For readers of The Evening Sun during World War II, it was a Christmas Eve tradition to read the annual holiday letter written by Lee McCardell from the battlefields of Europe. Published on the front page, the letters were addressed to his wife, Nancy, and their three daughters, Mary Ann, Abby and Tillie, who lived on Wilmslow Road in Roland Park.

McCardell, a Frederick native, joined The Evening Sun as a staff writer in 1925. With the onset of the war, he was assigned as a correspondent in early 1942 to cover the 29th Division, composed of National Guardsmen from Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, who were training in England and Scotland.

Away from his family for the first time at Christmas and feeling homesick, McCardell was stationed at a British Army post in Tidworth, near Salisbury, England, when he decided a few days before Christmas to write a letter to his family.

Realizing it would not reach Baltimore by mail until sometime in the new year, he chose to cable it as a press dispatch to The Evening Sun.

A second letter followed from London in 1943 and another from Luxembourg during the historic and pivotal Battle of the Bulge in 1944.

McCardell’s first experience as a war correspondent came on Feb. 2, 1944, during the standoff at Cassino in Italy, amid the bombardment of the historic 18th-century mountaintop Benedictine monastery. He went on to cover the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, the 29th Division’s breakout at Saint-Lô, and was among the first correspondents with American forces and the French 2nd Armored Division to liberate Paris on Aug. 25, 1944.

Assigned to Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army, McCardell was an eyewitness to the atrocities discovered at a concentration camp in Ohrdruf, Germany. He was with the 6th Armored Division when they liberated Buchenwald, a slave labor camp where 41,000 perished and 21,000 survivors were found barely alive.

“Good God,” he reported. “Good God.”

When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, McCardell was in Bavaria. The next day, The Sun published his analysis of what the victory meant.

“I was one of the lucky ones; one of the lucky ones who could think about going home. There were others, not so lucky, who would never go back,” he wrote.

“They were the dead whose graves belonged to the sandy waters of North Africa, the olive groves of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy, and the hills of the Ardennes,” he wrote. “Men, who, in some mathematical calculation of the infinite, were killed in battles in order that we, the lucky ones, might survive.”

Home from war-ravaged Europe in 1945, McCardell was able to celebrate Christmas with his family for the first time in three years. That year, an assistant managing editor of The Evening Sun suggested he write another letter, this time to the children of war-torn Europe.

In the letter, McCardell reflected on the abundance in America and lamented the price of Christmas trees — “$3 in Baltimore this year. That’s a lot of money, even in America, for a Christmas tree.”

“And while you won’t begin to have all the good things we have, it will be a joyful Christmas for you, too — your first Christmas in peace for six years,” he observed.

“But very few Americans to whom I have talked call it a ‘Peace Christmas.’ They call it a ‘Victory Christmas.’”

McCardell speculated why more of the nation’s abundance couldn’t be sent to help those suffering from deprivation in Europe. He opined that the average American couldn’t grasp the enormous destruction the war had left in its wake.

“No American who stayed at home seems to have the faintest notion of how scarce food and shelter are over there,” he wrote. “And, of course, none who stayed at home can be expected to carry in their hearts any haunting memories of hungry, undernourished babies and little children in shattered houses, and cold and damp cellars.”

“Real hunger and real want,” McCardell wrote, were conditions most Americans couldn’t comprehend.

While looking forward to celebrating the day with family and friends, McCardell described himself as a “pessimistic sentimentalist — and, I suppose, a natural-born sucker.”

“I shan’t really be very happy over such a one-sided Christmas. I wish it were going to be more of a peace Christmas, less of a victory celebration.”

He concluded his letter with: “God grant you a happier New Year.”

McCardell, who was an assistant managing editor at The Evening Sun, died in 1963 at the age of 61.

Have a news tip? Contact Frederick N. Rasmussen at frasmussen@baltsun.com and 410-332-6536.