letterstodefiance.com - Fran Seibert Home Page

Description: One man’s incredible WW II journey, told in his own words: the bomber flights, his capture and imprisonment, writing the secret underground newspaper for the prison camp of over 9,000 men, and finally, freedom – for himself, and the world.

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Francis Seibert

During WWII Sgt. Francis Seibert of Defiance, Ohio was stationed in Amarillo, Texas as an Air Force instructor training men to become aircraft mechanics for the B-17 and B-29 bombers. Being his first time away from home, he wrote to his family daily. Feeling his letters were “boring,” he began to illustrate the envelopes with cartoons.  His mother saved all 614 of these letters.  This documentary takes the 82-year-old Seibert through an historic journey as he revisits those letters 60 years later.

The letters cover topics as diverse as Mother’s Day; his first Christmas away from home; first learning of the D-Day invasion; and his impressions of the dropping of the first Atomic Bomb. For a young man of only twenty-one, Sergeant Seibert had extraordinary vision of what the future of the Atomic Bomb would mean to the world.  In his letter he already saw the full significance of what such a devastating weapon would have on life from then on.  He knew that it would very likely turn out to be instrumental