt brings a powerful and personal story about family and World War II to the Salem Athenaeum on Wednesday evening.

Bradt is launching the release of his new book Wilber’s War, An American Family’s Journey through World War II, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Athenaeum. The event is free to the public.

Wilber’s War, tells the story of Bradt’s parents, Wilber and Norma Bradt, and their time during World War II.

The story offers fresh insight, on a deeply personal level, into World War II as it was fought by the U.S. Army in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Philippines.

On his 50th birthday, Hale Bradt made a discovery that would not only change his own life but would further enrich the American story of World War II.

Prompted by an argument with one of his sisters, he unearthed long-forgotten letters written by his father, Wilber, while Wilber served in the Pacific Theater in World War II.

Stunned by their power and insight,Bradt began a decades-long journey to learn more about his father and his family’s past, unlocking stories that thrust him into a saga of heroism and heart-wrenching drama.

In the three-book set, Wilber’s War, An American Family’s Journey through World War II, Bradt reproduces much of his father’s intimate narrative from the Pacific front and recounts his painful return home after a three-year deployment. The accounts reveal not only on-the-ground details of Pacific combat, but the tangled web of a mother’s heartbreaking sacrifice, a tragic suicide, and a family that was reshaped forever.

“Wilber’s letters form the backbone of the story,” notes Bradt. “His mailings to my mother, my sister and me, and to his parents, exhibit very different aspects of my father: the lover, the father, and the son. It’s real life, not always pretty but always hugely revealing.”

The wartime letters also offer a picture of Norma, Wilber’s wife, as a complex, if not uncontroversial, heroine. A military spouse plagued by her husband’s lengthy deployment, she faced personal struggles on the home front while attending to the needs of her family. How she chose to handle these challenges becomes a distinctive and irrevocable element in the Bradt family saga.

“The story of Wilber’s and Norma’s lives is told through selections from those letters and in roughly equal measure through context and interpretation provided by me,” Bradt explains. “My father’s writing is vividly descriptive, technically informative, poetic, romantic, sometimes racy, and also quite introspective.”

Hale Bradt is a Korean War veteran and an astrophysicist retired from M.I.T. who once searched for black holes, but turned to searching for family and wartime history. He has been intrigued by the Bradt family story for more than three decades, interviewing relatives, academic and military colleagues, and a Japanese officer against whom his father fought in the Solomon Islands.