Keeping memory alive of area's WWII dead

A son of Italian immigrants in South Jersey, Nicholas Filipponi was 20 when U.S. forces assaulted the beaches of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

His brother, on a ship offshore, was first to get word that he had been killed in what a general would call "the most costly battle in the history of the Marine Corps." Filipponi was among 6,821 Americans who died, almost all of them Marines.

Today, few people are alive to remember Filipponi - a trio of sisters in their 80s and 90s; maybe some classmates at William McFarland High, who noted his "I-don't-care attitude" in their yearbook.

But his name - along with the names of 21 others lost in World War II - is perpetually engraved in bronze on a monument in his hometown.

"We the people of Florence Township," it says, "dedicate this tablet as visible evidence of our lasting and eternal gratitude for these men who made the supreme sacrifice."

As the nation prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, memorials such as this stand across America in mute remembrance of the 291,557 U.S. service members killed in battle in World War II.

In the First Ward of Marcus Hook, 40 miles down river from Florence, a bronze shield keeps alive the names of 15 men, including James Raoul, a ship's cook who went to sea three months after Pearl Harbor and never came back.

In Northeast Philadelphia, a memorial recalls 27 Burholme men from World War II, among them Thomas E. Jardel, whose Navy destroyer was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine.

In each town, each neighborhood, there is usually someone who tends the markers. In Burholme, it's Boy Scout Troop 160.

"Before every Memorial Day, we go out there and make sure the place is cleaned up," scoutmaster Walt MacBride said. "Pick up trash. Cut the lawn. Trim the bushes. Plant flowers."

He said he tells his scouts to read the names, to really look at them.

"I think, wow - all those guys killed, and just from the Burholme community. We need to remember these people and what they did for us."

The Florence Township memorial stands at West Front and Broad Streets, across from the river park.

Like many war monuments, it was built in the 1920s to memorialize the dead from the First World War - a war so terrible, people said at the time, it would end all wars.

When an even bigger conflict came a generation later, more names had to be put on memorials. Many would later take on names from Korea and Vietnam.

Judy King, president of the Florence Historical Society, remembers two times when the monument was hit by a car. Once, the bronze eagle atop a stone plinth was bowled over.

Pfc. Nicholas "Nick" Filipponi, who grew up in Florence with six sisters and a brother, said in his yearbook he wanted to be a master machinist. That was a solid ambition in a town where most of the men worked at Roebling Steel or in a pipe foundry.

His sister Mary, 87, who still lives in Florence, is the keeper of the few mementos Filipponi left behind. He joined the Marines on July 27, 1944, and was wounded once before landing at Iwo Jima.

Mary Filipponi said her other brother, Robert, four years older than Nick, was also in harm's way at Iwo Jima. He was on a Navy boat that helped put the Marines ashore.

Robert wrote home to deliver the news that Nick had been killed. Military censors, typically, would redact such statements in a letter. But somehow the letter got through intact.

The family was devastated, Mary said.

"Losing a son was very difficult for my parents, especially for an Italian family. Their boys are more important than the girls. They carry on the family name."

Robert, who got through the war unhurt, worked in the pipe mill and lived to be 85. He had four children and four grandchildren.

It was "just fate" that one brother lived and one died, Mary said.

"I still think he's part of our family, and his spirit is still with us," she said of Nick. "We try to be good citizens, and our patriotism will always be first."

When the 63-year-old Raoul, a merchant seaman, set sail from Marcus Hook on his last voyage, he apparently had no one to name as his beneficiaries except the nice local couple who often rented him a room.

After his ship was sunk by a U-boat off the Gulf Coast of Florida in May 1942, Mr. and Mrs. James A. Bell, of Market Street, were surprised to learn that they had inherited his $5,000 seaman's death benefit.

With no one to carry on his name, Raoul might be utterly forgotten today if not for the marker on a grassy island along Market Street, at Third.

Most of the names on the marker are of seamen. As civilians, they were not counted among the military dead.

But die they did, in the thousands. In the early months after U.S. entry into World War II on Dec. 7, 1941, most of the Americans killed in battle were merchant seamen. They manned the tankers and cargo ships carrying supplies across the Atlantic and up and down the East Coast.

Ralph Montella, who was on the committee that built the monument in the 1960s, remembers that the group got the lost men's names from the seamen's hiring hall, which is now gone.

Their sacrifice is remembered on a bronze shield. Five of the 15 men, including Raoul, were crew members of the SS Joseph M. Cudahy, which was en route home to Marcus Hook from Texas with a load of crude oil when it was torpedoed May 5, 1942.

Most of the men never had a local obituary. Few in Marcus Hook knew much about them. Raoul's name popped up in a small Chester Times item under the headline "Roomer leaves insurance to a Hook couple."

The Hook was rough-and-tumble in those days, when the Sun and Sinclair refineries were going full blast. Oil tankers, often made at Sun Ship in Chester, were casting off several times a week.

Montella, a retired social-studies teacher who was 9 when war broke out, remembers that Marcus Hook had "30 or 31" bars, plus "pavement princesses" who picked up seamen.

"Marcus Hook had a bad reputation, but I think it was unfair," he said. He remembers it as "a very close-knit community of honest, hardworking people."

The seamen were tame, most of the time, he said.

"They weren't residents of the Borough of Marcus Hook, but we felt they deserved some type of remembrance," he said. "We knew these guys; they were around all the time, and we got to be friendly with them."

The First Ward monument was kept up for years by Montella's aunt, Mary Montella, who lived across the way. Others since then have continued the work, putting up plastic gardenias and small American flags.

"Why do we remember? Simply because of the sacrifice," Montella said. "They gave their lives."

At Cottman and Whitaker Avenues stands the Burholme Memorial for Peace. The stone steps are working loose, but the fresh paint on the flagpole is the work of a Troop 160 Eagle Scout.

Bronze panels - one each for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force - bear remembrance for the dead from a Burholme that is long gone. This was prewar Northeast Philadelphia, when most everything north of Cottman felt rural, or at least small-town. The thousands of rowhouses and twins, in their neat ranks, would come later.

In those days, Philadelphia's dominant newspaper was the Evening Bulletin. The Bulletin's clipping files, at Temple University, remain the best source of neighborhood news from the era.

The Bulletin library has envelopes for seven of the 27 Burlholme men killed in World War II.

One of them, Adolph W. Mack Jr., 28, son of a former police officer from Dorcas Street, was killed when his destroyer was sunk in a convoy to North Africa.

William J. Schill, 20, of Tabor Avenue, a graduate of Olney High, was killed in April 1945 in Italy, three weeks before V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe.

Their stories - and those of the others - linger on crinkled brown paper, in a paragraph or two.

One name that jumps out is Jardel's. The Burholme marker sits next to the Thomas E. Jardel Recreation Center, named for him. (His dad was friends with Austin Meehan, the city Republican leader.)

Jardel's photographic image - skinny, big ears, devilish grin - hangs inside.

His ship, the USS Jacob Jones, sank off Cape May as daylight broke Feb. 28, 1942. One of the survivors, Thomas R. Moody, carried the story home to Tommy Jardel's family - and later married one of his sisters.

The Jardels lived on Tyson Avenue in a Dutch colonial house that remains in the family to this day. There were 13 children in Tommy's time.

"The oldest boys shared the attic, so that's where Uncle Tommy slept," said Luke Jardel, 45, who occupies the house today with his wife and children.

Luke said the clan remains proud of Tommy, the only member of the immediate family to die in the war.

A Water Department employee, he visits rec centers all over the city, and looks to see if there's a flag on the flagpole. If not, he and another guy put one up, on their own.

"It's a thank-you," he said, "to all these guys - the ones who got killed - who have given an opportunity to live here today."