US Army Corporal Joseph Wheeler Paffoon was born on March 27, 1907 in Pensacola, Florida, the son of Michael Paffoon (1870-1932) and Vance Baker (1880-1928). His father immigrated to America from Italy and could speak very little English. He worked at a variety of jobs to support his family and used to own stock in an oil well in Oklahoma. His mother was the daughter of Stark Baker from around Defuniak Springs and together they had six children. They eventually came to Flomaton where he was a vendor selling peanuts, popcorn, and such. Soon, they were in Pine Barren near the sawmill just north of Molino. As the kids grew up times were tough, and money was scarce. There was little time for education and when their father died, they was no money to bury him. They were forced to turn over their oil stock to Fisher Pou Funeral Home in exchange for the funeral. As for Joseph, he worked in several places including sawmills in the Pine Barren area. For a short period of time, he worked aboard the Tarpon, a well-known excursion boat in the area. The ship sank during a violent storm in 1937 but Joseph was long gone by that time.
When the war broke out, Joseph was in Cedar Falls, Iowa on another job. Since he had registered for the draft in Pensacola he had to return when he was called up to report to Camp Blanding. He enlisted on May 23, 1942 and after his initial training he was assigned to the 68th Coast Artillery. Joseph was sent to Casablanca, Morocco in November 1942 and would fight at Tunisia with the US 5th Army against General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Corps. Afterwards, they embarked for the invasion of Sicily before landing at Anzio in January 1944. For the next six months, they fought a determined enemy that was hellbent driving them into the sea.
The Anzio beachhead began to resemble the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. And the vast majority of Allied casualties during this period of time were from air and artillery attacks, including fire from "Anzio Annie," a 280-mm. German railway gun, which was fired from the Alban Hills. Sadly, Joseph was struck by an enemy shell on March 4th, one of the last days of the enemy offensive. He died several hours later on March 5, 1944. Joe’s buddies confirmed to his brother Emmanuel that Joseph was hit by an enemy shell and lived for only a short period of time. Emmanuel told this writer many years ago that he believed that James Arness, the actor that played Marshall Dillon on the television show “Gunsmoke” served in the same regiment as his brother and received a Purple Heart when wounded by an enemy machine gun at Anzio. It caused him to limp to the point that when filming Gunsmoke, they occasionally had to use a double. After Joseph was killed and since the family had no money, they all felt that he probably would have wanted to be buried among his comrades, so they left his body overseas. Today, he is buried with them in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy.
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