SHARPE – U.S. Navy Seaman Second Class Jesse Raymond Wilson, reported as missing in action for a year after his ship was hit by a bomb dropped by a German airplane, was presumed dead on Jan. 25, 1945. The change in status brought a sad end to a terrible ordeal for his family in Marshall County.
Some 71 years after he died at age 20, Raymond will be memorialized in a ceremony at Fooks Cemetery on Saturday afternoon. Family members are hoping that the ceremony will bring some comfort and closure.
“I know it will be sad,” said Barbara Wilson Johnson, who never knew her uncle but appreciates his sacrifice and mourns his loss. “It will be hard. But we want to do this.”
Also surviving are another niece, Patsy Darnell, and a nephew, John Wayne Wilson, all of Marshall County.
Another relative, Ruth Nichols, 99, of Chesterfield, Missouri, plans to be in Marshall County for the ceremony honoring her nephew. She remembers Raymond fondly.
“He loved cheese,” she said. “I always wanted to have cheese in the house for him whenever he visited.”
Raymond, a Sharpe High School graduate, was average height and “always was a little skinny,” she said.
“He was a good boy,” she said. “He loved children. He liked people. He probably would have stayed on the farm. He liked that type of work, I believe.”
Instead, when the United States entered World War II, Wilson, son of John and Iler Rhinehart Wilson, became one of the more than 3 million who served in the Navy during the war – and, on that fateful day, one of the 62,614 who were killed in action.
Wilson was a member of the crew of the USS Plunkett, a destroyer which was participating in escort duty on Jan. 24, 1944, for the Allied landing at Anzio, Italy. The ship was struck by a 550-pound bomb dropped by Nazi aircraft.
According to a history of the ship posted on the website Military.com, 23 were killed and 28 were missing. A total of 53 deaths was reported in a citation awarding the Navy Unit Commendation Medal to the ship’s crew.
Wilson, a Sharpe High School graduate, was listed among the missing. Thus began a torturous year of waiting for his family and friends.
The heavily damaged ship made its way to Palermo, Sicily, and on to Casablanca and eventually New York, where it was repaired and returned to duty.
But there was never any final service for Wilson and many others who were lost. They were memorialized by the inscription of their names on a Wall of Missing at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, but for many of them, there was never any individual funeral service.
Thanks to efforts by his family, there will be a service for Raymond Saturday.
During the ceremony at 2 p.m., a stone with Wilson’s image inscribed by laser will be placed between the headstones of his brother, Leonard Wilson, and sister, Nellie Wilson Wyatt. Military honors will be performed by the honor guard and color guard of William A. Doyle Post 236 of the American Legion.
“My last letter that I wrote to him was returned,” Mrs. Nichols said. “He never had opened it. I just can’t open it and read what I wrote to him.”
The service planned for Saturday won’t change the loss that family members feel. But they hope that giving a fallen sailor his deserved honor will hopefully bring some comfort to them and some closure after 71 years.