Joe Dickerson served in Co. E, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, in World War II. He was one of the first to go ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and he took part in several major battles later. He was wounded five times, and received a number of medals.

He has written and printed a book about his experiences during the war, entitled "Visitor to Hell." Copies can be found at the Elizabeth Parker Sewell Public Library, Murfreesboro NC 27855, and at Chowan College, Murfreesboro NC 27855.

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This Week's Story

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OLD NAZIS AND YOUNG MARINES

William E. Woolet was from Mishawaka IN. He said the "E" in his name stood for "Enough," because when he was born and his daddy saw him, he said, "That's Enough."

In 1946 William E. went to Bikini Atoll as a Seabee to take part in the first atomic bomb tests after the war. His job was to stake out some goats on a little island, to see what would happen to them when the bomb went off.

They put him and the goats off early one morning, and never came back for him. When the sun was going down in the ocean the night before the big blast, William E. said he got worried and waded as far out into the surf as he could, and took off his shirt and waved it, pretty frantically.

Finally another boat saw him and picked him up. He never got over the feeling that somebody had meant for him to be part of the test, along with his goats.

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Estonia is one of the small Baltic countries between Finland and Poland on the north and south and the Soviet Union on the east.

Historically a part of Russia until that country's collapse in World War I and subsequent descent into communism, its people fought hard for independence which was prized until the Hitler-Stalin deal in 1939, when it was ceded back to Russia by the Germans.

The Russians occupied it in 1940, but were driven out again by the Germans the next year. The people collaborated with the Germans in WWII, until the Russians fought their way back in 1944.

Then many of the Estonians had to flee. Many went to Finland, but even more went to Germany with the retreating Nazi army.

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Guadalcanal is a mountainous island in the Solomons chain in the Pacific that was overrun by the Japanese before World War II.

U.S. Marines invaded and after a hard battle won one of the first U.S. victories in that theater.

It became apparent at Guadalcanal that the Japanese would never surrender. If they were to be beaten, they had to be killed.

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Joe Dickerson was a farm boy from Northampton County.

He said that before the war he had never been out of his home county, not even to go to neighboring Hertford County, except for one school field trip to Richmond VA.

He was in the fighting for about three or four months, from D-Day until sometime in October, when he received another wound and his fifth Purple Heart.

"My God, Joe," I said, "five Purple Hearts in four months? The Germans were really gunning for you."

"Well," he said, "they weren't all bullet wounds. Some of them were from shrapnel. And two of them were for bayonet wounds.

"In Saint Lo, sometimes, we were too close to each other to shoot, so we used bayonets."

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Willem Ploom was a printer at the university press in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, before WWII.

His wife owned a "sewing factory."

Willem and his brother fought the Communists in 1918, 1919 and 1920 with Admiral Deniken's White Russian army, when Estonia won its independence from Russia.

When the Communists came in 1940, they brought a list, with Willem's name on it. His brother was one of the first to disappear and Willem knew his time was coming.

But the Nazis came first, in 1941, and Willem, like most other Estonians, welcomed them as liberators and helped them during the long siege of Leningrad.

Estonia was the only conquered European country that was not required by the Nazis to ship its Jews to the death camps in Poland in 1942-45.

The reason for that fact was simple. The tiny state on the Baltic only had 12,000 Jews in its borders when the Germans came. Six thousand fled immediately to Russia with Stalin's retreating armies. It took the Nazis less than a week to shoot the remaining 6,000.

So by the fall of 1941, the Nazis had no "Jewish problem" in Estonia.

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Charlie Marcom Jr. was a printer in Raleigh NC.

He had been a U.S. Marine in WWII, and had been on Guadalcanal, where he saw many of his compatriots wounded and killed by the Japanese.

When we asked Charlie if he had ever really seen any Japanese, he said: "Hell, yes. I killed one. I was running up a hilly path when I came to an open place and saw a Jap on the other side. He turned to run, and I shot him right in the crack of his ---. I watched him die, because if you left one of them only wounded, they would shoot you from behind."

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Joe Dickerson was short. He said that when he left the landing craft on D-Day, he was carrying a rifle, a lot of ammunition and a heavy pack, and when he went over the side the water was over his head and he went straight to the bottom.

He said if there had not been tall guys on each side of him, he never would have come up.

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Ed Isbell went to France at midnight before D-Day as a paratrooper, dropped behind German positions.

He landed in a marshy area and had a hard time untangling himself. He spent the next few days working his way around enemy units, hoping to reach American lines. While fighting his own lonely war in the hedgerows of Normandy, he wound up at the point of several unfriendly bayonets, and spent the rest of the war in Nazi prison camps.

(Ed tells his own story at the Poor Town web site. Go to The Poor Town Archives ~ scroll to the bottom and look for "The Poor Town Books" ~ then click on "Paratrooper." You will not be disappointed.)

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Jim S. also was captured by the Germans in WWII.

When asked how he was treated in the POW camps, Jim said: "Not too bad. We had to keep the camp and barracks clean, and stuff like that. We had one Jewish boy with us, though, that the Germans sort of rode real hard."

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Vernon D. was a glider pilot in France.

Gliders, pulled by C-47s and cut loose over a chosen landing area, had such high casualty rates that they soon stopped carrying people and hauled only heavy equipment that could take some bumping around.

Vernon got kind of fed up with glidering and France, and one day when he was riding in a C-47 that was going over Paris, he went to an open hatch and relieved himself, hollering, "P--- on Paris, and p--- on all the French."

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In later years, Jim S. became very religious. That wouldn't have been so bad in itself, but he wanted to convert everybody around him and was always calling impromptu prayer meetings at break time and lunch time, when all his co-workers just wanted to play rummy or eat.

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F. B. Walker was born near Lake Okeechobee FL during the great hurricane of 1927, when all the water was blown out of that pond.

Things were so hectic that his parents never got around to giving him a name, other than "F.B."

When he joined the Navy, the recruiter put him down as "F (only) B (only) Walker," and from then on he was "Fonly Bonly" Walker.

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Willem Ploom and his wife and daughter left Estonia in 1944 when the Russians came back.

They retreated with the Nazi army all the way to Germany, but somewhere while crossing Poland, their daughter disappeared and they never saw her again.

Willem and his wife became displaced persons, or "DPs," in Germany after the Nazi surrender, and somehow received sponsorship from someone to go to the United States as refugees.

In the U.S., Willem picked up his old trade of printer, working in New Bern, Dunn and Raleigh.

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Willem Ploom and Charlie Marcom Jr. wound up working side-by-side in the same printing office in Raleigh.

Ploom was a quiet, kindly old gray-head, but quite nervous and jumpy. He always carried a briefcase in which he said he had all the papers to prove what he and his wife had owned in Estonia, and he said he intended to go back there one day when the Communists were driven out and reclaim everything.

While he worked, he kept the briefcase between his legs and was constantly touching it with one of his feet to make certain it was still there. When he had to walk across the room for any reason, the briefcase went with him.

Charlie, the tough ex-Marine who had shot the Jap in the butt, had no sympathy at all for Willem and no use for anybody who had been on the other side in World War II.

He said Willem had been a Nazi, and that one day he, Charlie, was going to take Willem's briefcase and prove it.

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Charlie's taunts left Willem quite unnerved, and he took his worries to the newspaper management, which in turn asked the typographical union chapter to do something about it, since both the old Estonian and the young ex-Marine were members of that organization.

The union folks, a lot of them old themselves, asked Charlie to cool it, and he did.

Later, however, some of them – mostly the younger fellows – began to wonder if Charlie might have been right about Willem's role in WWII.

The talk and suspicions grew with news reports that some ex-Nazi collaborators in the Holocaust had been smuggled into the U.S. as "displaced persons" at the end of the war.

But just about that time, Willem died suddenly of a heart attack, and then there was nothing to be done about it anyway.

Most of his fellow printers attended the funeral ~ but not Charlie.

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This Week's Verse

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(From "Saki")

A mouse that prayed for Allah’s aid
blasphemed when no such aid befell:
A cat, who feasted on that mouse,
thought Allah managed vastly well.

Pray not for aid to One who made
a set of never-changing laws,
but in your need remember well
He gave you speed, or guile—or claws.

Some laud a life of mild content:
Content may fall, as well as pride.
The frog who hugged his lowly ditch
was much disgruntled when it dried.

You are not on the road to Hell,
you tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail
if Hell is on the road to thee?

A poet praised the evening star,
another praised the parrot’s hue:
A merchant praised his merchandise,
and he, at least, praised what he knew.

("Saki" was the pen name of Hector H. Munro, a British short-story writer, and the foregoing lines are his. He was born in 1870, and died one night in 1916 in a trench in France. Reportedly, the last words he spoke ~ before being shot by a German sniper ~ were to a fellow soldier: "Put that bloody cigarette out!")

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This Week's Elmo

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"Elmo," said Clem, "a few years back, I was all fired up and ready to take all my Social Security money and put it in the stock market.

"Now, with all these big-shot shenanigans and colossal companies collapsing, I'm not so sure it would be a good idea."

"Clem," said Elmo, "it all comes back to that old saying.

"If you have any spare money at hand ~ and you're developing ideas about doubling it ~ the best thing to do is fold it one time ~ and put it right back in your wallet," said Elmo.

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This Week's Mailbox

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To the Poor Town News ~ The letter from the Civil War in (last week's) issue certainly has the ring of truth, time and place about it. Thanks. Keep 'em coming. ~ Ron Lupton, Colorado.

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To The Poor Town News ~ Thanks (for the links to Don Upchurch's articles on the Chowan). I'll read (them) as soon as I can. Several months ago, I received an eMail from a gentleman who told me about ...... finding some pottery sherds while visiting the banks of the Chowan River. I forwarded his eMail to the archeology lab at East Carolina ...... but I don't believe a connection was made. If you would like, I will see if I can find the eMails and forward them to you. Keep up the good work. ~ John McGowan, North Carolina.

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To the Poor Town News ~ Thought you would like to know about a (new) monument (in France) memorializing the 507th PIR that I belong to ~ 5 feet across, 4 feet high and 4 feet deep, with a bronze plaque, and the second section consisting of a block of French granite 9 feet high. (The monument depicts) a paratrooper’s toes just touching the ground in Normandy ...... on D-Day. The monument is on two acres of land ...... very near our drop zone on D-Day. There will be over 200 men and family members going (to the dedication). Billie and I along with our two boys and their wives will be going. We leave on the 19th of July and return on the 28th. We are beginning to get excited. ~ Ed Isbell, North Carolina.

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