While rummaging through the records of the War Shipping Administration in the National Archives, we recently found a condolence letter that the WSA sent to the parents or wives of merchant seamen killed during WWII. Further rummaging turned up the original of the letter, which turned out to be written by none other than the famous American playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill later wrote of his efforts that he was trying to "put myself in the place of the next of kin of the dead merchant seaman and imagine what message would do the most to comfort my grief ­ and banish my bitterness ­ by convincing me I was not alone in my pride for the dead man's unsung heroism, nor alone in remembering it."

A paragraph from Eugene O'Neill's condolence letter:
"With a deeper understanding than is given to most landsmen, a seafaring man whose life has been spent contesting the elements finds man-made tyranny and inequalities insufferable. Perhaps that is why men such as your ____ have shown themselves ready to give their lives in a Service where the rewards of heroism are few, and which demands of its men the grimmest form of courage. It takes an iron fortitude and indifference to danger to be a good merchant seaman in this war. Their duty is to face on every voyage the constant threat of death and to go on with their work, accepting this threat as a commonplace risk of each day's job. And when their luck runs out, their duty is to accept death, too, in the same spirit of unflinching loyalty to their Service and the task assigned them."