It’s been more than eight decades, but Beverlee Dahmen still remembers her older brother Noel Plowman as someone who was always laughing and cracking jokes.
Seven years her brother’s junior, Dahmen describes Plowman as a quick-witted, charming young man who always seemed to “have a girl.” In high school, he played football, basketball and baseball all four years.
“He was a hard worker. He was a good brother, and a good son for my parents,” she said.
A child of the Great Depression in the small town of LaCrosse, Washington, Plowman grew up poor. But he had college aspirations, and a work ethic to back it up, Dahmen said.
“ He knew he wanted to go to college, so he worked hard to get good grades so he could get into college. And he knew that our family was poor,” she said, “so he worked in harvest, and saved his money to pay his tuition.”
In 1941, Plowman started taking classes at Washington State College — now Washington State University. His story, along with 250 others, was recorded by the Fallen Cougars Project, which seeks to honor those the university lost during World War II.
Plowman got involved in the agricultural fraternity Alpha Gamma Rho, and earned a $100 academic scholarship. He took pride in his school work, Dahmen said, recalling a letter he wrote telling his family about an “A” grade he received in a class.
Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked. That prompted the United States to enter World War II.
The event would change the course of millions of Americans’ lives, including Plowman’s. By the fall of 1942, talks began of ending voluntary enlistment in favor of the draft for the U.S. military.
Believing he would be drafted if he waited, Plowman decided to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He left for basic training the day after Christmas in 1942.
He learned to fly, and graduated from the Marana Army Airfield in 1943. From June to September 1944, Plowman piloted a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, named “Spirit of ’96,” in missions in Normandy and Northern France.
On Sept. 25, 1944, Plowman flew a final mission with eight other men intended to target railroad marshalling yards in Frankfurt, Germany. The plane never returned, and for roughly a year, Plowman was listed as missing in action, according to his family.
As months dragged on, the Plowman family didn’t know whether Noel was alive or dead.
Dahmen, still a young teenager, was living at home and recalls her father getting drunk every day. Until that point, she said, she’d never seen him drink.
Her mother, she said, was unable to speak about her son without crying.
“At 14, I didn’t know how to handle that kind of stuff to help them get over it,” Dahmen said. “I didn’t wanna be at home and see it. But I was.”
It was a year later, in 1945, Dahmen recalled a man who came to knock on their door. The family was informed that Plowman had been killed.
Dahmen remembers her mother collapsing.
“You always think they’re gonna come back,” she said.
Of the nine men who went up in the B-17 on Sept. 25, 1944, four managed to parachute to safety, but were taken as prisoners of war. Plowman was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart, along with an Air Medal for two missions during an air campaign in Normandy.
Survivors would report that Plowman and four other men, including a navigator, bombardier, radio operator and co-pilot, likely never had the chance to exit the plane.
“I kept thinking they didn’t get that right,” Dahmen said. “That he’s alright. He jumped outta that plane and he just hasn’t come home yet.”
After the war, Dahmen’s father went to rehab. She remembers her mother was “afraid it would kill him.”
Dahmen grew up, and had her own family with four children. But 80 years after World War II ended, the scars from her brother’s loss remain.
“You don’t talk about it with anybody after this length of time,” she said. “But you think about it, you know? What would it be like if Noel was here, married and had a family or something?”
For many families, memories of service members are collected like a patchwork. There are holes where people never told, or never had the chance to tell, their story.
Another WSC soldier
Jon Van Vogt said he always wondered how things would be different if his uncle, William McCanse, had survived World War II.
Stories of “uncle Billy,” came in bits and pieces, Van Vogt said.
A rifleman platoon leader, Lt. McCanse served in the Army infantry division, and attended Washington State College before the war.
He was wounded in France, and was offered the chance to come home. But McCanse chose to return to his men, and died in action in Heilbronn, Germany, on April 10, 1945.
He was posthumously awarded the Expert Rifleman Badge and the Silver Star. McCanse also received two Purple Hearts, according to his family.
McCanse, who grew up on Pataha Flat in Garfield County, Washington, was his parents’ only son. Van Vogt recalled one rare conversation with his grandfather about his uncle’s passing.
“ Granddad did say he used to whistle,” Van Vogt said. “But once my uncle Billy was killed, he could never whistle again.”
Van Vogt’s brother, William “Bill” Van Vogt, was named after McCanse. Bill said he’s proud of his uncle’s service, but regrets not having the chance to meet him.
Everyone who did know McCanse described him as wholesome, polite and kind-hearted, Bill Van Vogt said.
“We didn’t know him,” Bill said. “But I sure would have liked to.”
Dotty Van Vogt, Bill’s wife, said McCanse’s living family is proud of his service, even as they regret never having the chance to know him.
“Sadly, war is a fact of life, and always has been,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “To make war as an aggressive force should always be condemned, but if a nation is not willing to fight for its survival, it will not (survive).”
The importance of personal stories
Alicia Callahan is a historian based in Stanwood, Washington, who specializes in World War II history.
Humanizing wars, Callahan said, is an essential part of understanding them.
“ It’s easy to just look at the battles,” she said. “I think the first step in understanding war for what it is, is to … take a step back and understand that those battles couldn’t have been fought, or even won or lost, without each individual that was there.”
But getting those stories is hard. Even among those who did make it back, she said, many never talked to their families about the war.
Since 2022, Callahan has interviewed roughly 45 World War II veterans about their lives and war experiences.
“It took a lot of time for them to process what they experienced,” she said. “I’ve been so blessed that I’ve gotten to catch them at that point in their life where they are comfortable sharing.”
Callahan’s work focuses on memory and popular media portrayals of World War II. She said depictions of heroic battles and World War II’s success stories are a foundational part of American identity.
In many ways, she said, World War II captured some of the best of what America can be.
“America in general really did something special during the Second World War,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean (service members) weren’t human.”
Other stories — the battles that were lost, the realities of warfare — are sometimes overlooked, Callahan said. Those realities are something that, years later, the veterans she spoke with didn’t want the public to forget.
“I think that is a big reason the men struggled coming forward,” she said. “A lot of them died because leadership made mistakes. A lot of them made mistakes. I think at a certain point, it became difficult for them to share things that kind of went against the public norm.”
In their interviews with Callahan, numerous World War II veterans spoke about the difficult, complicated and ugly sides of the war.
“ It’s not the movies. It’s every day — every day, not knowing what’s next,” said Melvin Hurwitz, an Air Corps sergeant, in an interview with Callahan. “We can’t seem to love each other enough.”
Many described how, as young men, they lacked an understanding of what war entailed, Callahan said. Veterans told her they enlisted “because that’s what everyone else was doing.”
“ It really kind of goes against what we would think of. (That) they only enlisted ’cause they wanted to get even with the Nazis,” she said. “It played a role in it. But it’s not the main thing.”
Living memories of World War II
One Marine Corps veteran, Neal McCallum, said he enlisted after watching a movie about the war, and deciding he wanted to be like the soldiers he saw in it.
Another, Wally King, served as a first lieutenant in the Air Corps. He told Callahan he enlisted because he wanted to fly an airplane.
“(You) think it’s parades, and fancy uniforms, and medals, and you name it,” King said in an interview with Callahan last year. “But you can’t glorify war. It’s a very evil, mean business.”
Jake “Papa Jake” Larson, an Army sergeant, died on July 17 of this year at 102. He was interviewed by Callahan last year about his D-Day story.
Larson described a moment when, under heavy gunfire, he decided to hide behind a rock and have what he thought would be his last cigarette.
“ I didn’t have a match that was dry. I sensed someone to my left, so I said, ‘Buddy, have you got a match?’” Larson said. “I got no answer. So, I glanced back and there was a soldier there, all right. But there was no head under the helmet.”
Seeing the body beside him, Larson sprinted. Miraculously, he caught a break in gunfire, and reached safety without a scratch. Another 4,414 Allied troops, including 2,501 Americans, died on D-Day.
World War II veterans are widely considered heroes, Callahan said, and she believes the “Greatest Generation” earned that title. But, she said, all of the veterans she spoke to hated being called a hero.
“I think they’re heroes,” she said. “But I think with that, and they would agree with me, it kind of dumbs down what they endured. Every single one was the first to admit the mistakes they made … Every single one of ’em was like, ‘I was just a young kid following orders … I just survived.’”
George Reitmeier, an Army sergeant, survived the sinking of his ship, the S.S. Leopoldville. But he told Callahan his worst experience of the war was seeing a young girl begging for food at a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria.
Reitmeier recalled how he started carrying extra rations so he could give the girl something to eat.
“She wanted everything,” he told Callahan. “If I have a little bit of coffee in my coffee mug, she wanted me to just dump that in (her pot) too. Just really take anything, just to have something to put in her stomach.”
He described civilians who arrived in a displaced persons camp with “nothing but the clothes on their back.”
“That, to me, was a real part of the hell of war,” Reitmeier said. “Seeing those innocent people suffer for months after the shooting stopped.”
One of the biggest takeaways for many of the veterans had to do with the way they viewed their enemy, Callahan said.
“In any war, the first thing you have to do is dehumanize the enemy,” Callahan said.
Marine Corps Cpl. Neal McCallum, was just 18 when he served during the Battle of Okinawa. He lost his best friend in the war, and told Callahan that for decades after, he hated Japanese people.
But, during a layover in Japan in the 1980s, he met a group of young school children who approached him to practice their English.
“He said, ‘You know, I probably fought their dads and their grandpas during World War II, and I thought they were the devils. But if they can raise such precious, amazing children, they must not be so bad after all,’” Callahan said.
Other veterans who served in the European Theater recalled how they hated Germans. But in their later years, many grew to see those they had fought in a different light: Other young men who had been trying to survive.
“It’s that old tale of old men sending young men to war,” Callahan said. “And they had the blessing of growing older and getting to understand that.”
Talking about all of the realities of the war can be complicated, Callahan said. But those realities shouldn’t be forgotten.
“I think the best way we can honor them is to remember World War II the way that they remembered it,” she said, “and the way that they remember it now.”
In 2025, it’s estimated that there are about 45,000 surviving World War II veterans in the United States and U.S. territories — less than 0.5% of the 16.4 million who served, according to the National WWII Museum.
