All five of Clabe and Leora Wilson’s sons served during World War II, the two oldest in the Navy, the three youngest became pilots. All three pilots lost their lives. How? What happened?

After all those decades of helping arrange Memorial Day peonies and iris on their graves in Perry, not until after Grandma Leora died did I discover that only one of the brothers is buried there. 

Memorial Day with Grandma, Mom, and Aunt Darlene was a delightful day for my sister Gloria and me. After we helped with the bouquets at Violet Hill Cemetery, it was a day of shopping with favorite grownups and, for farm girls, getting to eat in a real cafe. 

But if only Junior Wilson is buried in Perry, what happened to the other two? 

They were both lost in combat. Mom said that Danny is buried in France and that Dale, who was Aunt Darlene’s twin, has never been found. (I was born six months after Dale went Missing in Action.)

After Grandma died, her daughters began going through the letters their mother had saved through the decades. They began mourning again, reliving those terrible years. 

Would they allow me to read them? Mom began to send batches of envelopes home with me. They held letters to the brothers in the military and their many letters home to Iowa. 

I sorted them chronologically so I could transcribe them, beginning with the ones from the Depression (when the two older brothers first joined the Navy). It took months–on a Mac Plus with a dot matrix printer. I made copies for all four surviving siblings, keeping mine in eight notebooks. 

Still had hope

On August 8, 1945, the Wilsons still had hope that all five sons would survive the war.

Both Dale and Danny were Missing in Action but Junior, the youngest, was still “safe” in Texas. But the next day the second atomic bomb was dropped and Junior’s plane exploded during a formation exercise. Clabe and Leora did not get official word that Danny had been killed and had been buried in Austria, and that Dale’s death had been declared by the Army Air Force. 

Because I ached to know what happened to the three young pilots, I joined reunion groups so I could write men who served with them, finding best friends of two of them. 

I ordered combat records, even microfiche of Missing Aircraft Reports. The military records are fascinating and even heartening, enough so that they should be shared. Others, especially with those with family members who served in WWII, would be surprised by the care and trouble taken to find Danny Wilson, and to know that Dale’s crew was on a watch list for years for anything that might mean that the remains of his bomber crew might eventually be located.

I hope you’ll also find What Leora Never Knew fascinating and heartening.

“We must never forget these three brothers.” – Marcus Brotherton, New York Times bestselling author

The ebook of What Leora Never Knew: A Granddaughter’s Quest for Answers is free from today, December 2, to December 6, 2025.