After his graduation from Morgantown’s University High, Jimmy Wickline left Scott’s Run near Osage to become one of the first casualties of an attempt to invade Nazi-occupied Holland called Operation Market Garden.

Wickline’s parachute failed to open when he jumped out of a Douglas C-47 transport plane on September 17th, 1944 with the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. 

He was 21 years old.

The goal was to drop in behind German lines to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine River so ground troops could invade Germany and liberate the Netherlands. 

The failed mission was documented in the 1977 movie, “A Bridge Too Far.” But it did eventually lead to the liberation of the Netherlands and became a jumping-off point for the Allied invasion of Germany.

Since 2002, when he was 13 years old, Maarten Vossen has been tending Pfc. Wickline’s grave at the American military cemetery in Margraten.  All 8,300 graves in the cemetery have been adopted and cared for by the grateful Dutch.

Maarten Vossen remembers his grandmother telling him stories as a child about what it was like to live in the Netherlands under Nazi rule. He also learned from other relatives about the bars of chocolate and smiles the Americans brought with them when they liberated the country in 1944.

Vossen got Wickline’s personnel file from the U.S. Total Army Personnel Command in 2003. That cranked up his research on his soldier.

He visited West Virginia in 2012, 2014 and 2015 in his quest for more information. He copied Wickline’s photo from the University High yearbook at the school.

Documentary filmmaker Marijn Poels heard about Vossen’s story through a member of the Dutch parliament. Poels plans to make a movie about the connection between two people who never met.