The war her grandfather never talked about
Granddaughter preserves 150 letters home
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Editor's note -- In a four-part Veterans Day series, The Sentinel tells the story of James Heller, a World War II sailor whose letters home revealed a different side of him to his family.
The series follows his granddaughter's discovery of the letters, Heller's Navy training and service aboard the USS Eldorado, and what his son learned about his father through the letters.
LEWISTOWN – Some evenings, Christina Short came to a word in her grandfather’s handwriting she couldn’t decipher. She would set the letter aside, return to it and try again.
For four or five hours after dinner, night after night, she worked through letters James W. Heller Sr. had written during World War II.
Heller wrote in cursive, forming certain letters in ways his granddaughter had to learn. Sometimes a single word brought her work to a halt. She wanted the story in the order he had lived it.
The letters were addressed to Margaret, the wife he called Peg, and the three children waiting at home while he served in the Navy. The letters had survived the war, the deaths of James and Margaret Heller, and decades in storage. Almost nobody in the family knew what they contained.
By the time she finished, approximately 150 letters had become a chronological account of a Mifflin County sailor’s wartime experience aboard the USS Eldorado, a command ship at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She called the collection “Through My Pap’s Eyes.”
Letters no one had read
Heller was born March 23, 1908, in Mifflin County. He married Margaret Mae Hoover, and they had three children: Jane, Michael and Joseph. He was 36 during Navy radio training, leaving behind a wife and three children while learning skills that would eventually take him into the Pacific war.
In a July 10 letter, he described the difficulty of learning to type while training for radio work. He was trying to keep pace with Morse code lessons and the demands of a Navy school. Still, he asked about the children.
The letters followed him through training and eventually into the Pacific. He worried about missing mail, asked about his children, discussed family expenses and described the exhaustion of Navy life. There were also traces of a war he couldn’t always describe freely.
The collection passed from Peg to her son Joseph Heller Sr., now 85. Joe kept it for years without reading it. Eventually, he gave it to his daughter, Christina. She put it on a shelf.
“No one ever read them until I read them, other than my gram,” Short said.
She did not start by typing. She began sorting the letters before her intensive work from October 2025 through March 2026. First, she had to arrange them by year, then month, week and day. The original pages and envelopes needed to become a sequence she could follow. She organized the handwritten material into three-ring binders covering 1944 and 1945. Reading them changed her understanding of the man she had known as Pap.
The father he never knew
Short remembered a close relationship with her grandfather. When she attended Penn State, he lived in Centre Hall and sometimes drove over to take her to lunch. She knew him as a loving grandfather. The letters introduced her to the young father who had gone to war.
“Not one word did he ever speak of war,” she said.
In the letters, however, he spoke freely about his affection for his family. He asked after the children, wrote stories for them and sent messages that Peg could read aloud. A Jan. 19, 1945, letter ended with a request: “Kiss them for me and all my love, and I mean all.”
For Joe Heller, the affectionate father in those letters was almost unrecognizable. He remembered a man who worked hard but seldom showed affection. He had never known the depth of the feelings his father put on paper.
“This is not my dad. This is not the guy I knew,” he said.
Heller rarely spoke of his wartime experiences after coming home, leaving his family with questions the letters could now help answer.
Christina had known a different side of her grandfather. “I just felt like I was in it with him,” she said of reading the correspondence in order. She wanted to follow his journey as it happened, one dated page after another.
Four or five hours a night
For Short, preserving the letters had become a personal priority. A life-changing health diagnosis had prompted her to think about unfinished things and what she wanted to accomplish.
Her grandfather’s letters became one of those things. Without that change in her life, she believes the collection might still be sitting untouched.
She worked especially hard from October 2025 through March 2026. Sometimes, the family puzzled over a word together. At other times, she had to leave the page and come back to it.
During the transcription, she would stop and share passages with her family, asking them to listen to what her grandfather had written. There were discoveries she couldn’t keep to herself.
She placed transcriptions alongside reproductions of the originals, preserving the sequence so someone unfamiliar with Heller’s cursive could read them. She included envelopes, photographs and other material that helped explain where he had been.
One detail particularly fascinated her. Heller and his wife used a numerical code to communicate his location without stating it openly in letters subject to military censorship. He spelled out ordinary numbers, but when digits appeared, Peg could consult a separate key to determine where he was. The code sheet survived with the correspondence.
A home for his words
Even before she finished typing the letters, Short was thinking about where the originals belonged.
Short researched museums and contacted the National WWII Museum in New Orleans in January 2026. She knew such institutions received countless offers of wartime material and expected to wait for an answer. Instead, she said, assistant curator Brandon Drake called about 32 minutes after she left her message.
They began corresponding. She arranged an appointment around a family trip and carried the letters to New Orleans rather than trust them to the mail. She met Drake at the museum May 18, 2026.
The family was taken into a private room, where museum staff examined the collection. Short remembered the excitement of the curators as they went through the material that had spent so many years in her family’s possession.
One curator was so enthusiastic that he seemed almost ready to jump up and down, Short recalled.
“We were like VIPs for the day,” she said.
According to Short, the museum accepted the original letters and plans to digitize them and display material in its Pacific War exhibits. The family has retained reproductions and transcriptions. The originals, with their envelopes and surviving markings, are now in the care of an institution devoted to preserving the history of the war.
Joe doesn’t believe the letters would have survived indefinitely without his daughter’s work. He is proud that the record of his father’s service will remain available to people who never knew him.
“I’m thrilled and kind of weepy that she even took the time to do this,” he said.
When Short reached the final letter, she had completed what she set out to do. She had read her grandfather’s words, put them in order and made them legible for people who would come after her.
Finishing, however, brought its own sadness.
“When I finished the last letter, I cried,” she said. “Cried missing my Pap, cried because I was so proud of him and what he did for country, and to be honest, I wanted there to be more.”
“I lived his journey while I wrote it and I so much wanted to have him back to sit with and have him tell me everything, firsthand. To hear his story from him, in his voice, and be able to hug him, one last time.”