Carroll never served in the military. Neither did his immediate family. Instead, the impetus for the project came from the devasting loss of his family home while Carroll was still a child. Having lost all their family photos and documents, a distant cousin, James Carroll Jordan, sent a box of family heirlooms, including a letter he had written his wife, after his unit helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camps during WWII.
It is clear why the letter made such an impression on Carroll. It is one of the first featured in the film (read with appropriate solemn gravity by Michael C. Hall)—and it remains absolutely devastating. Subsequently, Carroll realized these letters constituted firsthand history, but also something more. Initially, he exclusively collected American servicemen’s letters, but he later expanded the project internationally. While still directly related to wartime experiences, some of the documents featured in the film include some civilians, like the letter sent to Beryl Myatt, a young girl who was shipped off to Canada to escape the Blitz. However, Myatt never had a chance to read it, because a U-boat sank her passenger ship.
Ironically, Paul Walter Hauser reads one of the funniest incorporated letters, as well as one of the most painful. In fact, he appears almost drained by the latter’s rawness. When it comes to dramatic readings, this is one of the best you will ever see or hear.
Somewhat logically, Behind the Lines addresses some of the subjects covered by previous films, like the all-black Women’s 6888th Postal Battalion (dramatized in The Six Triple Eight), which cleared the multi-year backlog in troop mail delivery, as well as the Bangor airport greeters, who cheered for returning troops (as seen in the genuinely moving doc The Way We Get By, which truly deserves to stream more readily), who are referenced in a grateful letter from an Iraq War veteran.
