A MEMORIAL DAY ARTICLE: William Horace Wilkerson

In the year 2006 Sherri Wilkerson Shamwell and I went to her old home on Keith Springs Mountain in Franklin County, Tennessee to visit for most of one day with her uncle, William Horace Wilkerson. Sherri was a daughter of Prentice Stewart Wilkerson, brother of Horace. Sherri was also a tennis coach and had taught for 18 years in Discovery Middle School of the Madison City School system, which was independently established in 1996.

The purpose of the interview was to record Horace’s impressive experiences during his service terms during World War II in Europe for inclusion in the national movement to preserve archives of such veterans. Sherri was to prompt Horace’s memory by asking him to relate some of the stories that she had heard earlier as a child. My own role was to operate a video camera and digital voice recorder to capture his narratives and to photograph his medals and other memorabilia, then donate these things on a digital disk for the national archive of WWII veteran stories.

Horace was born May 28, 1925 to Ernest and Mae Wilkerson along the Elk River near Winchester, Tennessee. He was the first of 15 children in the family. The part of the mountain where the family still lives was then called Denson’s Cove. Today it is known as Wilkerson’s Cove. Because he was enraged that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Horace tried to enlist with the Army at age 17. His parents refused to approve his intent at that age or to sign the required release, so in 1943 when he was old enough to be accepted, he enlisted at Fort Oglethorp, Georgia. After training at Camp Shelby in southern Mississippi, Horace went to Camp Phillips in Kansas. From there Horace was taken by train to Boston, Massachusetts for a few days before departing for England on the ship “General Gordon” with about 5,000 other troops in a convoy of four troop-transport ships.

Due to the German submarine threat, the ships kept a zig-zag course that lengthened the voyage from the normal six days to seventeen. On the second day from port, German subs did attack the convoy, but our accompanying destroyers sank the subs as Horace watched torpedoes zing past his ship. Horace later participated in the D-Day invasion at Normandy. He fought in the hedge rows of France around Cherbourg and other areas. He was first wounded at Looneyville in 1944. He was close by when a “Bouncing Betty” land mine killed his unit’s highest-ranking officer, Col. Nelson. Horace was first a scout, then became a “bazooka man,” and later a radio man. During a tank and artillery attack, he knocked out two German tanks with his bazooka, for which he received a Bronze Star. When a mortar shell hit the lip of a crater that he was in, Horace was hit in the leg by fragments, but his buddy was hit in the heart and died instantly beside him. Horace got his first Purple Heart for his wound. However, he never saw it until he got home from the war because it had been sent to his mother in Tennessee.

After about a week in the hospital, Horace was involved with further action at Avocourt, France. That got him a second Purple Heart within a month of the first. He also received a Silver Star for running underneath a hail of bullets to stop “friendly fire” onto his unit from American tanks at that location. Horace saw action not only in northern France and Germany, but also in Africa and the Middle East. He was awarded numerous other medals plus service and theater decorations. When the war ended, he could have come home, but he volunteered to stay in Europe as part of the Occupation Force. His experiences included stopping General Patton to view his identification papers while on sentry duty, and he at a later time saw the General on the same day that Patton was killed by a vehicle wreck in 1946. Horace refused to sign up for an additional three years after his initial occupation enlistment expired, returning home in May 1946.

Horace married a German girl that he met overseas when she came to America as a translator, but even that was an experience in that she arrived in New York and soon left for Tennessee. Meanwhile, Horace had received word of her New York arrival, so he immediately left to get her there. Of course, they unknowingly passed one another in transit, so the marriage was a bit delayed. They were soon thereafter married in Huntsville by Judge Thomas Jones when Horace accepted employment here. As Horace told his niece Sherri during the interviews, he “went over there so that she wouldn’t have to speak German unless she wanted to”, and he had signed up “to stay until it was over with or to go home in a box”. This was the journey and experience of a lifetime for a Keith Springs Mountain youth who had never been further from home than Manchester, Tennessee before joining the Army. The details of his life story could well have been models for Audie Murphy or John Wayne war movies. Horace was a true American hero, and now his story is preserved, along with photos of many of his medals and other artifacts from the war days.