Tag Archives: shipping

Eighty years ago, a cadet from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy named Frank Tone sent a Christmas poem from the Mediterranean to his parents in Easton, Pennsylvania. Eleven days later, he was killed aboard his Liberty ship during “little Pearl Harbor,” a Luftwaffe attack on the port of Bari, Italy.

Frank, a twenty-year-old engine cadet, was on the SS Samuel J. Tilden the night of December 2, 1943, when a bomb destroyed the engine room, where he was on watch. There was no body to recover.

Elsewhere in the harbor, Ju-88 bombers sank 17 Allied ships and killed more than 1,000 British and American servicemen and hundreds of civilians. The Liberty ship SS John Harvey exploded, killing all aboard and spreading deadly mustard gas in the air and water. No one was supposed to know about the chemical weapons cargo.

I wrote a two-part story about Frank that ran over the weekend in The Morning Call of Allentown, my old employer. His family provided a trove of material: old photos and original documents, including the Western Union telegram informing his parents he was missing in action, a “certificate of presumptive death” and several Victory Mail letters he wrote from the Mediterranean.

One of those letters to his family is intriguing. It was dated November 21, 1943, and included a two-stanza typewritten Christmas poem. Here it is:

Polish the star on the Christmas tree
And give it an extra sparkle for me
Then give it my share of your Christmas cheer
So we won’t feel so far apart this year.

Yes, I’m in the old world and you’re in the new
But “merry Christmas” can still ring true
For we’re winning the right to say again
“Peace on Earth, goodwill to men.”

Beneath it, Frank signed it in longhand, “Love to all.”

So, did Frank write the poem? If he didn’t, who did?

I turned to my friend Kenneth Woolley III at the Allentown Public Library, a tenacious researcher who helped me debunk the myth that Bethlehem Steel made the steel for New York City’s iconic Chrysler Building. “I like this mystery,” Kenny said. “I’ll see what I can turn up.”

Here’s what Kenny said after several weeks on the case:

“I had a few other librarians on the trail of this poem also. We could not find any mention or lines from the poem in any resource we tried. I checked first with all the U.S. newspapers and even U.K. newspapers. I also tried some poetry encyclopedias that let you search by keywords and text. Internet searching also turns up nothing with that text. Nothing shows up. This leads me to believe that
a) Frank wrote the poem himself.
b) Frank borrowed the poem from a friend or acquaintance who wrote it.
c) It was a generic poem being used by many in the military, but if this was the case, surely other examples in letters or postcards would have survived.

“I did try to find other examples of poetry on GI postcards and looked at many letters from GI’s to home and I did not find the poem. … 

“Also, the V-mail telegrams that I found online for Christmas tended to have pre-filled illustrations and cartoons. Sometimes they were little Christmas jingles and verse, but they were very illustrated text and fonts. My question would be: Did the GI’s fill these out themselves or was a telegraph operator on hand helping them fill them out? They might have had a bunch of ‘ideas’ and templates to give GI’s sending the telegram.

“Frank’s V-mail seems to be hand-typed, although the added Bible verse and poem seem to indicate a generic nature to it. So it really is difficult to say if he wrote it or not. I’d love to see all the V-mail held in collections in museums and libraries across the country that I found in my research to see if any follow Frank’s format. So far, his is fairly unique.”

What do you think of this mystery poem? Where did it come from?