A small weathered piece of silver finally finished its journey from a back garden in southern France to the 90-year-old US veteran who lost his ID on the battlefield during World War II.
Sixty-nine years after losing his dog tag, Willie Wilkins reclaimed it in a surprise ceremony in Newark, New Jersey.
“I am so happy,” his daughter Carol Wilkins said. “You don’t know what joy is on my heart for what you have done for my father.”
In August 1944, Wilkins was part of the Allied invasion, with one of the grimmest jobs – removing and identifying the bodies of dead servicemen and having them buried or transported back to the United States.
At some point, Wilkins’ silver dog tag slipped off his neck.
“It could have been an arm, it could have been a hip that dragged it off, because he was picking up dead bodies,” Carol Wilkins said. “He said it was horrible. Blood everywhere. Parts. All he knew was to pick up those bodies for the family members of dead soldiers.”
Wilkins later returned to the US and worked on an assembly line. He was a happy man who doted on his only daughter, but he had a nervous breakdown and post-traumatic stress disorder and retired at 44, his daughter said.
He and his family were convinced his dog tag would remain buried somewhere in what were once the bloody battlefields of Provence.
But in a back garden 4,000 miles away, in Istres, France, Anne-Marie Crespo was tilling the soil around an olive tree on a spring day in 2001 and found it.
Crespo knew the small piece of metal stamped with a name and numbers belonged to a soldier and kept it on a bookcase shelf. She presumed he had died on the battlefield and held a ceremony to honour Wilkins and other US war dead.
“I often thought of this poor soldier dead for FRANCE + FREEDOMS,” Crespo later said in a letter to Carol Wilkins.
Crespo showed the “treasure” she found to visitors and one took photos of the dog tag and sent them to her brother, Philippe Clerbout. Clerbout posted the pictures in an online history forum and got a reply from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington.
Then Clerbout became a man with a mission: finding Willie Wilkins. His quest was personal. His father was a prisoner in Germany from June 1940 until the camp was liberated in 1945. He returned to France with US troops and married Clerbout's mother.
Clerbout sent e-mails to anyone he thought could help, from the White House to media outlets, and a woman from the US Department of Veteran's affairs located Wilkins.
The Wilkinses were presented with the dog tag yesterday, Victory in Europe Day, at a ceremony attended by French consul general Bertrand Lortholary.
Wilkins has been in a rehabilitation centre and suffers from Alzheimer's disease and other ailments.
When asked if he thought he would see his dog tag again, he shook his head.
“I never did,” he said.