GI daughter receives her dad’s long-lost bracelet
ABRAVE GI’s daughter has been given a silver bracelet her father lost while stationed in a Welsh country house – before he was killed on the battlefield.
History lover Colin Murphy, 49, discovered the personal jewellery engraved with the number of American serviceman Albert Eugene Coleman buried in the earth.
Colin found the bracelet with his metal detector while scouring the grounds of a country house in Pembrokeshire, where Albert was stationed.
Colin was able to track down Albert’s eldest daughter Nancy Shilling – who was just 18 months old when her dad left Beavertown, Pennsylvania, for the war in Europe.
Nancy, now 76, never knew her father, who was one of 19,000 US troops killed in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 just ten days before his 26 birthday.
But she was touched to be given the bracelet was found at Cresselly House near Kilgetty, Pembrokeshire – and to get more information about his war days sacrifice.
Colin said: “It was unbelievable because she had never known her father.
“She was only 18 months old when he went to Cresselly House and then to France.”
Albert, whose serial number was 33020558, tragically died in the Battle of the Bulge in 1945.
It was the bloodiest battle for American forces in the war – with 89,000 US soldiers injured and 19,000 killed.
Colin, of Tenby, tracked Albert’s family down through the Snyder County Historical Society in Pennsylvania.
The bracelet is now framed with a small American flag – and given back to his grateful family.
Colin said: “He died right at the end of the war in the Battle of the Bulge.
“His body was repatriated five years later, she would have been five years old when his body was brought back home.”
Colin added that US troops were stationed at Cresselly during the war
before going off to fight in France to defeat the Nazis.
He said Hugh Harrison-Allen, the owner of Cresselly House, thought the soldiers had been “billeted there as it was a flat piece of land.”
The Battle of the Bulge was one of the last major Nazi offensives on the Western Front – with the Germans fighting to stop Allied control of Antwerp.
An estimated 610,000 Americans took part between December 1944 and January 1945.
The Battle of the Bulge would later become known as the largest and bloodiest battle for the U.S. during WWII. It is also known for being the third deadliest battle in U.S. history.
About 5,000 American soldiers from the 110th US Infantry Regiment were based in Pembrokeshire from October 1943 – with Albert landing in France on D-Day plus one.
After she was given the bracelet with a US flag in a ceremony, Nancy said she was inspired to find out more about the family tree.
She said: “Before he was a name. Now I start wondering: ‘Where did he come from? I don’t know what he did when he was a little boy.’
“It was such a big surprise after all these years that something should come up like that that belonged to my father.”
Daughter Nancy told how her father kept her baby shoe in his helmet while fighting in World War Two.
Albert, who had been promoted to sergeant, told one of his friends in the army to make sure the shoe made it back home if anything happened to him.
He told his fellow serviceman: “Make sure you send this to my wife and he did.”
Nancy said: “He sent that shoe back to my mother. I realised in spite of what he was going through, he loved me.”