Returning to the States

The long-awaited news: Richard was finally coming home. After more than a year as a prisoner of war, liberation in May 1945, and weeks of processing and recovery in Europe, this telegram announced his imminent return to American soil.

For the Hanson family, this telegram marked the end of an anxious chapter that had begun fourteen months earlier with the Missing in Action notice. Their son, who had survived being shot down, captured, imprisoned, and forced on a brutal winter march across Germany, was coming home.