Wagner, Frederick H. Papers

Officer, U.S. Army Air Forces, c. 1945

The papers of Frederick H. Wagner consist of correspondence between Wagner and Father Julien Gombert, a Roman Catholic missionary in South Korea, along with a few related documents. Almost all of the letters in the collection are written in French and include information about conditions in Korea after World War II and before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.

Size: Less than one linear foot (approximately 100 pages).
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor has given their copyright interest in writings in this collection to the United States of America. Records created by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are in the public domain. The copyright interest in other documents in the collection presumably belongs to the creators of those documents or their heirs.
Processed by: Randy Sowell (2024).

Frederick Henry Wagner III was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1917. He served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Wagner was stationed in Korea in 1945 and developed a friendship with Father Julien Gombert, a Roman Catholic priest who lived in Inchon. After his return to the United States, Wagner corresponded with Father Gombert until the Korean War broke out in 1950. He had a successful business career and worked as a volunteer for the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles following his retirement. Wagner died in Los Angeles, California on July 14, 2006.

The papers of Frederick H. Wagner consist of correspondence between Wagner and Father Julien Gombert, a Roman Catholic missionary in South Korea, along with a few related documents. Almost all of the letters in the collection are written in French and include information about conditions in Korea after World War II and before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.

Father Gombert was the head of an orphanage in Inchon. He was a native of France, but had lived in Korea for more than forty years. Gombert befriended Wagner while the latter was stationed in Korea as a U.S. Army Air Forces navigator. After Wagner returned to the United States in 1946, the two men corresponded with one another, exchanging more than two dozen handwritten letters over the next four years. In his letters to Wagner, the priest describes life in Korea during this period, which was marked by poverty, political instability, and growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two countries that shared responsibility for the occupation of Korea following the Japanese surrender. Wagner’s letters to Gombert, which are also written in French, discuss his life in the United States and refer to his efforts to assist the missionary by sending him food and other supplies for the orphanage.

The collection also includes a few letters written in English by friends of Gombert and Wagner, navigational maps of Korea, and newspaper articles regarding the correspondence between the missionary and his friend.