A Boy Called Jesse: A Hometown Hero

As a small boy, Earl Crawford liked to dress up as the famous bank robber Jesse James, so his teacher nicknamed him "Jesse." He was only nineteen years old when he shipped out to Germany. They traveled in small boxcars that were called "40 and 8s," because they held forty men or eight horses. Young Jesse was unprepared for all the suffering and destruction he would witness. As the Allies won battles throughout Europe, the soldiers came upon the prison camps that we now call the Nazi concentration camps. When Jesse first saw the "walking skeletons" coming off the train, he felt sick. It's important that we remember by reading how Jesse made a difference serving in WWII.