Papers (1943-1946) including correspondence, post cards and a poem.
Robert Earl Dibble was a U.S. Naval air crewman during the years of World War II. He was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, 12th Regiment, Great Lakes, IL in 1943 and at the Naval Air Technical Training Centers in Tennessee, Virginia, and Oklahoma in 1944. He trained in gunnery and radio aviation; training that included the actual construction of a radio. Mr. Dibble graduated from the Naval Air Station in DeLand, Florida in 1945 and was stationed in Jacksonville, Florida.
Robert Dibble had a brother named James, who was stationed at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, CA, and a mother who lived in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
Source: Robert E. Dibble Papers (#0702), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
The papers mainly consist of correspondence and postcards that were written by Robert Dibble to his mother in Wisconsin. Letters written from 1943 and 1944 while stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and at the Naval Air Technical Training Centers include references to security measures enforced in classrooms due to the sensitive nature of code and semaphore practices.
Dibble's letters written between 1945 and 1946 while he was in Florida were filled with descriptions of training schedules, classroom procedures, liberty, vaccinations, war bonds and pay, materials shortages, difficulties between Northerners and Southerners, and personal relationships.
There is also correspondence and postcards from Dibble's brother James, who was stationed at the Naval Training Center in San Diego, CA. His letters pertain to liberty, duty, pay, change of the boot training camp location, and his trip to California. The remaining correspondence is from Mavis Pitts, a girl whom Dibble dated. Those letters include the history of her Portland, Florida family along with the work experience and education of her mother.
Gift of Friends of ECU Library
Encoded by Apex Data Services; Processed by Nanette Hardison, June 2024
Literary rights to specific documents are retained by the authors or their descendants in accordance with U.S. copyright law.