When World War II broke out, the Wilson family of Perry, Iowa, sent five sons into the service. Like so many American families of the era, they did their part without complaint, watching as one son after another left home for the uncertainty of war.
Danny flew P-38 fighter planes in Europe. Dale served as a co-pilot on a B-25 bomber in the Pacific. Their younger brother Junior joined the Army Air Forces as well. Back home, their parents, Clay and Jay Wilson, waited for letters, scanned newspapers for news from the front, and prayed for their boys’ safe return.
Not all of those prayers would be answered. Danny was killed in action over Austria. Dale was lost with his crew near New Guinea. Junior died in a training accident in Texas just days before the war came to an end. Three sons gone before their 23rd birthdays.
Our regular contributor Joy Neal Kidney grew up hearing stories about her mother’s brothers and making annual Memorial Day trips to the family cemetery. Years later, after inheriting old letters, photographs, and wartime telegrams, she came to better understand what her grandparents and so many other American families endured during the war years. Here’s her family’s story of service and sacrifice.
📖 Read the Transcript
Lee Habeeb (00:13):
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories. We tell stories about everything here on this show—sports, history, the arts, and our culture. And by the way, some of these stories are beautiful. Some of these stories are hard. Some are both.
And I think this one is.
This story comes to us from one of our listeners in Des Moines, Iowa, the home of the mighty WHO—one of the great heritage signals in this country. It comes from Joy Neal Kidney.
In World War II, her grandmother sent five sons to war. Only two came home. Here, Joy shares how her family has honored these men.
Joy Neal Kidney (00:52):
Neglected gravestones over Memorial Day. No flowers. No one to remember.
This would never happen in our family, so I thought.
Growing up, I knew that my mother’s five brothers had served in World War II and that the three youngest had lost their lives. Their sepia-toned photographs, all in uniform, were a familiar part of our home. Those same pictures posed for decades on the chest of drawers in Grandma’s house.
I grew up with women who observed every Decoration Day, as it was called then. I could have asked for details about those young brothers, but knew the answers would bring tears, so I didn’t.
In fact, Memorial Day was a wonderful time for me as a child, as it meant an outing to the big town of Perry for lunch and shopping with Grandma, Mom, Sis Gloria, and Aunt Darlene.
Either Mom or Darlene would pick up the other, both toting pails of pink peonies, coral bells, and blue iris from their own gardens, carried in the trunk of the car. These spring blossoms were for the cemeteries.
We’d drive the dusty gravel roads of Madison County, then the hills of Highway 25 to Grandma’s house in Guthrie Center, where she would be waiting with her best flowers, including what she called her “little yellow buttons.”
Grandma’s parents and some of her siblings are buried there at Guthrie Center Cemetery, so we’d leave flowers there first to remember them before heading east to Panther Corner.
Perry is a few miles north of where the old Panther Store used to stand. We’d skirt Perry’s downtown toward our main mission: Violet Hill Cemetery in the northeast corner of town.
Grandma’s husband is buried there, and their three sons who were lost in the war—or so I thought.
The Wilson stones are in the east section with stately evergreens. We three generations would solemnly deliver the flowers from the car to the Wilson stones.
Everything seemed hushed before the four names: Dale, Daniel, Clayburne J., and Clay Wilson.
We’d secure metal vases with wires Mom had cut from coat hangers. Then we’d fill them with our pastel bouquets.
“How nice they look,” Grandma would mention.
I remember her shedding tears there only once.
The mood lightened on the drive toward downtown. I don’t remember what the grown-ups ate, but we young sisters were treated to hamburgers and Cokes in a real café east of the library, then shopping and visiting.
For young girls from an Iowa farm near the small town of Dexter, this day was a yearly treat.
When it was time to start back home, we’d always drive by the old Wilson acreage a mile south on Sixteenth Street. Grandma and her daughters always wanted to see how it looked after so many years and how much the trees had grown that they had planted in the 1940s.
Through the decades, different family members would make that annual Memorial Day trip to Perry with Grandma. One or two of Aunt Darlene’s sons went along, and later on even my own young son.
Grandma died in 1987, leaving a cedar chest full of old postcards, letters, pictures, and the terrible telegrams.
After Mom and Aunt Darlene relived the war by reading through them, they shared them with me.
I realized for the very first time that only their youngest brother, Junior, is buried in the Perry Cemetery.
Danny Wilson, a P-38 pilot who was killed in action in Austria, is buried in France.
Dale Wilson, the co-pilot on a B-25, was lost off the coast of New Guinea with his crew. Only God knows where their remains lie.
I was determined that when Mom and Aunt Darlene—who was Dale’s twin—got to the place where they could no longer make the trip to Perry for Memorial Day to remember their brothers and parents, I’d always get it done.
So I thought.
My health got to the place where I could no longer make the trip.
One day, my husband and I stopped by just to see the stones once more. I realized that because Dale’s official date of death is listed as 1946, months after the war ended, no one would understand that he’d been a war casualty.
A few additions to all three stones would tell more of the story of what this one family had endured.
Mom and Darlene agreed, and the information was added.
One commemorates Dale and Danny, making clear that they were both killed in action. The center stone marks the grave of Junior, whose P-40 exploded during training in Texas in August 1945, at the very end of the war.
The brothers were aged 22, 21, and 20.
Their father, Clay, died the next year of a stroke and a broken heart—surely another casualty of the war.
Even though no family members have recently remembered the Wilsons for Memorial Day, the price that our freedoms cost this one Dallas County family must never be forgotten.
Lee Habeeb (06:45):
And it’s not forgotten here, Joy. Thanks for that piece.
Danny, Dale, and Junior—their sacrifices won’t be forgotten.
And here on Our American Stories, we don’t forget. That’s what we do here. As often as we can, we bring history back to life, because it’s still alive, folks, and it matters. These stories matter.
You know, it brings to mind the Sullivan brothers. I’ve been reading about them recently. All five boys in that family died in World War II.
They were all on the same ship, the USS Juneau, and on November 13, 1942, it was torpedoed off the coast of the Solomon Islands by a Japanese destroyer.
There were 687 sailors on board. One hundred went into the water. Only ten survived the elements and shark attacks.
It also brings to mind a personal story—my own family story.
A story my mom told me. I have her brother’s Purple Heart.
Boy, the way they printed out Purple Hearts in World War II.
It was the summer of 1944, and my mom remembered a black government car pulling up to her apartment building in West New York, New Jersey.
The men stepped out of the car and walked up the stairs.
A dozen or so families lived in that building, and several had loved ones who’d volunteered to fight. Her brother John was one of them.
He signed up when he was eighteen, and he parachuted behind enemy lines right around the time of D-Day.
She told me she felt terrible, praying that it would be someone else’s door those men knocked on.
Then she heard the footsteps stop in front of her door.
She was thirteen.
She told me she never heard her mom cry so hard when those men knocked on that door.
Her mom didn’t need to open it to comprehend the news.
Her dad barely cried, but she never again saw him enjoy his life.
He’d lost not just his son, but his only son.
My mom told me he’d lost his bloodline.
And so here on Our American Stories, we celebrate the fallen soldiers, and we honor their sacrifices and all of the men and women serving our country in uniform here and abroad.
This is Our American Stories.
Joy Neal Kidney’s family story, and so many other family stories—families whose sons, daughters, loved ones, fathers, and husbands paid the ultimate price.
Discover more real American voices.
