Letters of Holden author's parents a heartfelt insight into WW II 'At Home and At Sea'

Royce and Becky Singleton had only been married seven months in October, 1943, but Royce, a Navy fighter pilot, was aboard the USS Suwannee escort carrier headed to the Central Pacific.

Royce's ship and air group supported the battles of the decisive Central Pacific offensive of World War II, while Becky was home in Oklahoma City, pregnant with the couple's first child. Over the course of 13 months, they wrote more than 200 letters to each other.

"I guess I am just an old married woman now, but that title won't be for long, 'cause soon it's going to be 'mama' instead. How do like that, 'Daddy'? "Becky wrote on March 11, 1944.

The child is Royce A. Singleton Jr . of Holden, a retired sociology professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.

His book "At Home and At Sea: An American Navy Couple During World War II," which was self-published earlier this year, takes the letters of his parents as a very human way of conveying their wartime experiences and also offers a fascinating broader view of what "ordinary" people like his mother and father went through during that extraordinary period.

'Heartfelt exchanges'

"'At Home and At Sea' speaks for the American families who committed 15 million relatives to the global conflagration of World War II. The heartfelt exchanges between Royce and Becky Singleton offer rare insight to distant relationships of those at home and those serving overseas: longing, mutual concern, unexpected loss, and the joy of pending childbirth with an absent father," says Barrett Tillman, author of "When the Shooting Stopped: August 1945."

Singleton, 80, said he did not know the letters between his late parents had even existed for a long time, and he had never asked them about their wartime experiences, something he regrets. On the other hand, they did not talk about the war. Royce in particular may have chosen to let the past stay in the past, something that was fairly common with veterans of the Greatest Generation, Singleton observed.

"Had I asked my parents about the war, I don't know what they might have told me. Thankfully, from these letters, I learned the inspiring story of this exceptional time in their lives," Singleton writes.

"Learning for the first time what they went through, it gave me a new appreciation for that generation," Singleton said during a recent interview.

'The letters tell a love story'

Becky, who was working for quite a while during her pregnancy, wrote long and very frequent letters. Royce kept her letters and brought them home, something not every serviceman was able to do because of the constant flux of wartime. But Royce was somewhat constrained about what he could write to Becky since letters were read by military censors.

Singleton, a social psychologist who taught at Holy Cross for 32 years before retiring in 2009, writes a narrative about both the couple — especially Becky's accounts of her activities such as doctor's visits — and the course of the Central Pacific offensive. Royce's ship and air group were involved with every battle from the amphibious landing at Tarawa to General Douglas McArthur's return to the Philippines at Leyte, where U.S. and Japanese forces engaged in the largest naval battle ever fought.  To describe Royce's combat experiences Singleton researched flight logs, action reports, an oral history of Royce's ship and air group, and two memoirs written by shipmates.

The letters tell a love story, but just as the course of true love never runs smooth there is occasional bickering as well as the stress of separation and about matters of daily life such as money.

One quarrel was about what name to give to the first child. If it was a son, Royce wanted him, per family tradition, to be named after his father, Sandy Singleton. Becky wanted to name him Royce Jr. Becky got her way.

Singleton had the unique experience of reading about his own name being debated. "I had heard something about it before. To me it was humorous, but it must have been very difficult for my mother. He was very insistent about naming him after his father ... she was assertive in that way," Singleton said.

When Royce came back to Oklahoma City after being discharged from active duty there were plans for him to become a lawyer but he ultimately reenlisted in the Navy and became a career Naval aviator.

Becky had said "she would follow him wherever he went," Singleton said, and she did, although the nature of Royce's service would mean further separations.

Singleton said his father may have been ambivalent about returning to the Navy. "I wish I knew more about the decision," Singleton said. But he did research the matter. Royce had asked to withdraw his commission at the same time it came through, so he accepted it. "I didn't know that," Singleton said.

Becky and Royce had six children and were constantly moving in relation to where Royce was being stationed.

Singleton said he went to 12 schools through high school — "three different schools in one year."

'I was inspired to write the book'

When Becky and Royce were separated because of the Navy, they resumed writing letters. All told there are 500 letters between them, Singleton said. His mother stored them in old trunk.

Royce died in 2002 and Becky four years later. The letters were passed on to Singleton's sister, and his youngest brother later made Portable Document Format copies. Singleton started with reading the letters his parents wrote to each other in the 1950s, because he could personally relate to some of the events being described.

"When I finally got around to the letters written of World War II, I was retired," he said. From teaching, that is.

"I was inspired to write the book."

As a professor and since his retirement Singleton has a long list of academic publications, including two co-authored textbooks on social research methods published by Oxford University Press.

But in writing "At Home and At Sea," "it was a difficult decision to determine how to write the book, how to structure it," Singleton said.

He built a narrative around the Central Pacific offensive because his parents were involved with it. "My father was in it; my mother was watching it."

Singleton said he had an editor who "didn't like the space I devoted to the war." However, there are not a lot of books that deal with Central Pacific offensive, especially from a serving person's point of view, Singleton noted. And the "Central Pacific is not part of the popular fiction about the war."

"At Home And at Sea" was published in March.

Asked about the response his book has received Singleton said he has not done a lot of marketing yet because of a situation at home but is planning to ramp the marketing up.

"The sample is very small thus far, but the response is promising. Seven of nine readers on Amazon gave the book a 5 on a scale from 1 to 5. One person wrote that the book 'is a great read for anyone interested in the dynamics of a loving relationship dramatically affected by world events.'"

Problems with 'commercial publishing'

Singleton worked on "At Home and At Sea" for about three years, but a new challenge emerged in trying to find a publisher.

He said he sought advice about finding a publisher from several people, including a literary agent who he had come to know when she was a senior editor at Oxford University Press. She told him he was unlikely to find a traditional commercial publisher. "Commercial publishing," she said, "is relentlessly focused at this time on the present and the future, not the past, except where the past is being rewritten in certain ways that illuminate the troubling issues we are dealing with today, including and I might say especially, the assault on democracy and the rise of white supremacy thinking. And it is also focused on new voices — not white, not middle class.”

The agent advised Singleton to find a small regional or independent press. He sent book proposals to a handful of publishers, including three university presses and the Naval Institute Press. "The response I got was consistent. Editors generally believed the book would appeal to a limited market that was not big enough to justify publication," he said.

Singleton thinks the editors he contacted "underestimated the size of the audience for my book." Meanwhile, "I may have found a traditional publisher eventually. But at 80 years of age, I was eager to have the book published, and was concerned about how long the search for a publisher would take. The literary agent also recommended that I consider self-publishing. Perhaps because of my academic background, where self-publishing and vanity presses are held in low regard, I prematurely rejected this alternative," he said.

"Now that I know more about it, I believe that this may have been my best option even if I were to have gotten an offer from a publisher. I was able to self-publish the book within a few months, whereas even with a complete manuscript in hand, it’s unlikely that a traditional publisher would have had it in print before 2025."

Singleton could draw on his own resources. "I've written a lot. It's not like I'm new to writing and publishing," he said.

"Two colleagues read the entire manuscript. My daughter, who is a graphic designer, designed the book cover and created two maps for the book. I contacted a freelance editor, who did a final edit of the book, and I constructed an index."

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Letters of Holden author's parents a heartfelt insight into WW II 'At Home and At Sea'