Our favorite book party of the week was uptown, where renowned newspaper maven and consultant Herman “Obie” Obermayer sat amid a few dozen friends and admirers and talked about his new book, “Soldiering for Freedom: A GI’s Account of World War II” (Texas A &M University Press).The book is built around the astounding number of letters he wrote home from Europe during his days as a GI during World War II.

The letters offer fresh insights into the day-to-day experience of an enlisted soldier, who sets his keen eye on subjects from army rules and hierarchy to the ways soldiers enjoy leisure time. He did not know until 1962 that his letters had been saved. Mr. Obermayer writes, “They came into my possession, along with my baseball pennants, canoe paddle, political buttons, Eagle Scout sash, and college textbooks, when my parents moved from their suburban home to an apartment.” He has since donated them to the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans.

Mr. Obermayer describes his early life in the Germantown section of Philadelphia in a prosperous Jewish household that was civic-minded. His father was a lawyer, and his mother had been one of this country’s first female research biologists at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He heard the draft announced at a Harvard-Dartmouth football game in 1942, over the loudspeaker: “That night I got drunk for the first time.”

The subsequent letters, written between 1943 and 1946, begun by chronicling his studies at the Army Specialized Training Program at the College of William and Mary and basic training at Camp Pickett in southern Virginia, where punishment could consist of digging a “six by six by six foot hole over a weekend.” On a troopship overseas, Mr. Obermayer’s journalistic eye chronicled everyday life among soldiers, including gambling, boxing, and watching performances. Later letters described troops at play in Paris and on the Riviera, where Mr. Obermayer eventually earned a vacation furlough.

To avoid the prying eyes of the commanding officer who read and censored letters, Mr. Obermayer developed a code whereby, when he referred to a nonexistent Aunt Eva, the first letter of every third word spelled out a secret message to his parents. The reader also learns about V-mail, which existed long before e-mail, whereby letters by overseas servicemen arrived twice as quickly by being microfilmed and printed at the place of delivery.

Mr. Obermayer awaited combat at an enormous reinforcement depot called Camp Lucky Strike, one of nine camps built between Le Havre and Rouen named for cigarette brands. These names were chosen so that if overheard by enemy ears, one “could not tell whether a soldier who was mentioning a cigarette brand was discussing his favorite smoke or the reinforcement depot where he was housed.”

In his letters home “from a combat infantry division to an airborne engineer battalion to a combat engineer unit and finally to a pipeline company,” Mr. Obermayer captures a slice of life from the wartime experience, such as war propaganda leaflets, French sabotage of gasoline pipes, and differences in treatment of officers and enlisted soldiers. He finds that Allied bombing of nonmilitary targets made American troops unpopular in France.

Perhaps the most moving part of the book is when the author, through a Philadelphia friend on the prosecutorial staff, gained admittance to the courtroom at Nuremburg on the day that documented confirmation was presented that Nazis had murdered 6 million Jews. While working as a clerk, he also got to know the Nuremburg executioner, whose job included measuring each condemned man’s neck the day before the hanging.

In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Obermayer offers trenchant comments about counseling Eastern European newspaper executives between 1990 and 2002 on how to make the transition from state-owned enterprises to commercial free enterprise. Usually the host would first read Mr. Obermayer’s resume to the newspaper staffers. By and large, he found the “former apparatchiks were more interested in asking me about my Army days than about my 40 years of experience in profitably managing daily newspapers.”