Henry Wood wears a glove on his left hand.
The glove is black, made of simple cloth, the kind a gardener might wear. Or a farmer, like Wood was on his Taylor Ridge property for many decades. But it keeps his hand warm.
“It kind of helps my arm,” Wood said. “It kind of gets cold.”
Farther up from the glove, just below his elbow, are the scars left behind by shrapnel that tore into his arm in 1944. The 98-year-old Wood is a World War II veteran, and while the scars on his left forearm have faded over time, the emotional toll of talking about the war has taken a bit longer to heal.
“I never told my folks what happened, hardly at all,” he recalled from a recliner in his living room. “It just bothered me so bad. I couldn’t sleep and stuff. It was best not to talk about it, because it bothers me terrible.”
Hearing stories from World War II is a rarity, as almost 80 years later, there aren’t many veterans from it around. The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that just over 100,000 of the 16.1 million Americans who served are still alive in 2023.
“There ain’t too many World War II veterans around here — I can’t think of a single one,” Wood said. “I go to Edgington Church and I don’t think there’s any there. Once a year on Veteran’s Day I go to Rock Ridge High School and there’s not been one there for many years.”
But in 2010, he took a trip on the “Honor Flight of the Quad-Cities,” a one-day trip bringing local veterans to the various memorials and museums in Washington, D.C.
Meeting other veterans like him made Wood feel more comfortable opening up about his experience. Through information gathered for a brief book published in 2021 by his niece, Wanda Snow Franklin, his tales from World War II are easier to set in stone.
Henry Wood’s story
Wood was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, just after his 18th birthday, interrupting his senior year of high school. Looking back now, he says he didn’t mind going into the service.
After doing his basic training in Little Rock, Arkansas, Wood was sent overseas. He got to Europe through a laundry list of transports: a barge, a transport ship, and multiple trains, each vessel cloaked in secrecy.
Upon arriving in Europe, he was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division, a unit nicknamed “Spearhead” for its aggressive role in the liberation of France, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In April 1945, the unit helped liberate the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in Nordhausen. But later that month, Wood suffered the injury that still bothers his left forearm to this day.
While advancing eastward through Germany, his unit faced enemy fire, and Wood was hit with shrapnel just below his elbow. He laid face down for a half hour.
“The concussion knocked me cold — I didn’t hear it coming and I didn’t hear it go off,” Wood wrote in a letter months later, published in the Reynolds Press in Illinois in July 1945.
Remembering the moment from his living room in Taylor Ridge, Wood said when he finally made a run for help, officers were concerned that he was a “deserter.” They couldn’t see that his arm had nearly been completely separated, and assumed he was simply fleeing.
“I was carrying my arm, which I thought was shot clear off,” Wood said. “When I dropped my arm, he was able to see that I was wounded and he called for a medic.”
The injury shattered his bone, and Wood received blood plasma and a temporary splint that night in Nordhausen. He was later transferred to a hospital in England, where he remained in a body cast for a few days and underwent further operations. He finally headed home in June 1945.
Wood rehabbed his arm injury in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and in December 1945, he was honorably discharged from the Army, almost 14 months after he first reported for active duty.
Returning back home to Taylor Ridge, Wood worked on his family’s farm for decades, tending various crops and raising beef cattle. He met his wife, Nancy, in a grocery store not long after returning from the war. They married in 1947, and had two daughters, Judy, who died in 1951, and Debbie, who died just last year.
Wood still lives on his farm, now with his son-in-law Bill. The natural light from the remote farm creeps in through his windows, overlooking a sea of crop fields.
In this home, lined with 70 years of Wood family history, he remembers the time in 1983 a runaway bank robber once stopped in, holding Wood up with his own shotgun. He misses spending time with his cattle in the farm, and remembers in the nineties, when he started collecting cut glass with his wife and mother.
His dining room is lined with shelves and shelves of glasses, shimmering with a crystalline translucency you’d find in a luxury chandelier. Cut glass is sought after for its intricacy, the sheer effort and detail it takes to form the zig-zagging lines and imperfect patterns on each glass.
Of course, like all glass, his collection is fragile. But still, it is growing. And Wood is proud of it.
Four years ago, Wood slipped on his porch and broke his arm, the same one that was originally injured in the war. When asked to see the scars both injuries left behind, Wood shamelessly pulled his entire crewneck sweater over his head, leaving the glove on.
With a heavy breath, he pointed to where his bone juts out and told his story.
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