Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 6, 1995 TAG: 9505080056
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
You must be a very good person to do something for a stranger...I knew God wouldn't turn away when I prayed so much for the message.
I am an entirely different person since I received your card...not for one minute did I give up hope, but I have been so worried and nervous. This strain has been hard on us all.
It was the first word I had received from my boy who had been reported "missing in action." You can imagine how happy it made me.
Roy and Edythe Collins saved the cards and letters. There are more than a hundred of them, mailed from small towns and big cities, from 48 states and Canada.
They're from the grateful families of GIs who fought in World War II. Many hadn't heard a word about their husbands, sons, brothers or cousins for months, not since the boys had been shot down or captured by the Germans.
"Missing" was all they knew - which could mean "dead," "alive," or something in between. "The tension...held us so fast," wrote one mother.
The Collinses were their Samaritans of relief. Night after night, in late 1944 and early 1945, they sat by the shortwave radio in their kitchen listening to German propaganda broadcasts.
Interspersed among the music and the Nazi bombast were brief recorded messages from captured GIs to their kinfolk back home.
"Dear Ora: I am well and doing fine, so don't worry about me. Love, Bill," one soldier would say. "Hello, darling. Honey, I am a POW. Don't worry, I am well," said another.
Back in Christiansburg, Edythe Collins put her high school shorthand training to good use. She scribbled the messages, hour by dark hour. Next morning she transcribed the message on postcards and mailed them to the servicemen's families. The boys always gave their family's address during their brief remarks.
The arrival of these small messages was like a beam of sunshine breaking through clouds of worry in households across America.
"Our son, Pvt. Wilton Sheffield, has been missing since Oct. 30. We have anxiously waited for a hearing some way somehow, and so thankful he is alive even a war prisoner," wrote a breathless Georgia mother to the Collinses on February 27, 1945.
"Through your kindness it won't be long before Bill knows of our baby. The weeks I've known he was missing haven't been easy," a wife from Indiana told them.
Many times the cards from Christiansburg got to families ahead of official notification by the Red Cross or the U.S. War Department.
"We were glad to do this and very pleased that we could," Roy Collins says, simply.
With the 50th anniversary of V-E Day only days away, the couple pulled out the old bulging scrapbook and reminisced, sitting in the living room of their Roanoke Street home.
Out their picture window, you can see the farm land Edythe Collins' family once owned, now filled with gas stations, fast-food restaurants and car lots along U.S. 460.
Both 79 and married for 54 years, the couple met at Christiansburg High School. That's when Roy Collins developed a yen for shortwave radio. During the mid-1930s he built his own rig, got a license and joined the other pioneer surfers of the Model-T Internet. "Gabbing and exchanging pleasantries" is how he describes their communication.
That changed during World War II, when most domestic shortwave transmissions were banned. "All you could do was listen," Roy Collins says.
After the Allies invaded the European mainland in mid-1944, American servicemen began to be taken prisoner by the Germans, captured during aerial or ground combat. The German psychological ploy was to broadcast messages from the POWs during radio propaganda broadcasts.
"It was malarkey," Edythe Collins recalls. "Made me so mad I felt like throwing a brick through the radio."
But she endured the static to hear the servicemen speak. Twisting the dial one night, the couple found both the propaganda broadcast frequency and a new cause.
Roy Collins, who worked days at the Christiansburg Post Office, went to bed. Edythe, tending to a 4-year-old daughter, sat up late before the dimly lit radio dial with a notepad. "It was really hard to catch what they were saying," she said. "It was nerve-racking."
During early 1945, the couple transcribed so many messages and mailed so many notifications that they had to call in relatives to help and mimeograph boilerplate postcards.
Many other shortwave operators across the county independently came up with the same idea. Some of the servicemen's families contacted by the Collinses wrote back to say they received word from any number of listeners.
One said she got 70 penny postcards about her son. Others sent the couple stamps, postcards and money to support their work.
"You see I had heard nothing since receiving the message from the War Department saying he was "missing in action" since 15th of Dec. 1944," a Georgia mother wrote to the Collinses in March 1945. "This is a very wonderful work you are doing and I'm sure many others feel as I do about it."
One soldier, whose brother's broadcast was recorded by the couple, wrote from overseas: "Now I know why we fight, we fight to protect all the good people such as you...I can go to sleep now without fear of waking up from terrible dreams."
"They were all so grateful. That was the nice thing about it," Roy Collins recalls.
The broadcasts stopped as the Allies pushed the Germans back and eventually forced their surrender on May 8, 1945. A few of the families wrote the couple again, but not many.
Now the Collinses are grandparents as the world looks back a half-century to the anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. Roy says he hasn't been on the radio much during the past few years, although he still has his license.
But good deeds have a life of their own, as one mother vowed:
As long as I live I shall never forget your kindess.
"We've had a good life," Roy Collins says. "I'm sure that had some bearing on it."
by CNB