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Staff Sergeant Roman Drapinski of 1468 South 10th Street, Camden, served with the 53rd Armored Engineer Battalion, 12th Armored Division, U.S. Army. Born in the United States in 1918 and raised and educated in Poland, he returned to Camden in 1938 and was killed on July 18, 1943 by a premature dynamite explosion while instructing soldiers at Camp Campbell.
A bronze plaque in the vestibule of St. Joseph Church at 10th and Liberty Streets in Camden, presented by the Catholic War Veterans, St. Joseph's Post 418, and dedicated April 3, 1949, honoring the parish's heroic war dead of World War II.
The Polish Heroes War Memorial at Cooper River Park in Pennsauken, N.J. (Park Drive and Route 130) unites three monuments — to Casimir Pulaski (1936, moved here 1984), Thaddeus Kosciusko (1984), and, since 1995, the members of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church of South Camden who died in World War II.
A 1944 Camden Courier-Post feature by Frank Sheridan on St. Joseph's Church (the Polish parish at Tenth and Mechanic Streets), whose 1,154 mothers gave sons and daughters to the war — four killed, two missing, one a prisoner — among them Joseph Piotrowski, lost when the cruiser Helena was sunk at Kula Gulf.
A service flag honoring 1,150 St. Joseph's Parish men and women in the armed forces was unfurled at Tenth and Mechanic Streets, where Mayor Brunner pinned gold stars on the mothers and a brother of parishioners killed or missing in World War II. Courier-Post, August 31, 1943.
The Camden Courier-Post reports the death of Staff Sgt. Roman Drapinski, 1468 South Tenth Street, killed by a premature dynamite explosion while giving instructions in its handling at Camp Campbell.