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95-year-old Eugene “Jake” Jacobsen of Shaver Lake, CA appears on episode #675 of Hometown Heroes, airing April 3-5, 2021. A native of Selma, CA, Jacobsen was wounded while serving with the 3rd Infantry Division during World War II.

“I was a puny little kid with asthma and couldn’t do the normal things,” you’ll hear him say of his childhood. “Even when I went in the service, I probably weighed about 105.”

You’ll hear how determined he was to become part of the war effort, eventually declining an additional agricultural deferment and hiding his history of asthma to leave his father’s raisin vineyard and join the Army after graduating from Selma High School in 1943. Becoming a replacement with the 3rd Infantry Division’s 15th Infantry Regiment meant that many of the men with whom he entered combat had already experienced extreme situations in North Africa, Italy, and Southern France. The 19-year-old soon surmised that the three most likely outcomes were that he would either be killed, captured, or wounded.

“You’re afraid. You’re scared,” Jacobsen explains. “You reach a point that you don’t figure you’ll come out of it alive.”

He spent the final weeks of 1944 fighting against SS troops who were trying desperately to maintain a Nazi foothold in the Alsace region, among the Vosges mountains in northeastern France. You’ll hear him describe wintery conditions that made digging foxholes difficult, and a promise he proposed while huddled in the snow near the village of Bennwihr.

“Lord, if you get me out of here alive, I’ll never complain about anything again,” Jacobsen remembers pledging in prayer in December, 1944. “I’ve tried to keep that.”

Jake recalls that promise in the video above, also explaining briefly what he is convinced was a divine response to his desperate plea, reflected in the details of the incident that earned the teenager his Purple Heart. Casualties suffered on a December 29th, 1944 mission left I Company with too few soldiers to carry out a patrol on December 30th. Cobbling together cohorts from three other units, they formed a big enough group to set out in the middle of the night, accompanied by four tanks.

Trying to navigate a French vineyard in the dark, his helmet and rifle proceeded to leave him tangled in the wires maintaining the vines. Jake knew that moving in behind a tank would help him avoid that hazard, but when fire from enemy mortars zeroed in on the tanks, shrapnel from one of those mortar shells struck his left hand. Bleeding badly, Jacobsen couldn’t move two of his fingers, because the tendons controlling them had been severed. After a thirty minute walk to an aid station, he was surprised when a medic asked him how his head was. The teenager had no idea that shrapnel had penetrated his helmet.

“There was a six-inch slit through the helmet and helmet liner and it hadn’t touched my head,” you’ll hear Jacobsen recall. “So I knew then that, you know, God had spared me again.”

He would spend the next three months in hospitals, later assigned to a military police unit that ended up spending six months in the Philippines after Japan surrendered. An operation after his discharge eventually attached the pinky and ring fingers on his left hand to a single tendon that lifts them both in unison. A post-war work injury cost him the tips of two fingers on his right hand, perhaps testing his pledge to never complain, but also redirecting his career back to the raisin industry. Listen to Hometown Heroes to hear the longtime Sun-Maid grower’s opinion of how to find the best tasting raisins. You’ll also hear what he’s looking forward to at age 95, as well as a principle his combat experience taught him that he has applied to the rest of his life.

“When you have tough things to do, you have to decide, with your own mind, what you’re gonna do through it,” Jake says of the kind of forethought that can prevent indecision in the moment. “You need to set that no matter what things you do. Decide. Decide the tough things.”

Thanks to Rishi Sharma of heroesofthesecondworldwar.org for introducing us to Mr. Jacobsen. You can view a YouTube excerpt of Rishi’s interview with Mr. Jacobsen below.
—Paul Loeffler