Nearly 70 years after Clyde Ballenger’s ship sank in the North Atlantic, a Wilmington mother stumbled across his Purple Heart while spring cleaning her home.
When Sylvia Jabaley found the iconic gold and purple medal in a box in her dresser, she immediately knew it was in the wrong place.
Her husband, Eric, had found the Purple Heart in 1998 as he sifted through belongings left behind by renters at a house he bought, a brick home at the corner of Wrightsville Avenue and Audubon Boulevard.
“He picked it up and thought, ‘I can’t throw that away,’” she said.
So the medal — awarded to members of the armed forces wounded or killed in service — was boxed up for safekeeping, forgotten until Jabaley found it in the same house, the gold still shiny.
Inscribed on the back is a name and a rank — Clyde E. Ballenger, a boatswain’s mate second class for the United State Coast Guard.
For hours, she searched the Internet for his name, trying to find what became of Ballenger. Finally, Jabaley found a hit. He was lost in 1944.
But who was Clyde Ballenger? Did he have family? Could they be tracked down? How was the medal connected to their house?
About eight hours into her search, Jabaley had found no confirmed family members.
And Clyde Ballenger was still a mystery.
Serving at sea
The U.S. Department of Defense has a Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office charged with overseeing the effort to recover more than 83,000 service members that are unaccounted for. More than 73,000 of them never returned home from World War II.
Clyde Ballenger’s name is on that list. His recorded date of loss is March 9, 1944.
On that night, the USS Leopold was about 400 miles south of Iceland, according to a report from the Coast Guard Historian’s Office.
The Leopold was one of 30 destroyer-escorts built in 1943 by the Navy but manned by Coast Guard crews. Their main objective was defending the convoys against German U-boats, or submarines.
In the winter of 1944, after spending two weeks training off the coast of Maine, the Leopold was sent to protect a 27-ship convoy in the North Atlantic.
On March 9, 1944, the crew detected a U-boat lurking in the convoy’s route. The Leopold, along with the nearby USS Joyce, was ordered to fire upon the submarine.
Crews shot a flare into the sky to help them spot the sub, but when they did, the U-boat was already descending into the waters.
As gunners fired into the darkness, the ship was rocked by a torpedo.
Statements from the crew, preserved in the Coast Guard’s survivor’s accounts, evoke a harrowing scene.
The blast blew Seaman 1st Class Troy Gowers out of his shoes and into a net a dozen feet away.
He returned to his gun. It was jammed. Electricity was off. When the order came to abandon the stricken ship, Gowers thrust a lifeboat overboard and jumped into the nearly freezing ocean. Waves washed over the raft.
On board the ship, a guardsman pinned during the explosion asked an officer to shoot him. When the officer said no, he asked them to pass him a gun so he could shoot himself.
Just as a storm strengthened, Seaman 1st Class W.G. O’Brien said the Leopold began to sink.
As the USS Joyce passed by, O’Brien heard their skipper on a megaphone. “We’re dodging torpedoes,” the man shouted. “God bless you. We’ll be back.”
Soon after, crew members were flung into the ocean when the ship rolled over. “The waves were about 50 feet high and one by one, the men were washed off,” O’Brien said.
It was a grim morning when the Joyce returned. Of the 199-man crew, there were only 28 men left to save.
Clyde Ballenger, 22, was among those lost.
Life before war
Four years earlier, in 1940, Ballenger, then 18 and unmarried, lived with his parents in New Bern, according to U.S. Census records written in cursive.
His father, Clyde Austin Ballenger, was a 48-year-old barber. His mother, 50-year-old Nora Prevatte Ballenger, listed no other children.
Ballenger had left school after the ninth grade. When the census-taker came to their home, it was spring, and Ballenger was seeking work.
About 20 months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Ballenger would find a job serving his country.
As a boatswain’s (pronounced “bos’un”) mate on the Leopold, Ballenger would have worked on the ship’s deck and could have assisted with standing watch or navigation, said Coast Guard Lt. Terrence Walsh, who oversees casualty matters.
“It’s your classic sailor stuff,” Walsh said earlier this month over the phone.
The Coast Guard keeps records of its members made before 1950 in a bank of 3-by-5 notecards. The cards usually have a birth date and home of record.
“Sometimes, that’s all it has,” Walsh said.
Within those files was a Clyde Edward Ballenger, service number 220-823 — the same number on file with the missing personnel office. Born in Sumter, S.C., Oct. 26, 1921, Ballenger had enlisted as an apprentice seaman.
No family was listed on the card.
Yet when the Leopold sank, Ballenger left behind a young widow, Elizabeth Emily Ballenger, of New Bern.
His wife is listed next to Ballenger’s name in a National Archives list of war deaths from North Carolina.
After 1944, the paper trail in New Bern for his wife runs cold.
Clyde Ballenger’s mother, Nora, died in 1949, just five years after her son, according to county records. His father, Clyde Austin, died in 1955.
‘Only one left’
At 84, William “Bill” Ballenger speaks slowly on the telephone from his home in New Bern.
He listens closely about the search for a surviving Ballenger.
“I’m about the only one left,” Bill said.
Clyde was his first cousin on his father’s side. “I knew him very well.”
Bill doesn’t remember exactly when Clyde went away to war.
“It’s been so long ago,” he said.
While the years have erased the memory of his cousin’s funeral, he immediately recounted that Clyde was killed in the North Atlantic.
It wasn’t the family’s sole loss. The war also claimed the life of Ed Ballenger, Bill’s older brother and only sibling, who he said also served in the Coast Guard.
Bill remembers his cousin Clyde had a wife, Elizabeth, but doesn’t remember them having children.
“She just left the area and remarried,” he said.
Bill was at a loss to explain how Clyde’s Purple Heart ended up in a Wilmington house built after his cousin’s ship went down.
“All the family was right here, local,” he said.
Bill said he would like to have his cousin’s Purple Heart, although he said he wouldn’t object if another member of the family wanted it. Though he added, he’s likely the closest family that’s left.
A permanent home
Sylvia Jabaley still wonders who lived in her house that would have had some connection to Clyde.
“It could have been anybody,” she said.
Jabaley has been in contact with officials at the Coast Guard’s medals and awards program, who encouraged her to ship the Purple Heart to their office. She’s also thought about it going to a museum.
“I’m not quite ready for that,” Jabaley said, standing in her shaded backyard, holding the Purple Heart in the palm of her hand. For now, she wants to keep the medal in North Carolina.
Jabaley had hoped to put the medal in the hands of another Ballenger, perhaps a son or grandson.
“If it were that simple, it’d probably already be there,” she said.
For now, she’s waiting and wondering who else is out there that may surface, someone who knows how the medal got there — and where it should go next.