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The journal's 4-by-7-inch back cover was nearly filled with her photograph. The picture itself was black and white, but the photographer had tinted her cheeks pink and her lips dark red. She had signed it, 'Love, Laurie.' The pair met in the class of '41 at Winslow High School. 'He was a basketball player and I was a cheerleader,' she said. They had dated through high school and went to the prom together. Jones had given her his class ring but they weren't engaged, she said. He made his first diary entry while a private at Camp Elliott in San Diego, a little less than a year before he was killed. He described it as 'my life history of my days in the U.S. Marine Corps ... And most of all my love for Laura Mae for whom my heart is completely filled. So if you all get a chance please return it to her. I (am) writing this as my last life request.' Burlingame said she didn't know why she never got the diary. It apparently went first to a sister of Jones whom she didn't know well, she said. Robert Hunt of Evansville, the nephew who gave Jones' artifacts to the museum in 2001, told her he had received it several years after Jones' death and worried that passing it on to Burlingame might cause problems with her marriage. It wouldn't have, she said: 'My husband and Tommy were good friends.' From Daily Mail UK - Corporal Thomas 'Cotton' Jones had one 'last life request' before he was killed by a Japanese sniper on a South Pacific island in 1944: Please give my diary to Laura Mae Davis, the girl I love. Davis, 90, did get to read the diary, but not until last month - nearly seven decades later - when she stumbled upon it in a display case at the National World War II Museum. The New Orleans museum is currently holding an exhibit  dedicated to the 22-year-old machine gunner - her high school sweetheart - who was one of nearly 2,000 Americans killed in the bloody assault on the Japanese-held island of Peleliu during World War II. 'I didn't have any idea there was a diary in there,' said the Mooresville, Indiana, woman, and the discovery brought her to tears. Laura Mae Davis Burlingame, she married an Army Air Corps man in 1945, had gone to the New Orleans museum on April 24 looking for a display commemorating the young Marine who had been her first love. 'I figured I'd see pictures of him and the fellows he'd served with and articles about where he served,' she said. She was stunned to find her sweetheart's diary - a gift she had given him before he set off to war. Jones died on September 17, 1944, the third day of the U.S. assault on Peleliu, in Palau. The bloody operation was where U.S. forces learned the Japanese had changed their island defense tactics. Instead of concentrating units on the beaches and finishing with reckless banzai charges, the Japanese holed up in bunkers, trenches, pillboxes and caves, many of them blasted into the island's hills and mountains, that had to be taken one at a time. Jones, nicknamed in high school for his blond hair, was in the 1st Marine Division's L Company, 3rd Battalion. He was among 1,794 Americans killed on Peleliu and nearby islands in a 10-week assault that Marine Major General William Rupertus had predicted would be over in a few days Another 7,302 Americans were wounded. An estimated 10,900 Japanese were killed; 19 soldiers and sailors became prisoners of war. Another 283 POWs were laborers, mostly Korean.