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The papers came to Chris Jennings in a packet of documents after his father died four years ago. Among them were letters his father had sent the Army, starting in 2009, asking that Pvt. Willard M. Jennings be recognized for the wounds that killed him in Italy on Oct. 12, 1944. The first answer, Jennings said, was that the records had been lost in a fire.
On Friday in Abbot Hall, under Archibald Willard’s painting “The Spirit of ’76,” the family received the Purple Heart. The certificate, signed by the secretary of the Army and the adjutant general and dated Sept. 1, 2026, awards the medal “for wounds received in action resulting in his death.”
“It’s something that started many, many years ago,” Jennings told the small crowd around the Select Board’s table. “It’s nice to see this finally happening.”
A miner from a vanished town
Willard Jennings was 28 when he was killed, his grandson said before the ceremony. He had mined lead and zinc in Picher, Oklahoma, “a town that no longer exists,” and worked at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works before he entered the Army. He left a wife and a 3-year-old son, Larry Dean,
He served in Battery C of the 435th Antiaircraft Artillery (Automatic Weapons) Battalion. Retired Army Col. Edward Pesce, an Army Reserve ambassador for Massachusetts, read from a unit history he had requested from the Army’s historians. The battalion fought in the Naples campaign in the fall of 1943 and at Anzio in early 1944, firing 40 mm guns and machine guns at low-flying German planes.
By the fall of 1944 it was fighting as infantry in the northern Apennines. From Oct. 10 to 12, Pesce read, Battery C fought “sharp, localized firefights” against German patrols on the slopes near Pietrasanta. Willard Jennings died on the last of those days.
Pesce stopped to explain what that meant. The unit’s job was shooting down aircraft, he said, but its crews were good enough that the Army sent them into direct combat as foot soldiers.
How it reached Abbot Hall
After the September letter, the effort began at Salem’s veterans office. Once that office learned the family lived in Marblehead, one speaker said, it passed the case to Veterans Services Officer Roseann Trionfi-Mazzuchelli, who “took it and ran with it” during the week of Veterans Day. Pesce said he got the call two weeks ago asking him to preside.
He came in dress uniform. He retired in 2017, he said, and wears it once a year, on Veterans Day, “but the uniform still fits as long as I don’t take a deep breath.” He also read a letter from Maj. Gen. L. Scott Linton, commander of the Army Reserve’s 99th Readiness Division, which covers New England and part of the Mid-Atlantic states, calling the medal “a lasting testament to his courage.”
Select Board member Moses Grader read a town proclamation naming Nov. 13 a day of remembrance for Willard Jennings, and the family also received citations from the state House, the state Senate and the Executive Office of Veterans Services.
A Purple Heart town
A green “Marblehead Purple Heart Town” sign hung from the microphone stand. The Select Board voted unanimously in June 2024 to designate Marblehead a Purple Heart town, an honor from the Military Order of the Purple Heart that adds the town to the national Purple Heart Trail. Teresa Collins, founder of Wreaths Across America in Marblehead, proposed it and paid for four signs at the town’s entrances on Atlantic Avenue, Humphrey Street, Tedesco Street and Lafayette Street.
Francisco Ureña was one of six local recipients honored when the town marked the designation that August. A Marine veteran and former state secretary of veterans services, Ureña read the award citation Friday. He said he knows Sarah Jennings through a group in town.
“The Purple Heart is a medal that no service member wants to earn,” Ureña said. “It means you were injured or, in this case, paid the ultimate sacrifice.”
He asked the room to remember service members and Gold Star families who have yet to receive the recognition they are due.
Then Chris Jennings took the medal in its case, 82 years and 32 days after his grandfather died.
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