More than a hundred thousand American women were widowed by the Second World War, many of them in their twenties, some with children they would now raise alone. Word came by telegram, or by the slower arrival of a chaplain's letter, and then the war went on without the man it had taken. They kept the letters and the photographs and the last things he sent home, and they carried a grief the country thanked them for and rarely asked about. Some never remarried. Some spent the rest of their lives making sure the men were not forgotten.
