A bracelet, a body, a bride denied, an insatiably curious farmer, and an intrepid daughter, all separated by 4,300 miles, yet connected by an 80-year mystery.
In 1991, Jim Dick broke the black soil of his North Dakota fields and struck a silver enigma—an inscribed armlet bearing the name of a fallen soldier from New York City, killed in action during the closing months of World War 2.
How did an East Coast war hero’s bracelet burrow under the dirt of a corn and soybean farm in the Great Plains? The unlikely threads of the answer, running from an army barracks in Alabama to a graveyard in Belgium, stretch credulity. As in, blind chance fares poorly on a Dakota farm.
Was a deeper link in play? Some treasures can only be uncovered by the right hands.
Secrets and Whispers
A man for all seasons. A man to honor the past. Jim Dick.
Born to corn in 1930 in southeast North Dakota’s Ransom County, Dick was raised in a German-Russian farming family with American roots reaching to the 1890s. In 1960, captured by the charms of farm girl Millie Bergh, Dick married, raised five children, served in the National Guard, and followed the shadow of his forefathers, growing grain on level land atop glacial, black soils on a vast ocean of 1-mile-square sections unbroken under endless skies, 45 minutes west of the Red River Valley.
With calloused hands contrasted by the mind of an academic, Dick was consumed by a thirst for learning. His modest farmhouse situated roughly 2.5 miles from Englevale—a community barely qualifying for a postal code, with 40 people in the register on a busy day—was a veritable library. The halls overflowed with reference works on built-in bookshelves, bedrooms bulged with novels, and the living room was lined with nonfiction. Literature. Everywhere. Books as meals to be savored.
Geography, topography, agronomy, history, trapping, hunting, fishing, or flying airplanes, Dick was a high-intellect sponge, blessed with a phenomenal capacity to make plants grow—even peaches in subzero, mercury-bottoming temps. Likely the first to successfully grow peaches in North Dakota, Dick initially coaxed 10 trees to fruit-bearing maturity and his grove thrived for over 30 years. Shaped by the Dirty Thirties of early childhood, Dick also planted tens of thousands of trees in shelter belts across his lifetime.
In early June 1991, catching a break between fieldwork, Dick exited his farmhouse and walked to the west side of his immediate property, into acreage dotted with melons, squash, and black walnut trees. Spade in hand to plant another tree, Dick knelt, drove the blade into rich dirt, and turned over the glint of tarnished metal. A bracelet: rectangular plate connected by heavy links.
Perplexed, Dick carried the bracelet inside to show Millie. The couple washed away the dirt, revealing a name and Army identification number on the plate’s face: Pvt. Thomas M. McWilliams, 32828928.
Reversing the plate, Dick marveled at a telltale inscription: “Always Yours, Elaine.”
Dick knew. He knew. The bracelet held secrets.
Picking up the phone, he spun the rotary dials and hurtled into the past.
Spilled Blood Never Dries
New York always paid in blood. From the Civil War to World War l to World War ll, New York lost more native sons to each conflict than any other state: 39,000 dead in the Civil War, 9,891 casualties in World War l, and 31,215 casualties in World War ll. McWilliams, owner of the farmland bracelet, hailed from New York.
When Dick telephoned the North Dakota Department of Veteran’s Affairs, he learned McWilliams was a World War ll soldier killed in Germany. Pulling threads, Dick dialed his daughter, Janna Diggs—a mirror of her father’s intellect—and described the scant information surrounding McWilliams and the bracelet. Diggs scooped up the details and jumped down the rabbit hole.
“I was hooked immediately,” she recalls. “I was raised with my nose in encyclopedias and National Geographic, and those fostered an interest in exploration. My family would find arrowheads on our farm, and the house basement still holds a lot of stone tools today. As kids we’d go to local farmsteads and dig through garbage pits for soda bottles or old spoons. But find jewelry? No.”
By nature, Diggs was unable to resist the urge to peek behind synchronicity’s curtain. “How could a silver bracelet from World War ll get lost on our farm?” she continues. “We’re 12 miles from the county seat, and several miles from our mailing address town, Englevale, which had a general store, church, bar, and grain elevator. Other than empty fields and farm buildings, nothing was in proximity to us except for my grandparents’ house, my cousin’s house, and my uncle’s house—all family. Nobody else.”
After Diggs contacted the Department of Veterans Affairs, the administration located Collette Von Schalscha, a sister of McWilliams in New Jersey; she was receptive to a phone call from Jim Dick.
In September 1991, Dick spoke to Von Schalscha: Slowly, McWilliams’ ghost emerged.
Tucker. To friends and family, McWilliams went by Tucker. “The timing of my dad’s call was so peculiar,” Diggs describes. “When he called Collette, almost 50 years after the fact, she said, “’It’s so strange you call now. This whole week before, I’ve been thinking a lot about Tucker. And now you call.’”
In combination with Von Schalscha’s recollection and Diggs’ research, a poignant narrative came into view: In 1942, McWilliams, 19, registered for the draft. (His father, Irish-born Ralph McWilliams, immigrated to the U.S. as an infant in 1896 and saw action with the 77th Infantry Division in World War l at Chateau-Thierry and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918.)
In 1943, engaged to Elaine Moore, McWilliams was sent to training at Fort Rucker, in southeast Alabama. Moore, as a pledge to McWilliams, gave him a promise bracelet before his departure, inscribed with a declaration of her love. In Alabama, McWilliams removed the bracelet from his wrist and deposited it in a locker for the final time. He died in combat in Europe, just over a year later.
“Collette told my dad that when Thomas McWilliams was training at Fort Rucker, someone broke into his things and stole the bracelet,” Diggs explains.
And how, presumably, did McWilliams’ bracelet travel 1,500 miles to Dick’s farm in North Dakota?
Dick’s father, Lawrence, sometimes hired itinerant workers. Specifically, in the mid-1940s, Dick recalled the arrival of two men with distinct accents—Southern drawls. Two men from Alabama signed on as part of a threshing crew.
As described by Dick to the Ransom County Gazette in 1991: “Some Southern boys couldn’t pass the test and came to the Midwest to help with the harvest because our boys were in the war. Where we ran bundle racks is where it was found. It’s possible it might have fallen off the hayrack.”
Diggs elaborates: “The crew would ride the wagon to the fields and back. My dad believed one of the Alabama guys dropped it. We’ll never know if they bought it or stole it, but that connection must be why it was on our farmland.”
In fall 1991, only months after the bracelet’s discovery, Dick mailed the last physical vestige of McWilliams to his sister, Von Schalscha. She returned the bracelet to McWilliam’s fiancé, Moore, who even 50 years after the death of her beloved, had never married. For the bride denied, spilled blood had never dried.
Bracelet and Bones
Light-complected, blue eyes, brown hair, 5’11”, and 163 lb., McWilliams shipped out to Europe in 1944, as a member of the 297th Engineering Battalion, Company C, and saw action at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and the U.S. advance into Germany. His engineering role was high-risk duty, placing him at the vanguard of troop movements to repair roads and build bridges—while exposed to all levels of German fire.
Between June 1944 and May 8 (Germany’s surrender), 1945, the U.S. military absorbed 552,117 casualties in Europe, including 104,812 killed in action. McWilliams died in the heart of the maelstrom.
In mid-January 1945, following the six-week Battle of the Bulge, U.S. forces went on the offensive and pushed toward the German border. By Feb. 23, in Operation Grenade, a pincer movement into the Rhineland, McWilliams and the 297th Engineering Battalion were on the banks of the flood-swollen Roer River, building a pontoon bridge at Duren, 380 miles from Berlin. Exposed at blade’s edge, McWilliams, 21, was mortally wounded.
“Thomas McWilliams died two days after his injury, Feb. 25, 1945, just a couple of months before the end of the fighting in Europe,” Diggs notes. “Elaine was waiting on his return. Waiting on his next letter. Waiting for him to come home. Waiting to marry and start a family. What might have been?”
Half a century after McWilliams’ death, following the discovery of his silver bracelet, Diggs refused to let go of the memory. “I wanted to make sure the story didn’t get lost. I wanted to be certain the family knew. I didn’t want Thomas’ name to fade away.”
Indeed. As surely as Diggs stood unaware on her farmland as a child over McWilliams’ hidden bracelet, she soon would stand unknowingly atop McWilliams’ bones.
Uncanny
When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. The proverb echoes, and no louder than in the life of Jim Dick.
In 2019, Dick put pen to paper, and spilled a fount of farming and historical vignettes into The ABCs of Living: Stories From Birth To Old Age. Dick raced against time. Ravaged by cancer, his body faded as he wrote the last chapters. Shouldering her father’s final labor of love, Diggs typed the manuscript into a computer and shaped the content, in preparation for publication. “It became his mission to preserve his family story and he wanted everyone to do the same,” she says. “We all have a story.”
The ABCs of Living, packed with tales of agriculture and the American experience, contains a chapter—Unsolved Mystery—on the enigma of Thomas McWilliams’ bracelet. As Diggs transcribed the notes of her father, she progressed to Unsolved Mystery. The text took away her breath: “McWilliams is buried in Henri-Chapelle Cemetery in Belgium...”
Shock. Goosebumps. Only 12 years prior, on the last day of a European vacation in June 2007, Diggs, along with her daughter, Marissa Diggs; sister, Wendi Dick; and niece, Brianna Dick, finished sightseeing in the medieval Belgian city of Bruges, and drove southeast for Germany and a flight home to the U.S. Roughly 140 miles later, still in Belgium, they passed a sign denoting an American World War ll cemetery.
On a whim, they pulled off the highway and entered the hallowed ground of Henri-Chappelle, the final resting place for 7,987 U.S. soldiers from 49 states who died (1944-1945) stopping the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes or advancing into Germany.
In the late afternoon of a misty, overcast day, the foursome was alone—the sole visitors at the sweeping 57-acre Henri-Chapelle site. Diggs walked the graves for two hours in silence, row upon arcing row, noting the names of the fallen from North Dakota. What she didn’t know; what she couldn’t know; Thomas McWilliams’ graves was under her feet: Plot D, Row 9, Grave 35.
The circumstances were uncanny. Diggs had grown up and played on the precise spot where McWilliams’ bracelet was concealed. Decades later, 4,350 miles distant on a separate continent, she walked beside his burial marker.
Over a decade later, as Diggs prepared her father’s book and discovered the location of McWilliams’ remains, she could not attribute the improbability to chance. “It’s a connection I can’t explain, but I can feel. There’s something deeper than coincidence. It’s on my bucket list to return to the gravesite, this time knowingly.”
On Oct. 8, 2023, Jim Dick, 93, passed on—the life of a champion. Dick, the consummate curious farmer, was the catalyst to the preservation of McWilliams’ tale, i.e., the silver bracelet required recovery by precisely the right person.
“I don’t believe it was chance,” Diggs says. “It could have been found by someone who didn’t care, or someone who pawned it, or someone who stuck it on a shelf. Instead, it was found by someone with an insatiable desire to learn. It was found by my father, and he asked, ‘Thomas McWilliams. Who was this man?’”
New York to Alabama to North Dakota to Germany to Belgium. More than a twist of fate.
Respect to Thomas “Tucker” Michael McWilliams; May 9, 1923 – February 25, 1945; Purple Heart; 297th Engineer Combat Battalion; U.S. Army. Rest in Peace.
Respect to James Elmer Dick; April 27, 1930 – October 8, 2023; husband, father, follower of Christ, farmer, conservationist, hunter, teacher, author, pilot, forester, and student to the end. Rest in Peace.
For more articles from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years
