John Renza, of Cranston, a Byrant College alumnus, holds the letter he wrote to the Bryant Service Club in 1945. The letters were found in September, when the director of library services and a student were going through archive material that had been stored in a basement.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

SMITHFIELD — For seven decades they sat in darkness and anonymity. Now these time capsules, more than 1,400 of them, have resurfaced to illuminate a time when the country was locked in a desperate fight for the survival of Western civilization.

They are a trove of letters written during World War II by service members overseas who were students or alumni of Bryant University, then known as Bryant College. Among the 16-million Americans who served in uniform during the Second World War, the writers were communicating with their alma mater to thank the members of the Bryant Service Club, a student organization, for sending hundreds of letters plus gifts of candy and cigarettes and hand-knitted gloves and scarves.

The letters to the service club came to light in September, when Mary Maroni, Bryant’s director of library services, and student Jillian Emma, Class of ’09, were “rummaging around” through archive material that had been stored in a basement since Bryant moved to Smithfield from its campus on the East Side of Providence in the early 1970s, said Greg Carter, chairman of history and social sciences.

“They were looking for something entirely different,” said Judy Barrett Litoff, a Bryant history professor who has written several books on World War II and who has focused on the correspondence on which the armed forces, understanding the value of morale, spent so much energy and treasure to foster.

“The student said, ‘Look — that box has scrapbooks,’ ” Litoff recounted. “It was fascinating for me, because back in 1988, when I was just beginning my women-in-letters writing project, I went to the archive and learned about the Bryant Service Club. When I asked about letters, no one had a clue.”

While much of today’s correspondence is dominated by e-mail, many of the World War II letters were written on V-mail, forms that could be drastically reduced in size by microfilm, then reconstituted on the other end. The system saved uncounted tons of cargo space and fuel for ships and aircraft.

The final letter to the service club was dated Sept. 15, 1945, less than two weeks after the official surrender of the Japanese aboard the battleship Missouri brought the war to a close.

In December 1943, Bryant alumnus Bob Marshall wrote from “Somewhere in the Pacific.”

“Out here it’s business as usual with strikes every day to date. I’ve been out on nine strikes or raids as some people call them, and several flights aiding ground troops. As far as dive bombing goes, it’s still as much fun and exciting as it ever was only now we have a new added attraction, and that’s the stuff thrown up to greet us, AA [antiaircraft fire] and there’s plenty of it. You go into your dive with your two [two words unreadable] blazing away, right into your target all the way from fifteen to twenty thousand feet and straight down then drop your bombs and get out [paper torn] and I do mean fast unless you want a tail full of arrows and they can really burn.”

Marshall went on to describe day-to-day life: “The chow is fair, nothing to brag about, plenty of dust when it is dry, and plenty of mud when it isn’t, bugs not too bad, rats plentiful.”

Harry Golub, aboard the Sakatonchee, a naval tanker, wrote on April 1, 1945. He warned that “If it’s a girl that’s reading this, maybe you had better put this letter down now.”

He continued, “. . . I will tell you a story that will make your blood boil. I hope it does, for maybe then some more of you will realize what type of an enemy we are fighting out here in the Southwest Pacific. On this invasion we were on, the Japs were taken completely by surprise and had to move out in a hurry. The hills they had to hide in were no place to take the 250 American prisoners that were being held there. I believe some of these Americans were survivors of Bataan. The Japs did the natural thing — considering their cracked minds — and forced these prisoners into a foxhole, filled the place with gasoline and set it afire. No, that is not propaganda, for I saw the charred remains myself the day it happened.”

Litoff said that during the past 20 years people have written to her telling of discovering lost wartime letters, “But they were mostly in an attic or a trunk, and most were between two people.”

This collection, she said, “is something I have not come across in doing two decades of research on the Second World War.”

John S. Renza, of Cranston, a member of the Class of ’43, was also surprised when he learned of the existence of the letter collection.

Renza, who taught at Bryant for 22 years after he returned from the war, and spent 40 years in education, said he was “shocked” when the university informed him that he had been one of the writers.

“I don’t even remember writing, but there was my handwriting,” he said earlier this month. He recalled that when he was a Bryant student, the person in charge of public relations was Clara Blaney. “She had the foresight obviously of preserving all these letters,” he said. “That woman did a remarkable job by saving them and cataloging them by names of former students.”

The letter Renza can’t remember composing was dated January 1945, when he thanked the Bryant Service Club for sending him a sweater. Although he had received the sweater the previous Dec. 18, he said at the time, he had not had a chance to send a thank-you note because his unit was immediately caught up in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.

When the battle broke out, Renza was serving with the 158th combat engineers battalion near the town of Bastogne, where the unexpected German attack would wither due to the unyielding resistance of American troops, particularly the 101st Airborne Division.

“We were forced to face the enemy, and since then we were on the go right along,” he wrote. “Rather a nice way to have spent the holidays, isn’t it? As a result of all the commotion, I lost all of my personal belongings plus my Christmas packages. … The only gift which was saved was your sweater, and only because I was wearing it. I’m so glad now that I had it on my person, otherwise I would have lost it too.”

Renza, who attended a ceremony at Bryant this month at which the discovery of the letters cache was announced, said he no longer recalls what the sweater looked like or what happened to it.

Renza’s wife, Marie, also a member of the Class of ’43, has her own memories of the Bryant Service Club, to which all Bryant students belonged.

Marie Renza belonged to a sorority at Bryant. She recalls launching into a knitting project, her first try at that skill.

“The scarf had lots of holes in it, and I didn’t want to send it,” she said. “But they told me to go ahead anyway.”

Litoff said that the scrapbooks with the letters, which were stored in cardboard boxes, somehow made the journey from Providence to Smithfield unscathed, and then even more remarkably stayed safe and intact, if entirely forgotten, until the discovery in September. “They had just been stored there, all these years,” she said.

Litoff has written a dozen books, nine of them on World War II. They are presented “mostly in terms of how the lives of ordinary women and men were reflected in their wartime service,” she said. “But I want my next book to be on the Bryant Service Club.”

She said she hopes the book will be ready for publication by 2013, when Bryant will celebrate its 150th anniversary. She also intends to make the material available online.

Howard Peach, of Harwich, Mass., another Bryant alumnus whose correspondence with the Bryant Service Club has come back to life after all these decades, told Litoff, “These days everything is e-mail. There is no written record, so everything you are doing is legacy.”

tmorgan@projo.com