From Calcutta with Love

Sometimes the most painful aspect of life is when one's contributions are forgotten.

Such may be the case with service by Americans in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II. From Calcutta with Love is an extraordinary collection of letters, the first ever published with an American's perspective of "the forgotten theater." In being remembered, those who served in CBI are being honored, an homage long overdue.

Lieutenant Beard's letters breathe life into the experience of China-Burma-India. Richard was one of the men fighting and working together, living on hope, to protect all we had left behind. They were men who longed to be home in the arms of the women they loved.

"From Calcutta with Love" comprises letters written from India and Ohio between Richard and his wife Reva. They are about love and yearning for home. For Richard, writing to Reva was a lifeline. He poured his heart out through the tip of a pen. Clinical Psychologist Richard Leonard Beard, 2nd Lieutenant in the 12th Bomber Group, was a graceful and voluminous writer with a flare for description, a communicator. His letters inform, entertain, and reveal honest feelings about the war and his role in it.

Through her letters, Reva constantly reassured Richard of her love and devotion. She confided to Richard that life seemed to stand still without him. Like other war wives throughout the United States, Reva talked with her friends of nothing but her missing husband and the latest war news. Like hundreds of others, she lived for the daily mail. She wrote to Richard that his letters would be "a privilege for anyone to read." Though she offered to send them to the Findlay, Ohio newspaper for publication, Richard apparently never consented to such a plan.