Ask About Me from the War: Letters from World War II

Ask About Me from the War: Letters from World War II is a collection of real letters that brings the Second World War down from the scale of nations, armies, and statistics to the lives of the individuals who actually experienced it.

The collection brings together voices from twenty Allied and Axis countries: officers and infantrymen, pilots and sailors, nurses and doctors, prisoners of war, the wounded, the missing, and those who never returned home. Written from Europe, the Pacific, North Africa, Asia, and other fronts of the conflict, their letters create an intimate and remarkably varied portrait of life inside a world at war.

What makes these letters memorable, however, is not simply what they tell us about military history. Behind each one is a person missing home, thinking about the enemy, confronting fear and death, describing unfamiliar places, or trying to protect loved ones from the reality of what they are experiencing. Alongside violence and loss, there are also moments of love, humour, hope, boredom, and ordinary daily life.

Ask About Me from the War tells the history of World War II from eye level. It reminds us that behind every statistic was an individual with a name, a family, a memory, and often someone far away waiting for a letter to arrive.