Column: My Family's World War II Mystery

*This is a feature column*

NORTHPORT, AL — "Who is that?" I turned to my Dad and asked a couple of years ago about a young boy wearing an ill-fitting American military uniform in one of the first photos in my great-grandfather's photo album from his service in the European theater of World War II.

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The aged, leather-bound album was laid open on my Dad's glass kitchen table after I asked him to dig it out for a 2021 story I wrote about the legendary Elmo Jones — my Papa Jones, a decorated Army veteran who made it a point to attend Veterans Day programs at Walker Elementary, wrote thoughtful notes in my birthday cards and had a full head of hair until the day he died.

Just with the stories surrounding his service, he was a legend and the embodiment of courage to us knobby-kneed kids who were far removed from military drafts and global conflicts amid the tranquility and comfort of the 1990s. But as adults have a way of doing, stories over time can take on lives of their own and it wasn't until I sat down to tell my great-grandfather's story myself that these family legends were finally buttressed with truth and brought into much-sharper focus.

Tom Brokaw dubbed his kind the "Greatest Generation" and, as I've written about at length in the past, he only told a handful of war stories to his family.

Never mind he earned a Purple Heart on the business end of a Nazi machine gun during urban combat and later aided in liberating the extermination camp in Landsberg — the same German town where an imprisoned Adolf Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" two decades earlier.

As he wrote on the back of one photo dated Nov. 19, 1945, which showed him standing in what appears to be a palace garden: "This could be anyone, but it's not. It's me haha."

This small example adds some insight, though, into his mindset during the war. After all, my Papa Jones was a young farmer and father from Berry, Alabama, who had likely never traveled far from home before he received his draft notice.

In 2021, though, my Dad shrugged and said he didn't know who the boy was in the black-and-white photo. So, being the pain-in-the-ass reporter I am, I took the picture out of its thin plastic covering for probably the first time in over half a century.

I turned the photo over and, in black pen on the back, under a French name we'll soon discuss, are the words "This is the boy I tried to adopt."

And that's all that's written apart from the boy's name. No date, no location, no age, no context.

My Dad is a retired homicide investigator and I've won multiple awards for investigative journalism. We don't spook easy and are quick to grasp for logic when trying to answer a question.

But in that moment, all we could do was look at each other in a kind of stupor.

Dad had heard about as much as I had growing up regarding the little French boy Papa Jones wanted to bring home to Alabama, but those tales were offered in short passing by my Grandmother, never elaborated on, and certainly never trotted around with photographic aid for the entire family to see and discuss.

This was a different time, obviously, and so much of what we've learned about my great-grandfather's service came years after he died, including this mysterious photo.

For such a legendary generation, it's one of the innumerable stories that could easily be lost amid the passage of time or the glut of World War II anecdotes churned out daily that seem to only cheapen the humanity of such a deadly and high-stakes chapter of history.

But for me — a blue-collar public school nobody, born and raised in Tuscaloosa County — this is a piece of family history that is far too rich and beautiful to ignore, regardless of any resolutions or feelings decades later.

You Should've Seen It In Color

To show you the level of awareness we had with this priceless World War II photo album, there was another moment where I pressed a finger down on a photo of a shapely woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat, a spaghetti-strap bathing suit top and a pair of stylish denim summer shorts.

"That ain't my Granny Virgie," I cackled to my Dad, referring to my great-grandmother when I saw the picture of the unfamiliar woman.

Upon further examination, the picture was taken in California by a man named James Riley.

And after we did our best to interpret the message scribbled on the back of the photo, we quickly surmised it was Riley's girlfriend who he was showing off as a kind of foxhole pin-up to his Army buddies in Europe.

I use that brief aside to underscore how little we truly understand about the nuances of my great-grandfather's service and that of other soldiers. It's an all-too-common story with respect to those who fought and lived through the second world war — a generation whose numbers grow smaller with each passing day.

Sure, my Papa Jones was injured in combat, but he also had a pet monkey named Pete and helped a starving French woman and her child, before later showing compassion to her husband when he became a prisoner of war after being forced into the German army by the occupying Nazis.

But amid the yellowed photos my great-grandfather took of the concentration camp in Landsberg, his downtime with army buddies, and the sights in Paris, the photo of the little French boy in the American army uniform is the only one that defies explanation.

Indeed, even in the taped interviews I've since digitized for posterity, my Papa Jones never once mentioned the little boy.

And to complicate the mystery, I showed the photo to a dear friend with a decorated military career who pointed out that the insignias on the uniform appear to be that of the Army Service Forces —not the 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Division, B Company, known as the Texas Division, that my Papa Jones served in. This can be determined by going off of the red, white and blue patch on the left arm of the coat worn by the boy in the picture.

Still, the young boy's name is a mystery in itself, which, when coupled with the fact that this reporter can't read French, became even more difficult to track down in an exhaustive search.

Over the last two years, I've tried every variation of the name I can think of in searching different databases, archives and resource websites like Ancestry.com. Unfortunately, though, I'm no closer at present than I was when first pulled out the old photo.

Indeed, we can't even be confident that the boy's name was written correctly. After all, my Papa Jones had very little formal education at the time and, on a photo of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, he referred to the majestic sight as "The Ethel Tower."

So, now maybe you understand our predicament?

What's evident is that the little boy in the photo is named Pierre. That much we know for a fact, but his last name is where this experienced researcher keeps coming up empty.

Coly? Goly? Cony?

What does the last name look like to you?

And it's this last name that partially inspired me to sit down and finally write this story — not just to document it for the sake of my family's history, but as a Hail Mary attempt to learn more about this chapter in the life of my great-grandfather.

Who was this little boy?

What were the circumstances that led him to cross paths with my Papa Jones?

What inspired my Papa Jones to want to adopt this little boy?

Why didn't it work out?

Those last two questions are the most interesting to me, considering that money was tight back home and another mouth to feed would have likely placed even more strain on a young family struggling to make ends meet — a mystery within a mystery.

Regardless, this beautiful anecdote adds even more humanity to the tales of war that Papa Jones brought back with him from Europe.

And it's the deep-seated hope of this reporter that in broadcasting this story to the universe, there just might be ... just maybe ... some answers out there.

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The views expressed in this column are his own and in no way a reflection of our parent company or sponsors. Contact him at ryan.phillips@patch.com