Category Military & Warfare

The legend says the USS Eldridge vanished from Philadelphia in 1943. The ship's surviving war diary places her in Bermuda. The story originated in 1956 letters from a merchant seaman who later admitted authorship of his own "corroborating evidence." This is the actual paper trail.

On July 14, 1861, Major Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife Sarah from Camp Clark: "If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you." Seven days later he was shot at Bull Run. Roughly 750,000 soldiers died in the war his letter introduces. This is how Americans learned of it — through the letters, photographs, and cemeteries the war forced them to invent.