B-25 #42-64889 crashed at sea off Cape Boram east of Wewak on the northern coast of New Guinea, November 27, 1943.
It was Dale Wilson’s thirteenth combat mission.
The MIA telegram arrived in Minburn on his mother’s December 4 birthday, six months before I was born. Dale was the first person Mom told in a V-Mail letter that she was having a baby the next spring. I grew up with the shadow of his loss and eventually became the keeper of his letters, official records, his stories.
Mary Ragsdale is a niece of John “Junie” Stack. Her grandmother, John’s mother, lived with them when Mary was a child. She shared a bedroom with her grandmother, and the photo of her missing uncle. Mary grew up with his loss and became the keeper of his letters, records, and stories. She and her husband, Jim Ragsdale, wrote Reading Between the Lines: Getting to Know Uncle Junie Through the Letters he Left Behind. It reveals that John Stack, the only married crew member, was lost on his ninth combat mission.
I don’t know the number of missions the other crew members had endured before this one, their last very last one. The plane and crew have never been located.
I’m still in contact with family members of these young men who have been missing since November 27, 1943. Mary Ragsdale hopes to offer an ebook version of Reading Between the Lines this winter. She said they acknowledged the anniversary of the loss of her uncle and his crew at their family Thanksgiving dinner.
Leora’s Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family During World War II is available from Amazon in paperback, hardbound, and ebook, and as an audiobook, narrated by Paul Berge.
It’s also the story behind the Wilson brothers featured on the Dallas County Freedom Rock® at Minburn, Iowa.
What Leora Never Knew: A Granddaughter’s Quest for Answers is my journey of research into what happened to the three Wilson brothers who were lost during WWII.