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Churchill’s Warnings

 The invasion of Ukraine by Russia parallels the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in 1939.  That miscalculation by Adolph Hitler provoked World War II.  But the German attack on Poland pushed to fame one of the greatest leaders and greatest Britons of history. Winston Spencer Churchill until that time had been washed up. His own father had thought he was “too dull for the Bar.”  He directed hs son into the British Army. At 17, with a poor lower-school record and having failed the entrance examination, Churchill as a young man had entered Sandhurst, Britain’s two-year military college. He showed an aptitude for military studies. He graduated, and received…

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Judge Pannill’s career

   My assistant and I have been working for three years to archive the family letters of the Pannills (my father’s family) and the Goodrums, Hunts, and Donaldsons (my mother’s).  People communicated by letter in those days. We thought we had archived between 5,000 and 6,000 letters. She now believes the current total nears 10,000. And we have several boxes to go. This collection will produce a portrait of life in Texas in the 19th and 20th centuries. A letter from Hastings Pannill, my father, to my brother Fitz (Fitzhugh Hastings Jr.) outlined the legal career of Dad’s own father, Judge William Pannill. Fitz graduated from the University of Texas…

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Putin and Churchill

 The world awakened on Saturday, February 26, to amazement: Vladimir Putin’s professional battalions had failed to conquer Ukraine’s citizen soldiers. My mind went back to one of Winston Churchill’s great speeches. On June 4, 1940, after the Dunkirk evacuation, he spoke to Parliament about Britain’s defense against German invasion: We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…

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A History Lesson

 A Texas museum’s request for funds dropped through my mailbox last week. Requests come all the time, but this one startled me. The writer was Mike Hagee, director of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Fredericksburg was settled by Texas Germans in the 1800s on U.S. Highway 290 west of Austin. The Pacific War Museum is the heart of the Nimitz Museum. The Nimitz Museum honors Admiral of the Fleet Chester W. Nimitz, born in Fredericksburg in 1885. The Museum is world class. On December 7, 2009 – 68 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — President George H. W. Bush opened the Bush…

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A soldier’s first letter in the Army hospital

 One of the poignant letters we uncovered this year came from a wounded soldier in World War I who said he had received no mail. The letter, faded and written in pencil, was hard to decipher at first. We slowly rolled out the top creases on the envelope. J. W. Atkins served with the American Army in France but wounds kept him in the Army hospital after the Armistice, November 11, 1918.  He dated his letter December 8, 1918. Military records show him as a private in the National Guard, enlisting from Quanah, Texas. He was 19. He served in the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment, then the 142nd, then the…

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Our V-J Day, August 14, 1945

 No pandemic marred the year 1945. A far greater calamity had fallen on the world. World War II was the biggest war in human history. As Victor Davis Hanson, the California classicist and military historian, writes in his recent book The Second World Wars, far more civilians than soldiers died in the war — for the first time.  Hanson wrote, “It killed over 60 million people, meaning that about 27,000 people on average died each day. The victors suffered five to seven times more dead than did the defeated.” Germany surrendered in April 1945 following the death of Hitler. Japan refused to admit defeat. American planners feared the invasion and conquest of Japan…

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Mariah Hunt writes daughter Nellie in 1877

 We have added more than 3,000 letters to the family archives of Hastings and Mary Pannill.  We are so busy archiving and dating letters, we have no time to read them all.   “We” means me and my assistant, Jill Brugger, who works with me on this project three days a week. All the research we have the time to do is assign the best date we can  to the document.  Now I plan to pull a letter every week or so and reprint it.  In this first letter, Mariah Frances Hunt writes her daughter Nellie Donaldson with advice on her marriage.  She dated her letter May 6, 1877. A couple…

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Mary Pannill’s suitcase

   MARY GOODRUM PANNILL My mother, Mary Goodrum Pannill, wrecked her car in 1990. She was 74. It was a new blue Ford with trimmings. She was not wearing a seat belt. They didn’t. She and my father, Hastings Pannill, 75, had driven from Huntsville, Texas, to Fort Worth to close the house of his deceased brother, William Cherry Pannill.  William had never married. By this time, Dad and Adeline Pannill Aycock (“Hooliwag” to the family) were the last survivors of the seven children of William (VIII) and Mattie Pannill. They were selling William’s small house in the historic district of South Fort Worth. My parents were taking some of…

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Monk Reese serves in the Army — briefly

 The West Point Guards, a militia company from West Point, Georgia, entered Confederate service in 1861. Many such companies, North and South, responded to their government’s call that spring on the outbreak of hostilities. When the Guards entered Confederate service, they became Company “D” of the 4th Georgia Infantry Regiment. The company formed parts of different brigades during the war, but after the battle of Antietam, its service took place in the Doles-Cook Brigade. The National Archives published the “Compiled Service Records of Confederate Solders” from Georgia. Here we get a glimpse of Monk Reese. Milton E. Reese appears in the records as a private soldier born about 1840 who…

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