Scroll of Honor – Clarence Rhody

Engine Failure

Written by: Kelly DurhamClarence Rhody

The Rhody family of Starr was one of Anderson County’s  “patriotic families doing their utmost in the war effort.” According to the local newspaper, all three of the Rhody sons were in the service and the family’s two daughters were building B-26 Marauder bombers at the Glenn Martin Aircraft factory in Baltimore. The youngest son was Clarence Rhody, a member of Clemson’s Class of 1945.

Rhody arrived on campus with the last class to enroll before the United States was pulled into World War II.  An agriculture major, he was assigned to Company F, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment of the Cadet Corps.

In March 1943, Rhody volunteered for the Army Air Force.  He was one of four, out of a group of twenty, passing an entrance exam to qualify for the air corps. Rhody was channeled into training to become an aerial bombardier.  He attended basic training at the University of Alabama and completed subsequent advanced training assignments at Laredo, Texas; Biloxi, Mississippi; San Antonio, Texas; Nebraska; and Kansas.

After completing his training, Rhody was assigned to the 6th Bomb Squadron of the 29th Bomb Group.  The squadron was destined to receive the new B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber, but these were not yet available, so initially the aircrews trained on smaller, slower, older B-17s. Once it received its new B-29s, the 6th continued to train, because the new bomber was not simply an improved version of older designs.  According to B-29 pilot Chuck Sweeney, the Superfortress was “a technological marvel, an example of the supremacy of American science and engineering.  The B-29 was not just a collection of incremental improvements to existing aircraft design, a simple step in the evolutionary progress of any technology.  Incorporating scores of revolutionary advances, it was a quantum leap into the future.”  The new bomber featured a pressurized cabin, ten-ton payload, 300 mile per hour cruising speed at 30,000 feet, a centrally-controlled gunnery system, and “four giant, thirty-six cylinder Wright R-3550 engines.”  Those engines were among the reasons why, according to Sweeney, the B-29 “developed a reputation among some pilots as being unreliable and dangerous.”

The 6th spent two months learning to fly the complex new bombers before deploying to North Field on the Pacific island of Guam in January 1945.  North Field was a sprawling air base with four main runways and revetments for more than two hundred B-29s.  From Guam, the Japanese islands were within the combat radius of the B-29s.

B 29s on an air field

29th Bomb Group B-29s at North Field, Guam, 1945

The 6th conducted its first combat mission, an attack on Tokyo, on February 25, 1945.  Its high altitude, daytime bombing missions against strategic industries were not effective and the following month, the squadron switched to nighttime, low altitude incendiary attacks on area targets—Japanese cities.

On the night of May 13, 1945, Mothers’ Day, Second Lieutenant Rhody was the bombardier on First Lieutenant Frederick Bedford’s B-29, City of Baltimore. Their mission was an incendiary bombing raid on the city of Nagoya, a manufacturing and shipping hub in central Honshu.  About fifteen minutes after takeoff, one of the aircraft’s giant Wright engines failed.  By itself, the failure of a single engine did not constitute a major emergency, still it was sufficient to abort the mission and return to North Field. By the time City of Baltimore made it back into North Field’s traffic pattern, the weather had become “very bad and visibility very limited,” according to the aircraft’s radar officer, Second Lieutenant Dale Spencer. The bad weather and the dead engine made maneuvering the aircraft difficult.  The ship lost airspeed, drifted to the left of the runway, and crashed.  Eight of the eleven on board, including Rhody, were killed.  Spencer and two of the gunners from the aft section of the plane survived.

Second Lieutenant Clarence Henry Rhody was survived by his parents; his two brothers, both of whom were Army captains, one serving in Washington and one in England; and his two sistersClarence Rhody's grave stone working at the aircraft plant in, ironically, Baltimore.  Rhody was awarded the Purple Heart and after the war was reburied in the Silverbrook Cemetery in Anderson.

For more information on Clarence Henry Rhody see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/clarence-henry-rhody/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission by Charles W. Sweeney, Avon Books, 1997.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Harold Major, Jr.

B-24 Copilot

Written by: Kelly DurhamHarold Major

Harold Major, Jr. of Anderson enrolled as a freshman in the fall of 1942.  Major was an engineering student and a member of the Anderson County Club.  With the country at war, the future for his Class of 1946 was unsettled at best.  Rumors flew across campus that fall and in early spring came official word that all cadets would be ordered to active duty upon the completion of the academic year.

Major volunteered for Army Air Force flight training. Pilot training consisted of four phases.  In the primary phase, aviation cadets were taught basic flight skills while flying with an instructor pilot.  This phase also included classroom instruction on the principles of flight.  Basic training introduced cadets to formation flying, flight by instruments, aerial navigation, and cross country flying.  In the advanced phase, cadets flew more complex and powerful aircraft.  In this phase, pilots were designated for single engine or, in Major’s case, multi-engine assignments.  The final phase was transition training during which pilots spent two months learning to fly the type of airplane they would fly in combat.  In total, the pilot training regimen lasted about eleven months.

B-24Harold Major likely headed overseas as a B-24 bomber replacement pilot in late 1944.  He was assigned to the 448th Bomb Group at Seething, England about ten miles southeast of Norwich and twenty miles west of the English Channel.

On April 4, 1945, the 448th was alerted for a mission to bomb airfields in Germany.  When the regular copilot on First Lieutenant James Shafter’s crew was unable to participate on the mission, Second Lieutenant Major volunteered to take his place.  More than 1,400 heavy bombers escorted by 866 fighters departed airfields all over southeast England that morning.  Major’s B-24 was part of a 97 plane formation bombing Wesendorf Airfield about 24 miles north of Brunswick, Germany.  The B-24 was attacked by German fighters near the target and so heavily damaged that it could not remain in the air.  Observers from nearby aircraft reported between five and ten parachutes exiting the stricken bomber.  Lieutenant Major was believed to have bailed out of the aircraft, but reportedly, his parachute failed to open.  Originally reported as missing in action, he was later confirmed to have been killed.  Three weeks later, the 448th flew its last combat mission of the war.Harold Major's gravestone

Harold Major, Jr. was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his parents and after the war his remains were returned to Anderson where he was buried in Old Silverbrook Cemetery.

For more information on Second Lieutenant Harold Major, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/harold-major-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Joshua Ward Motte Simmons

In the Navy

Written by: Kelly Durham

It is no surprise given Clemson’s long history of Army ROTC that the vast majority, nearly 80%, of the men on the University’s Scroll of Honor served in the Army and the Army Air Force.  Despite the fact that Clemson has administered an Air Force ROTC program since the late 1940s, it is the Navy rather than the Air Force which lays claim to the next largest group of Scroll of Honor heroes.  Joshua Ward Motte Simmons of Newberry is one member of the Navy contingent, which comprises six percent of the Scroll of Honor.

View of Agriculture Hall from Boman Field

Agriculture Hall from Bowman Field https://digitalcollections.clemson.edu/

 

Simmons attended Clemson from 1904 to 1906 as an engineering major.  The young campus included few academic buildings. During Simmons’s time at Clemson, Agriculture Hall (now Sikes) was built, joining the Main Building (later Tillman Hall), Chemistry Building (Hardin Hall), Textile Building (Godfrey Hall) and Mechanical Hall. Enrollment was less than 600 cadets, all male, all white, and the majority from South Carolina.

Simmons left Clemson after two years and eventually made his way to Charleston.  When the United States entered World War I, Simmons joined the Navy.  Ensign Simmons served on two vessels, the USS Osceola and the USS Teal.

USS Teal

USS Teal

Osceola was a seagoing tug that steamed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and remained there as a station ship.  Teal was a minesweeper.  Launched in May 1918, Teal patrolled off the shores of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.  It is likely that Simmons’s service on Teal, operating in and out of northern ports, put him in contact with soldiers returning from the war.  In addition to their gear, many of these soldiers carried the influenza virus that in 1918 swept across much of the United States and the world and was known as the Spanish Flu.

The flu was particularly deadly among young adults whose lungs it would damage and who would then often develop pneumonia.  That may well be what happened to Simmons.  He was admitted to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia where he succumbed to pneumonia on March 14, 1919, at the age of 32.

Ensign Joshua Ward Motte Simmons was buried at Rosemont Cemetery in Newberry.  He was survived by his mother.  He was posthumously awarded the WorldSimmons' grave stone War I Victory Medal.

 

For more information on Joshua Ward Motte Simmons see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/joshua-ward-motte-simmons/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Henry Edward Cochran

High Esteem

Written by: Kelly DurhamHenry Cochran

Henry Edward Cochran of Donalds was held in high regard by his fellow members of the Class of 1937.  They elected him class president as a freshman and vice president as a sophomore.  As a senior, by which time they had come to know Cochran quite well, class members expressed their confidence by electing him to the Senior Disciplinary Council.  The vote was by secret ballot, making Cochran’s election a true reflection of the esteem in which he was held.  The Council served as the liaison between Clemson’s administration and its student body, seeking, according to Taps, to “find a smoothing remedy for all problems which might present themselves in the regular operation of a school year.”

Cochran was selected as the best drilled sophomore and was so consistently excellent that he was chosen for the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior platoons, consisting of the best drilled cadets in each of his four years on campus.  He was a member of Alpha Tau Alpha, the honorary agricultural education fraternity, the First Sergeants’ Club, and Scabbard and Blade, the military honor society.

After graduation, Cochran took a job as the agriculture teacher at Greeleyville High School. He married the former Margaret Parler of Beaufort and they had a daughter, Margaret Ann. Cochran was called to active duty in May 1942.

Cochran was assigned to the 406th Infantry Regiment of the 102nd Infantry Division organized that September at Camp Maxey in northeast Texas.  After two years of stateside training, the 102nd deployed overseas arriving at Cherbourg, France in September 1944.

The 102nd received additional training in France and then moved to the Dutch-German border in October.  In late November, the division attacked in strength toward the Roer River, reaching Welz, Flossdorf, and Linnich.  The division found itself to the north of the Battle of the Bulge and held the northern shoulder of the penetration while allowing other Allied units to move south to help blunt the German offensive.

On February 23, 1945, the 102nd resumed offensive operations by attacking across the Roer.  In fighting near Krefeld, First Lieutenant Cochran was killed on March 2.  The following day, his division reached the Rhine River.

First Lieutenant Cochran was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife and daughter, his mother, and four brothers, two of whom were then serving in the Army in France.  After the war Cochran’s remains were returned to South Carolina and buried in the Turkey Creek Baptist Church Cemetery in Ware Shoals.

For more information about Henry Edward Cochran see:   Henry Cochran's grave stone

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-edward-cochran/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Richard King Thackston

Dead Man’s Curve

Written by: Kelly Durham

Richard Thackston
Richard King Thackston of Greenville grew up on his family’s dairy farm off of Buncombe Road and graduated from Parker High School.  He enrolled at Clemson College as a member of the Class of 1933 but would not graduate with his class.  A dairy major, King Thackston joined the Dairy Club and was assigned to Company B of Clemson’s Cadet Brigade.  He was also a member of Kappa Phi Fraternity.  Thackston attended summer school at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, during the summer of 1932.  After graduating from Clemson in just three years, he continued his studies with post-graduate work at New York’s Cornell University.

Returning to Greenville, he managed Thackston Dairy which produced more than nine thousand bottles of milk daily.  He also immersed himself in community service.  He Head shot of Richard Thackston in a suitchaired Greenville County’s Live-at-Home program for farmers, served on the board of directors of Franklin Savings and Loan, and was a trustee of the Greenville County Library.  He was a member of the Rotary Club and served on the executive board of the Blue Ridge Council of the Boy Scouts.

As the United States reluctantly prepared for war, Thackston registered for the draft in October 1940.  Although Thackston’s cadet curriculum at Clemson had focused on infantry training, he would end up in the Navy.

In June 1942, Thackston applied for the Navy’s Aviation Cadet program.  Based on his education, business background, and glowing references, King was appointed a lieutenant, junior grade in the United States Naval Reserve on August 11, 1942.  He reported for instruction to the Naval Training School at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island on October 20.

Upon completion of his course of instruction at Quonset Point in mid-February 1943, Thackston received orders to proceed to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco for the first available transportation to the Pacific Theater where he was to report to the Commander, Air Force, Pacific Fleet for aviation intelligence duties.  Thackston’s orders authorized five days of leave prior to his departure.

On February 20, Thackston, his colleague Lieutenant (jg) James Joseph Britt, and Britt’s wife Margaret set out from Quonset Point for New York City where they planned to dine with Britt’s father.  Traveling in Thackston’s Chevrolet Coupe, the trio headed west on US Route 1.  In the vicinity of Madison, Connecticut, they reached Jannas curve, a hazardous bend in the road.

As Thackston guided his vehicle through the curve, the left front of his car clipped a tractor-trailer rig headed in the opposite direction. The collision caused Thackston to lose control of the car which crashed, seriously injuring all three occupants.  In those days before seat belts, Lieutenant (jg) Britt suffered cuts, bruises, and broken ribs.  Mrs. Britt’s pelvis and collar bone were broken.  Thackston’s injuries were the most serious:  two broken legs, several broken ribs, and a fractured skull.  All were taken to New Haven Hospital were Thackston was listed in critical condition.  The Britts survived their injuries, but Thackston died six days later.

The Navy’s official investigation into the accident noted that Jannas curve was “deceptive and dangerous.”  “The curve is not apparent to the driver of a car approaching” from the west, as Thackston was.  “There are no adequate signs to warn an approaching driver of the serious nature of the curve.”   The report said that there had been so many serious accidents there that the curve was “popularly known in the vicinity as ‘Dead Man’s Curve.’”  The Navy determined that Thackston’s and Britt’s injuries had occurred “not as the result of their own misconduct.”

Thackston’s story is a reminder of an often overlooked tragedy of American involvement in World War II: non-battle deaths made up approximately one-quarter of US military deaths.  Among Clemson men, the percentage was slightly higher, 26%.

Sixty-five Clemson men died during the war in non-battle aircraft accidents, most of them training accidents Stateside, but some in operational theaters while on non-combat missions.  Illness claimed at least thirteen and drownings, both during training exercises and leisure, accounted for seven more.  Two men were lost to friendly fire accidents and eight, including Thackston, to vehicle accidents.  One Clemson soldier was struck and killed by a train.  None of the more mundane ways people died took a hiatus during the war years.  The sacrifice of non-battle death was just as tragic, just as grievous, as death in combat.

Lieutenant (jg) Richard King Thackston was survived by his mother and two brothers, both then serving as officers in the United States Army.  He is buried in Greenville’s Christ Church Cemetery.

For more information about Richard King Thackston see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richard-king-thackston/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Thanks to Dr. Debbie Jackson for research assistance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Aquilla James Dyess

Heroism and Gallantry

 

Written by: Kelly DurhamJimmy Dyess

It was hot; the air thick with humidity and a breeze was blowing in from the ocean.  The forecast called for afternoon showers.  Young Jimmie Dyess, taking a break between his freshman and sophomore years at Clemson College, was enjoying the beach when his attention was attracted to a young woman in a bathing suit.  That made it a fairly typical summer day on Sullivan’s Island.  But this day was shaping up to be anything but typical.

Cries of distress jerked Jimmie Dyess’ attention toward Lucy Holley, who had been swept 600 feet out into the ocean and was in danger of drowning.  With every muscle in his body focused on reaching Miss Holley, Dyess pulled himself through the rough water.  Although a fit 20 year-old, Dyess was unaccustomed to swimming either in the ocean or for long distances. With arms and legs burning from exertion, Jimmie pushed himself until he reached Miss Holley.  With great effort, Dyess and another rescuer swam more than 400 feet holding Miss Holley between them until they reached the safety of shallow water.  For helping save Lucy Holley from drowning, Jimmie Dyess was awarded the Carnegie Medal for heroism.

Aquilla James Dyess returned to the sleepy, tree-shaded lanes of Clemson’s still young campus later that summer of 1928.   The Seneca River flowed below Fort Hill and the college grounds.  Hoke Sloan’s men’s store advertised “Gent’s Furnishings to Clemson Men at the Right Price,” but if you wanted to order a class ring, you had to venture farther down College Avenue to L. C. Martin Drug Company.

At Clemson, Jimmie, a native of Augusta, GA and an Eagle Scout, was already a recognized leader.  He’d been chosen by his sophomore class mates as their vice president.  He rounded out his rigorous architecture studies with extracurricular activities.  He played on the football team and was a member of the Block C Club.  As he progressed through his studies, Jimmie’s leadership qualities were frequently on display.  He served as president of the Inter-Fraternity Council and the Minaret (architecture) Club, on the class ring committee, and the Junior and Senior Dancing Clubs.  In the military arts and sciences he excelled.  As a junior, he was appointed a company first sergeant.  He competed as a member of the rifle team which he served as captain, and was an officer of the Sabre Club.  As a senior, Jimmie was promoted to cadet major and commanded the 1st Battalion.

Jimmy DyessFollowing his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve and his graduation from Clemson, Jimmie returned to Augusta where he joined his father’s lumber business and worked as a general contractor.  Jimmie married Connor Cleckley and was active in Augusta’s civic circles, even serving as assistant director of a boy’s summer camp.

In December 1936, the 19th Fleet Battalion, a reserve unit of the United States Marine Corps, was organized in Augusta.  Jimmie Dyess, based on his reserve commission earned at Clemson, was appointed a first lieutenant.  In 1937, First Lieutenant Dyess was awarded the bronze star as a shooting member of the Marine Corps Rifle Team which won the Hilton trophy in the National matches. The Marine Team won the same award in 1938 capturing the Rattlesnake trophy in the matches. By the time the battalion was mobilized in November 1940, Dyess had been advanced to captain.

Following mobilization, the 19th was split up.  Dyess was sent to Lakehurst, NJ for training in barrage balloon operations.  Once it was determined that the Marines wouldn’t be using the balloons, he was reassigned to Marine Corps Infantry, now as a major.  His outstanding abilities and performance soon earned him a further promotion to lieutenant colonel.

In December 1943, Jimmie was ordered to San Diego.  His wife Connor and their young daughter spent the Christmas holidays with him there before he sailed for the South Pacific in mid-January as part of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, a regiment of the 4th Marine Division.

After the fall of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea to the Allies in 1943, the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific became the next step in the Allies’ island-hopping march to Japan. The Marshall Islands had been German colonies until World War I after which they were governed by Japan under a League of Nations mandate. The Japanese closed the islands to the outside world and built fortifications throughout the atoll, however the precise extent of these fortifications was unknown. The Japanese regarded the Marshall Islands as part of the “outer ring” of Japan’s defensive perimeter and considered that any assault on them would be the first on “Japanese” soil.  The American attack on the Marshalls was code named Operation Flintlock.  The 4th Marine Division, including Dyess’ 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, was assigned to attack the island of Roi-Namur.

For Jimmie Dyess, the attack was another in a long line of leadership challenges—and it came with a premonition.  Shortly before the landing, Dyess visited in private with Buck Schechter, one of his company commanders.  Schechter, a young captain, had been admitted to the New York State bar before joining the Marine Corps in early 1940. Dyess called Schechter aside and confided that he expected to be killed in the coming battle.  He asked Schechter to help him make out his will.

The 4th Marine Division captured several islets on January 31 then landed on Roi-Namur on the first of February. The airfield on Roi, the eastern half of the island, was captured quickly, and Namur, the western half, fell the next day.   Throughout the battle, Dyess led his men from the front, encouraging and motivating them by his willingness to face the same withering enemy fire they faced. On February 2, while standing on the parapet of an anti-tank trench directing a group of his men in a flanking attack against the last Japanese position in the northern part of Namur Island, Dyess was killed  by a burst of enemy machine gun fire.

Dyess’ comrade-in-arms, Major Thomas Fry of Augusta, wrote that he saw “…Jimmie fall.  They picked him out from in front of his men as he led the attack. It was the bloodiest battle you can imagine, and he was out in front.  He was one swell guy and an officer the Marine Corps was proud of.”

The Marines weren’t the only ones proud of Jimmie Dyess.  The Medal of Honor citation signed by President Franklin Roosevelt memorialized the “gallantry and intrepidity” of this man who had again at the “risk of his life” performed heroic deeds. (Click for more details)

Jimmie Dyess was initially buried in the 4th Marine Division Cemetery on Roi-Namur Island, Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands.  In 1945, the destroyer USS Dyess (DD-880) was named in his honor.  In 1948, he was re-interred in Westover Memorial Park Cemetery, Augusta, Georgia.

Jimmie Dyess was survived by his mother, his wife, and their daughter.  In 1994, fifty years after his death, the Jimmie Dyess Parkway, connecting I-20 with the main gate at Fort Gordon in his hometown of Augusta, was dedicated.

Jimmie Dyess set his personal safety aside to help others live.  He remains the only person to have received both the Carnegie Medal for Heroism and the Congressional Medal of Honor.Jimmy Dyess grave stone

For more information about Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Dyess see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/aquilla-james-jimmie-dyess/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Otis Foster Morgan

The Heavy Debt

 

Written by: Kelly Durham

Clemson students of a later generation are familiar with the name of Otis Morgan who was killed in the last year of World War II.  They remember him not because of how he died, but because of how he lived.

Otis Foster Morgan arrived on campus during the Great Depression.  A civil engineering major from Laurens, Morgan was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Laurens County Club which he served as secretary.  He was associate editor of The Tiger and served as president of the Central Dance Association.  Morgan, a member of Alpha Chi Psi fraternity, was listed in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.  As a senior, he served as a cadet first lieutenant and company executive officer after completing ROTC summer training at Fort McClellan, Alabama.  After graduating on the final day of May 1938, Morgan lived briefly in Aiken before entering the Army.

Morgan was soon on his way to the Philippines.  Described by his friend Manny Lawton as a “neat, square-shouldered, aggressive lieutenant,” Morgan was assigned to a Philippine Scout unit.  He later moved to the 71st Engineer Battalion of the Philippine Army’s 71st Infantry Division.  The Philippine Army had been established only in 1935 as the Philippines formally became an American commonwealth on a pathway toward eventual independence.  The commander of the Philippine Army—as well as American forces in the archipelago—was former US Army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur.

The Japanese attack on the Philippines began on December 8, 1941.  American and Filipino forces were eventually pushed back onto the Bataan Peninsula.  Morgan’s 71st Infantry Division fell back to Corregidor, the rock island fortress in Manila Bay.  Outnumbered, with limited food and ammunition, and with no hope for resupply, Corregidor finally surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942.

Morgan, along with other American and Filipino survivors of Corregidor’s siege were marched north to the prisoner of war camp at Cabanatuan.  There Morgan was reunited with his Clemson classmate Ben Skardon.  Henry Leitner of the Class of 1937 was also present in the camp.

At its peak, 8,000 POWs occupied Cabanatuan, making it the largest such camp in the Philippines.  The compound covered about 100 acres divided by a road that ran through its center.  One side of the camp housed the Japanese guards and camp administration.  The other side held the prisoners and included a hospital nicknamed the “Zero Ward” because zero was the probability of coming out of it alive.

Ben Skardon’s health had deteriorated at Cabanatuan.  He had contracted beri beri and malaria and was suffering from diarrhea.  He had grown so weak that he could barely eat and was about to be committed to the “Zero Ward.”  Skardon’s story has been oft retold during the ceremony in which Clemson students receive their class rings.  Otis Morgan is at the center of the story.

“I was in very, very bad health in the prison camp,” Skardon recalled, “and there was no medicine and no way of improving your health.”  Leitner and Morgan kept Skardon alive by massaging his swollen feet and carrying him back and forth to the latrine.  Skardon had secreted his Clemson class ring by rolling it up in the sleeve of his uniform.  Morgan had learned a little Japanese and worked on a local farm as an “in charge,” a prisoner who could pass along instructions from the Japanese guards to their English-speaking prisoners.  To save his friend’s life, Morgan bartered Skardon’s ring for food.  “One evening Otis came in from the farm with a small can of potted ham and a live pullet-sized chicken.  Henry borrowed a tin pail, built a fire, and boiled the chicken.”  Skardon recalled that Morgan and Leitner took turns feeding him.  They even broke open the chicken’s bones and pulled out the marrow.  “My diarrhea dried up…my appetite was restored.”  Skardon regained his health and would survive his captivity.  Otis Morgan would not.

Oryoku Maru burning at Subic Bay after being attacked by planes from the carrier Hornet, December 15, 1944.

Morgan spent two years and seven months at Cabanatuan.  After American and Filipino forces returned to the Philippines in October 1944, the Japanese began to evacuate POWs, transporting them by merchant ship to become slave laborers in Japan.  Morgan, Leitner, and Skardon were among 1,619 prisoners aboard the Oryoku Maru at Subic Bay, Luzon when it was attacked by aircraft from the USS Hornet on December 15.  They survived the ship’s sinking but on Christmas Day were transported by train to San Fernando on Lingayen Gulf.  Two days later, the Clemson colleagues were loaded onto the Brazil Maru bound for Takao Harbor, Formosa.  Upon arrival there, Morgan and his fellow prisoners were transferred to yet another ship, the Enoura Maru.  On January 8, 1945, while still at Takao, this ship, which carried no markings identifying it as a POW transport, was attacked by aircraft from the Hornet.  Otis Morgan was killed when a bomb struck the port side hold.  He was buried in a mass grave along with 294 other POWs killed in the attack.  His remains were never repatriated.

First Lieutenant Otis Foster Morgan was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, a brother, and a sister.  He is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing, Manila American Cemetery, the Philippines and on the Memorial Wall at the Aiken County Veterans Park.

In the telling of Ben Skardon’s story, his Clemson ring often gets star billing.  “It saved my life,” Skardon said.  But Skardon always acknowledged the role of his Clemson comrades, Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan.  Their actions converted the ring into the nourishment that rescued him from the “Zero Ward” and offered him a chance for survival.  During their long, dark days of imprisonment, Leitner and Morgan ministered to their weakened friend, purchasing with their efforts a second chance for his life.  Speaking sixty years after the end of the war, Skardon summed up his feelings: “My debt to Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan is heavy—it cannot be repaid.”

For more information on Otis Foster Morgan see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/otis-foster-morgan/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – William Robinson Chapman

Skip Bomber

 

Written by: Kelly Durham

William Robinson Chapman came to Clemson with the intention of becoming a doctor. A pre-med major from Greenville, Chapman was the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Chapman and a graduate of Greenville High School.  During his two years on campus, Chapman participated in Alpha Phi Omega, the national service fraternity.  At the end of his sophomore year, Chapman joined most of Clemson’s cadets in bidding the campus “goodbye” for the duration of the war.

Chapman entered the Army Air Force in September 1943.  He trained as an air crewman and became a radio operator.  After completing his training in the States, Chapman shipped out for the Pacific Theater.

By 1944, the Allies had begun to push the Japanese back toward their home islands.  Great battles had already been won—and more were to come.

plane flying over water

A 405th Bomb Squadron B-25 skips its bombs across the water. Note the bomb at the bottom of the picture.

Chapman was assigned to the 405th Bomb Squadron of the 38th Bomb Group, part of the Fifth Air Force supporting General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping return to the Philippines.  Nicknamed the “Green Dragons,” the 405th flew B-25 Mitchell medium bombers.  Chapman’s squadron provided close air support to US ground forces during the liberation of the Philippines.  Later, it began a bombing campaign against industries and airfields on Japanese-occupied Formosa and attacked shipping along the southeast China coast, including along its rivers.  Flying abreast, B-25s would strafe enemy ships from low altitudes and utilize skip-bombing tactics, approaching their targets at low angles and skipping bombs along the water’s surface much like one would skim a stone.

During the summer of 1945, flying from airfields on Lingayen, the group attacked oil production facilities in Borneo.  After the conquest of Okinawa, the 38th relocated to Yontan air base from which it began attacks on industries and transportation targets in Japan on July 25.

With the conclusion of hostilities, the 38th deployed to Fukuoka on the north shore of the Japanese island of Kyushu as part of the occupation forces.  On December 26, 1945, Chapman was a member of the crew of a B-25 dispatched on a routine training mission.  Chapman was killed when the plane crashed.

He was survived by his parents.  His body was returned to Greenville where he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.William Chapman's grave stone

For more information about William Robinson Chapman see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/william-robinson-chapman/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Theodore Williams Gaines

Accidental Discharge

 

Written by: Kelly DurhamTeddy Gaines

Teddy Gaines was looking forward to returning home.  He had been in France for a year and a half, had seen the Great War through to its end, and was anticipating a reunion with his wife and their toddler daughter.  During a visit with his friend and comrade, Major H. C. Tillman, Teddy seemed “jolly” and “happy,” but within an hour, Gaines was dead.

Theodore Williams Gaines was an agriculture major and a member of Clemson’s Class of 1909.  After leaving Clemson, Gaines returned to his hometown of Greenwood and took employment as a cotton buyer for the Greenwood Cotton Mill.  The mill’s president, J. C. Self, described Gaines as “true blue, loyal, faithful, upright, and a friend.”

In June 1916, Gaines married Miss Wilhelmina Foell of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who was then the superintendent of the Greenwood Hospital.  Their daughter was born the following summer.

When a coastal artillery company was organized in Greenwood, Gaines was elected its captain.  He later resigned to devote his energies to business, but when the company was activated for federal service upon America’s entry into the World War, Gaines rejoined the outfit.  The Greenwood battery was assigned to the 61st Coastal Artillery Corps at Fort Moultrie before shipping out to France.

On December 17, 1918, Gaines was killed in his quarters by the accidental discharge of his pistol.  Major Tillman had visited with him only an hour earlier and noted that Teddy was looking forward to the prospect of returning home to his loved ones in Greenwood.  In a letter to Teddy’s father, Tillman described the shock of Gaines’s death and its impact on the unit.  “The entire regiment was if the wound had pierced each and every man. And so it had, for no man was so beloved or deserved it more.  And in death as in life, I say that he was the best of us all.”  Upon hearing the devastating news, Major Tillman at once sought to console Gaines’s brother, Milton, who was serving in the same battery.

A letter to Teddy’s family from Gerald Smart described the military funeral conducted in France.  Gaines’s body was covered with the American flag and rested on a bier in the town square where two thousand villagers paid their respects.  Smart added that “There was not a better liked man in the regiment…no one ever heard any man say evil of [Captain Gaines] who was loved by everyone.”

Teddy Gaines grave stoneTeddy Gaines was survived by his wife and daughter, his parents, four sisters, and three brothers, two of whom, Milton and Newt, were then serving in France.  He is memorialized at the Edgewood Cemetery in Greenwood.

For more information on Captain Theodore Williams Gaines see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/theodore-w-gaines/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

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Scroll of Honor – John Robert Southerlin

Transport Pilot

 

Written by: Kelly DurhamJohn Southerlin

John Robert Southerlin, Clemson College Class of 1941, helped military aviation come of age during World War II.  Rapid technological advances borne of existential conflict carried the state-of-the-art from fabric-covered biplanes to all-metal jets within a few chaotic years.  The roles of aviation expanded along with the achievements in aircraft design and manufacture.  In the Great War, airplanes had been used for scouting, or reconnaissance, and for primitive aerial bombing.  World War II saw the advent of fast, maneuverable fighters and heavy, long-range bombers.  The war was also the first time that aviation was used as a significant means of moving personnel and supplies within war theaters.  Army Air Force transport planes, piloted by Southerlin and his contemporaries,  carried paratroopers into battle, resupplied forward units, and moved military personnel all over the world.

Johnny Southerlin came to Clemson from Texarkana, Texas.  He majored in civil engineering and was a member of the campus chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Southerlin socialized with the Alpha Chi Psi fraternity and was in charge of decorations for the hops staged by the Central Dance Association.  He also ran track for three seasons.

Following graduation in early June, Southerlin reported for active duty with the Army Air Force.  He advanced through the phases of flight training and was designated as a multi-engine transport pilot.  Southerlin was assigned to the 16th Squadron of the 64th Troop Carrier Group.

Military planes in the sky over GermanyThe troop carrier groups were expanding the role of aviation by working with the newly formed airborne units to drop paratroopers directly into combat.  The 64th headed overseas in August 1942 as part of the first wave of American units to fly to Britain.  Soon after its arrival, the group participated in the November invasion of North Africa, landing paratroopers on the airfield at Maison Blanche in French Algeria on November 11 and at Duzerville airfield near Bone on the following day.  Subsequently, the air transport pilots ferried in fuel and anti-aircraft guns to help the paratroopers secure the airfields.

During the July 1943 invasion of Sicily, the 64th dropped paratroopers at Gela and Catania. Again, with the September invasion of Italy, the group delivered paratroopers over Avellino to destroy a key bridge on the German supply lines leading to Salerno.

In between dropping airborne forces into battle, the troop carrier group conducted resupply flights and ferried key personnel on planning, liaison, and other missions.  On November 24, 1943, the day before Thanksgiving, Southerlin was a passenger on a C-47 aircraft carrying personnel and freight from Maison Blanche to Oran, about two hundred fifty miles east along the North Africa coast.  At approximately 1000 hours, with the aircraft about fifteen miles out over the Mediterranean Sea, the right engine caught fire.  The bail out order was given, but the plane lost altitude too quickly for parachutes to be used.  The plane ditched in the water and, according to the accident report, “all personnel cleared the aircraft and attempted to don ‘Mae West’ life vests.”  Three passengers were rescued by a French fishing boat, but Southerlin was lost and was listed as killed.

First Lieutenant John Robert Southerlin was awarded the Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters indicating the completion of at least fifteen combat missions.  He is memorialized at the North Africa American Cemetery in Carthage, Tunisia and at Hillcrest Cemetery in Texarkana.John Southerlin's grave stone

For more information on John Robert Southerlin see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/john-robert-southerlin/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Henry Grady Stone, Jr.

Over “The Hump” Henry stone in uniform

Written by: Kelly Durham

The spring of 1942 was the low point of the Allies’ World War II experience in the Pacific.  Japanese forces had been victorious at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, the Gilbert Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya.  The Japanese violated Thailand’s neutrality and used it to stage an attack on Burma in a successful attempt to severe the Burma Road. This had been the only overland supply route serving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese regime in its war against the Japanese, a war which had been underway since 1937.  That spring of 1942, as Bataan and Corregidor fell, the Japanese captured Lashio, the southern terminus of the Burma supply route.  To keep their Chinese ally in the fight, the Allies made the consequential decision to resupply Chiang by air.  Half the world away, Henry Grady Stone, Jr. was making his own consequential choice.

“Gee” Stone was a junior general science major from Florence and a member of the Class of 1943.  He Henry Stone in pilot gearwas also a member of the Flying Cadets, an organization of junior and senior cadets who already possessed their private pilot’s licenses.  In that dark spring of 1942, Stone elected to depart Clemson and volunteered for the Army Air Force.  Stone advanced through flight training and was designated for multi-engine flying.  After earning his pilot’s wings, he completed Stateside assignments before deploying overseas in September 1944.  Stone was sent to the Air Transport Command’s India-China Division to help fly supplies over “The Hump” of the Himalaya Mountains and deliver them to the Chinese.

Flying the Hump was risky business.  On a clear day, “all” a pilot had to do was climb from just above sea level to as high as 15,000 feet to scale the jagged peaks.  Weather was often a factor as warm, humid air from the Indian Ocean collided with cold, dry air sweeping down from Siberia.  These air masses then collided with the world’s tallest mountain range resulting in violent up and down drafts that could flip airplanes over and send them streaking toward the ground.  And there were also the Japanese, who fully realized the benefits of the aerial resupply effort to their Chinese enemy.  Japanese fighters contributed to the startlingly high losses of the unarmed transport planes flying the India to China route. Initially, the Hump had been flown by DC-3 commercial aircraft commandeered from Pan American World Airways, but by the time of Stone’s arrival, the Air Force was flying military aircraft like the familiar C-47 Dakota and the larger C-54 Skymaster.  One other aerial hauler in use, the C-87, was described as “an evil bastard contraption.” It was nothing, wrote aviation author Ernest Gann, like the B-24 bomber on which it was based.  The C-87’s electrical and hydraulic systems frequently failed at the extreme cold of the high altitudes required by the Hump.  Cockpit illumination was often lost during takeoffs, and the heating system on the flight deck produced either stifling heat or none at all.  These flaws aggravated the C-87’s accident rate which was 500% higher than that of the C-54.  Nonetheless, the exigency of the supply mission required that all available aircraft remain in service.

On November 13, 1944, First Lieutenant Stone was assigned as the copilot of a C-87 loaded with supplies and bound for Chengtu, China. C-87 airplane  The airplane lifted off from Jorhat Air Base at 2017 hours.  Takeoff appeared to be normal with the engines running smoothly, but thirty seconds into the flight, between one and two miles from the end of the runway, the C-87 crashed, exploded, and burned, killing Stone and the two others aboard.  An investigation concluded that the airplane took off with its flaps extended, increasing its drag and making it impossible to quickly climb.  In addition, the investigators determined that the landing gear and the flaps could not both be retracted at the same time, so the extended gear added to the already increased drag further amplifying the difficulty of remaining aloft.  It was Stone’s thirteenth mission.

First Lieutenant Henry Grady Stone, Jr. was survived by his parents and a sister.  In 1948, his body was removed from the American Military Cemetery at Jorhat, India and returned to Florence where he was buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery.Henry Stone's grave stone

For more information on Henry Grady Stone, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-grady-stone-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Dixon Franklin Pearce, Jr.

Targeting Oil

Written by: Kelly Durham

When Clemson’s cadets left campus at the end of the spring semester in May 1943, returning in the fall was not an option for most.  The War Department had directed that college-age men report for active duty.  College campuses across the country were converted into classrooms for advanced technical training to meet the needs of the armed forces.  Dixon Franklin Pearce, Jr., a junior chemistry major from Greenville, entered the Army that same month.  Pearce volunteered for the Army Air Force, completed his basic training, and then attended navigator school.  He emerged in April 1944 as a second lieutenant and in July was sent to England, where he joined the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force.

By the time of Pearce’s arrival in England, the Eighth Air Force was at the peak of its wartime strength with more than 200,000 personnel, forty heavy bomber groups, fifteen fighter groups, and four specialized support groups.  Second Lieutenant Pearce was assigned to the 94th Bomb Group, operating from Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, less than fifty miles from the English Channel.

The Eighth Air Force had suspended its strategic bombing campaign to target transportation networks, railroads, and bridges in support of the D-Day invasion of Normandy in early June.  By the time of Pearce’s arrival, the Eighth had switched back to targeting the German oil industry.  Having achieved air superiority, the Eighth’s heavy bombers pounded petroleum related targets throughout Germany and as far to the east as Hungary.  The intent of the campaign was to cripple Germany’s war making capabilities by drying up its fuel tank.

By November, Pearce had been awarded the Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters suggesting that he had completed at least fifteen combat missions.  On November 3, he was promoted to first lieutenant.

The following day, Pearce and his crew, led by pilot Harry Hummel, were ordered on Mission 700 to bomb enemy oil installations in western Germany.  Flying aboard a B-17G nicknamed St. Christopher’s Kids, Pearce and crew set out with more than eleven hundred heavy bombers on the long flight to Hamburg, Germany.  More than a thousand of the bombers that started out on the mission reached their targets, dropping nearly three thousand tons of bombs.

St. Christopher’s Kids was hit by German anti-aircraft fire, damaging two of the airplane’s engines and making it impossible for the aircraft to keep up with its formation.  After clearing the North Sea coast, the aircraft reported that it was attempting to turn back for a landing in Holland, then still occupied by the Germans.  Shortly after that transmission, the aircraft radioed that it would instead ditch in the sea.  The stricken airplane, continuing to lose altitude, radioed Air Sea Rescue.  At 1342 hours, St. Christopher’s Kids last reported its position as north of Terschelling, one of the West Frisian Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands.

No rescue was affected.  The nine crewmembers of St. Christopher’s Kids were among forty-six Eighth Air Force personnel listed as missing in action on Mission 700.  Pearce’s crew was never recovered.

Pearce was awarded the Purple Heart and a third oak leaf cluster to his Air Medal, indicating that he had flown twenty of the thirty-five combat missions required to complete a tour of duty.  He was survived by his parents and two brothers, one of whom was serving in the Navy.  First Lieutenant Pearce is memorialized at the Netherlands American Cemetery, Margraten, Netherlands and at the Springwood Cemetery in Greenville.

For more information on First Lieutenant Dixon Franklin Pearce, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/dixon-franklin-pearce-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – George Hermon Fairey

Remain in School

Written by: Kelly Durham

College seniors generally find themselves looking ahead to the next phase of their lives—where they will live and what kind of job they will have.  As Clemson’s Class of 1943 began its final semester, most of the young men knew that the next phase of their lives would be spent in military uniforms.  What they were unsure of was just how quickly that next phase would begin.

Headline from The Tiger newspaper
As Americans were fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa and the Japanese in New Guinea and at Guadalcanal, the headline in The Tiger on January 7, 1943, reported that Juniors and Seniors would remain in school until the end of the semester and would then be called to active duty.  That meant that George Harmon Fairey of Kingstree and his classmates would be allowed to finish their degrees and graduate before swapping cadet gray for Army khaki.

Harmon Fairey was a dairy major and an honors student.  He was a member of Alpha Zeta, the national agriculture honor fraternity.  He flew with the Flying Cadets, marched with both the Junior and Senior Platoons, and socialized with the Williamsburg County Club.  In the Cadet Brigade, Fairey served as a first lieutenant.  He graduated on May 24, 1943, and then awaited his orders to report for active duty.

Fairey entered active duty on August 4.  He was ordered to Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.  Next, he was assigned to Fort Blanding, Florida where he trained Japanese-American soldiers.  In August 1944, Fairey shipped overseas.  He was assigned to a tank battalion in France at a time when American and Allied forces were advancing rapidly toward the east and the German frontier.  On the final day of September, Second Lieutenant Fairey was killed in action.

Second Lieutenant George Harmon Fairey was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, the former Bernice Tucker, his parents, two brothers, and three sisters.  After the war, Fairey’s remains were returned to Kingstree and buried in the Williamsburg Presbyterian Cemetery.

For more information on George Harmon Fairey see:George Harmon Fairey's gravestone

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/george-harmon-fairey/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Ronald Brian Ritchie

Instrument Training Flight

Written by: Kelly Durham

By the fall of 1972, as America prepared to cast ballots for President Richard Nixon or his challenger, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, Brian Ritchie had already served in Vietnam and returned to the relative safety of a stateside assignment.

Ronald Brian Ritchie was a biology major from Columbia and a member of the Class of 1969.  He married Clemson alumna Teresa “Terry” Charles in June 1967.  Their daughter Lynn was born in September 1968.

Ritchie was a Navy lieutenant (junior grade) assigned to Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 33 as a naval flight officer.  In Vietnam, the squadron provided carrier-based electronic countermeasure services to the fleet.  The 33rd returned to Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia in 1970.  Its new mission was to simulate electronic threats to units of the fleet.  Participating in exercises, the 33rd’s aircraft would simulate missiles and jamming radars.

Ritchie was a naval flight officer specializing in airborne weapons and sensor systems and flew as part of the three-man crew on the A3 Skywarrior, a jet-powered strategic bomber also known as the “Whale” as the heaviest aircraft to operate from Navy carriers.  Initially used as a nuclear-armed strategic bomber, its mission was redefined with the development of effective ballistic missiles.  By the middle 1960s, the A3’s role was as a tactical bomber, aerial reconnaissance platform, and electronic warfare aircraft.

On October 10, 1972, Ritchie was assigned to a routine instrument training flight originating in Norfolk with an intended destination of Pensacola, Florida.  Shortly after takeoff, the pilot radioed Norfolk requesting to cancel his flight plan and return to base immediately.  Before he could return, the aircraft went into a dive and crashed in an unpopulated, wooded area two miles west of Holland, Virginia.  One crew member, Lieutenant (junior grade) Jeffrey Haushalter, managed to eject, but though his parachute deployed, he did not survive.  Ritchie and the other crewmember, Lieutenant (junior grade) David Grant, were also killed.

Ritchie was survived by his wife and daughter.  He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

For more information on Lieutenant (junior grade) Ronald Brian Ritchie see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/ronald-brian-ritchie/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Claude Sims Lawson, Jr

After the Fighting Stopped

 

Written by: Kelly DurhamClaude Lawson

Hostilities in the Pacific theater had been suspended pending the formal surrender of the Japanese.  That ceremony was still a week away, but Captain Claude Sims Lawson, Jr. and his B-29 crew continued to fly missions—only now their focus was on dropping supplies, not bombs.

Lawson, an engineering major from Birmingham, Alabama, was a member of Clemson’s Class of 1944.  After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Lawson left Clemson and joined the Army Air Force.  He applied for flight training and was accepted.  As he progressed through basic, primary, and advanced flight schools, he was channeled into multi-engine bombers.

Lawson was assigned as a pilot to the 502nd Bomb Group (Very Heavy) which was organized in early 1944.  The group was destined to receive the Army Air Force’s newest—and most expensive—bomber, the B-29 Superfortress.  There were problems with the new bombers which had slowed production, so initially the 502nd trained with B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers.

In the fall of 1944, the 502nd began to receive B-29B bombers manufactured in Marietta, Georgia.  The B version of the B-29 was stripped of its high-tech electrically-fired gun system and other components in an effort to reduce weight and lessen the strain on the aircraft’s temperamental engines and airframe.  Lighter and more streamlined with the elimination of gun turrets, the B-29B’s top speed increased to 364 miles per hour.  The B variant was also equipped with the new AN/APQ-7 radar which provided a clearer ground image for bombing in poor visibility.

The 502nd deployed to the Northern Mariana Islands in late 1944, but rather than attacking the enemy, the group was put to work building Quonset huts to house barracks, mess halls, shops, and other facilities required for the operations of the unit.  During the long interval between arriving in theater and the group’s first combat mission, Lawson likely learned of the death of his brother Bob.  Bob had followed Claude to Clemson in 1941 and had been killed in action fighting the Germans in Europe.  Claude’s group finally began combat missions on the last day of June 1945.  Throughout July and the first half of August, the 502nd flew very long range strategic bombardment missions over Japan.  Combat missions ended in mid-August when Japan capitulated.  By late August, Lawson had been promoted to Captain and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

The end of hostilities did not mean the end of flight operations.  B-29s, with their ability to carry heavy loads over long distances, were pressed into service to fly supplies to Allied POWs in Japanese captivity.  Supplies were dropped by parachute into POW camps in Japan.

On Sunday, August 26, Captain Lawson and his crew picked up a load of cargo parachutes at Florida Blanca Airfield in the Philippines and departed for the long return flight to the Marianas.  Their intended final destination was Isley Field on Saipan.

Lawson’s B-29, Temper Eleven, flew eastward into the night.  According to the official accident report, the aircraft landed first at Northwest Field on Guam.  It then departed Guam at 2247 hours for the short 100 mile hop to Saipan.

Poor visibility, stormy weather and night instrument problems combined to make Lawson’s first approach to Isley Field unsuccessful.  A second attempt ended at 0037 hours on Monday morning when Temper Eleven crashed into the side of Mount Tapochau about five miles north of the airfield.  Lawson and his nine crewmen were killed. The Japanese signed the surrender documents six days later.

Lawson’s remains were recovered from the crash site.  He was buried at the National Memorial of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lawson was survived by his parents and their third Grave stoneson, William, then serving in the Marines.  He and Bob are among the five sets of brothers listed on Clemson’s Scroll of Honor.

For more information on Captain Claude Sims Lawson, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/claude-sims-lawson-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Walter Cleo Williams, Jr.

Quick Reflexes

Written by: Kelly Durham

Since the 1830s, Amchitka near the western end of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, has been uninhabited.  The one hundred sixteen square mile island is bordered on the north and east by the Bering Sea and on the south and west by the North Pacific.  Frequently stormy, Amchitka is covered by clouds ninety-eight percent of the time.  It is a barren, inhospitable place, but during World War II was the home of an Army Air Force base commanded by Clemson alumnus Walter Cleo Williams, Jr. from Swansea.

“Dub” Williams possessed the quick reflexes of a two-sport letterman. A member of Clemson’s Class of 1941, Williams was a guard on Coach Rock Norman’s basketball squad and played baseball for Coach Randy Hinson.  A general science major, he was a member of the Block “C” Club and marched with the Pershing Rifles.  As a junior, Williams was selected as the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment’s best drilled sergeant.

Immediately following graduation, Williams entered the Army Air Corps.  He received his primary flight training in Texas where he was appointed captain of his aviation cadet class.  Graduating to advanced training at Randolph Field, Williams served as cadet battalion commander.  In January 1942, Williams earned his pilot’s wings at Kelly Army Airfield near San Antonio.

Williams was assigned as a transport pilot and sent to Patterson Field in Ohio.  He served as a check pilot for various types of Army aircraft and was assigned as the engineering officer at air bases in Sumter and in Avon Park, Florida.  In early 1944, Williams was ordered north to Alaska, where he assumed duties as air inspector for Army airfields in the Aleutians.  By August of that year, Major Williams was serving as the acting commander of the Army airfield on Amchitka.

Although the Allies mostly considered the Aleutians a distraction, the June 1942 seizure of some of the western Aleutians by the Japanese forced joint American and Canadian efforts to regain the territory.  US planners decided to build a series of airfields in the Aleutians from which Allied forces could bomb the Japanese invaders.  One of these airfields was on Amchitka.

American forces landed unopposed there in January 1943 and by mid-February, the airfield was operational, despite bad weather.  Although fighting in the Aleutians was over by the end of July when the Japanese evacuated their remaining troops, the US continued to maintain bases there.

On the afternoon of August 29, 1944, Major Williams piloted a UC-64A Norseman aircraft on a routine personnel ferry flight from Kiska bound for the Army airfield at Adak, about 170 miles to the east.  On takeoff, with seven passengers onboard, the aircraft’s engine backfired twice.  Flames shot from its exhaust.  Williams radioed the control tower that he was returning to land, but on final approach the aircraft was too low.  Williams turned the Norseman to the right, away from the onrushing ground and toward the lower elevation of Salmon Lagoon.  The aircraft crashed at the edge of the water, hitting on its left wing and landing gear.  The plane came to rest on its back.  All of the passengers survived due to Williams’s quick reflexes, but he was killed in the crash.  Accident investigators attributed the accident to the loss of engine power and absolved Williams of fault.

Major Walter Cleo Williams, Jr. was survived by his wife, the former Margaret Wright of Honea Path, and their daughter Peggy.

For more information on Walter Cleo Williams, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/walter-cleo-williams-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Allen Jackson Snead

Twice Wounded

Written by: Kelly Durham

His was the first American regiment to land in French Morocco during the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.  Allan Jackson Snead of Greenwood continued to serve in the 47th Infantry Regiment from Morocco to Sicily to Normandy.  Along the way, he would be wounded  twice.

Snead was a civil engineering major and a member of Clemson’s Class of 1941.  He was a member of the Greenwood County Club, the YMCA Council, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Snead qualified as a sharpshooter at ROTC summer training at Fort McClellan, Alabama and served as a cadet Second Lieutenant in Clemson’s Cadet Brigade his senior year.

Following graduation on June 2, 1941, Snead reported for active duty as the United States raced to build up its Army in response to the threat of the expanding war in Europe.  Snead was assigned to the 47th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division.  After Stateside training, the regiment shipped out in October 1942.  Its destination was French Morocco where it landed in November as part of Operation Torch.  Snead’s outfit was among the first American ground units to be committed to combat against the Axis forces in the European war.

In April 1943, as the Germans and Italians were squeezed between General Eisenhower’s forces in the west and General Montgomery’s Eighth Army advancing from the east, Snead was wounded.  He rejoined the 47th in time to participate in Operation Husky, the July invasion of Sicily.

The regiment remained in Sicily after Axis forces escaped from the island to the Italian mainland.  Rather than joining the invasion of Italy, the 47th along with the rest of the 9th Infantry Division, was ordered to England for reorganization, replacements, and retraining in preparation for the war’s penultimate mission, the invasion of France.

Snead and the 47th crossed the English Channel, landing on Utah Beach four days after D-Day.  As part of General “Lightning Joe” Collins’ VII Corps, the regiment helped liberate the Cotentin Peninsula by sealing off its base to prevent German reinforcements from breaking through to relieve the port of Cherbourg.

After taking part in the capture of Cherbourg, the regiment was ordered south to join in the effort to liberate Saint-Lô and the junction of key roads General Omar Bradley’s US First Army needed to affect a breakout from the Normandy beachhead.  On July 25, First Army executed Operation Cobra which punched a hole in the German lines and allowed American forces to move south into better country for the maneuver of armored forces.  The 47th moved south to the area around Gathemo.  On August 2, First Lieutenant Snead was leading a machine gun platoon along a road when he was seriously wounded.  He was evacuated to the 42nd Field Hospital and then transferred to a hospital in England where he died on August 16.

Allan Jackson Snead was survived by his parents.  After the war, his remains were returned to Greenwood where he was buried in Magnolia Cemetery.

For more information on First Lieutenant Allan Jackson Snead see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/allan-jackson-snead/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Joseph Herschel Brown

An Unprecedented RepatriationJoseph Brown

Written by: Kelly Durham

Joseph Herschel Brown attended Clemson College from 1931 to 1934, during the worst years of the Great Depression.  Brown was a mechanical engineering major from nearby Liberty assigned to Company H of the Cadet Brigade.  A member of the Class of 1935, he did not return to campus for what would have been his senior year.

We know little about Brown’s post-Clemson life.  He married the former Marion Eloise Alexander.  He joined the Army before the United States became involved in World War II and by August 1942 was serving in the Army Air Force in the Pacific Theater.

Captain Brown died on August 20, 1942, from non-battle causes that remain obscured by the passage of the years.  Brown was buried near his Pacific duty station, but that’s not the end of his story.

Historian Rick Atkinson writes, “In 1947, the next of kin of 270,000 identifiable American dead buried overseas would submit Quarter-master General Form 345 to choose whether they wanted their soldier brought back to the United States or left interred with comrades abroad. More than 60 percent of the dead worldwide would return home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 per body, an unprecedented repatriation that only an affluent, victorious nation could afford.”  The cost would be about $7,000 in 2021 money.

Brown’s body was one of those headed home.  He was reinterred in Woodlawn Cemetery in Greenville.  The final resting places of approximately 130 Clemson men lost in World War II remain scattered around the globe.  More than one-third of Clemson’s World War II dead lie buried beneath the green, neatly manicured lawns of American military cemeteries in France, Belgium, Italy, Hawaii, and the Netherlands, the sandy plains of North Africa, or the rolling blue depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  The remains of 40 of these men have never been accounted for.

For more information about Joseph Herschel Brown see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/joseph-herschel-brown/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, by Rick Atkinson, 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Irvin William West

From D-Day to Saint-Lô

Written by: Kelly DurhamIrvin West in uniform

First Lieutenant Irvin William West sailed for Europe in May 1944, just in time for the largest amphibious operation in history, the D-Day landings in Normandy.  West was assigned to the 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division.  The 116th, which traced its lineage to the Virginia Militia of the colonial period, was drawn from Virginia National Guard units, a fitting assignment for West who hailed from Richmond.

Although his hometown was Richmond, West was no stranger to South Carolina where he spent much of his childhood and where his father was in the lumber business.  West was a member of the Class of 1942, the first to leave campus after the United States entered World War II.  A general science major, West was an honor student.  He served as a cadet First Lieutenant assigned to I Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment in the Cadet Brigade.  He completed ROTC camp at Clemson in the summer of 1941, qualifying as a marksman on the firing range.  Immediately following graduation and his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the infantry, West reported for active duty.

West served at Army posts in Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Missouri.  He also found the time to marry the former Alice Monroe of Marion before heading overseas in the critical spring of the European war.

On D-Day, the 116th Infantry was in the first wave, landing on the DOG sectors of Omaha Beach.  No American regiment suffered more grievously.  Fifty-six percent of A Company, most of whose men were from the town of Bedford, Virginia, were killed within the first minutes of landing on DOG-Green beach.  By the end of D-Day, the 116th had suffered casualties of more than thirty-five percent.  But the end of the day didn’t mean the end of the fighting.  The regiment moved to Pointe du Hoc to reinforce the Rangers who had earlier scaled its sheer cliffs and who faced a long night of German counterattacks.  The 116th was finally withdrawn to a rest area on June 11.  There it reorganized and received replacement officers and soldiers.

Over the following days, as the Allied buildup of troops, vehicles, and supplies streamed across the beaches and crammed into the beachhead, commanders struggled with how to breakout of the restrictive hedgerow country with its thick hedge barriers at the edge of every field.  General Omar Bradley, commander of the US First Army, focused his attention on seizing the road network converging at the town of Saint-Lô, about forty kilometers south of the invasion beaches.

On June 13, the 116th moved forward crossing the Ellé River and advancing toward Saint-Lô.  By June 17, the regiment was still three miles from its objective as the Germans made effective use of Normandy’s hedgerows to bog down the American advance. Saint-Lô was finally captured on July 19, two days after First Lieutenant West’s twenty-fifth birthday and one day after he was killed.

The capture of Saint-Lô came at a high price.  From D-Day through July 19, the 116th suffered eighty-one percent killed, wounded, or missing.  But the seizure of the town and its network of roads readied Bradley’s forces for Operation Cobra, the combined arms operation that would commence July 25 and result in the long anticipated breakout from the Normandy beachhead.  “I have a hunch,” wrote correspondent Ernie Pyle, “that July 25 of the year 1944 will be one of the great historic pinnacles of this war.  It was the day we began a mighty surge out of our confined Normandy spaces, the day we stopped calling our area the beachhead and knew we were fighting across the whole expanse of France.” After Cobra, the Germans would be forced to begin their long retreat to the borders of the Third Reich. Irvin West's Grave marker

Irvin William West was survived by his mother and his wife.  After the war, his body was returned to South Carolina where he was buried in Marion’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

For more information on First Lieutenant Irvin William West see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/irvin-william-west/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also The Battle of the Generals: The Untold Story of the Falaise Pocket—The Campaign that Should Have Ended World War II, by Martin Blumenson, 1993, and The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II, by Alex Kershaw, 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Wilson Harvey Smith, Jr.

Contract Pilot

Written by: Kelly Durham

Wilson Harvey Smith, Jr. of Charleston  attended his hometown college, The Citadel, for two years before enrolling at Clemson as a member of the Class of 1965.  At Clemson, Smith served as president of Beta Sigma Chi, the old Charleston County Club which had evolved into a service fraternity.  A civil engineering major, he was a member of both the Society of American Military Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Smith also had a passion for flying which he nurtured as a member of the campus Aero Club.  This passion would lead Smith to an unusual career.

After graduation, Harvey Smith joined the Coast Guard, serving for two years, including time as a member of the Presidential Honor Guard in Washington.  He then took a job with an engineering firm working on a government contract in Vietnam.  Upon his return to the States, Smith renewed his passion for flying and attended aviation school in Santa Barbara, California.  His flight school classmate, Gerald Brenc, remembered Smith as an innovative thinker and visionary spirit.  He and Smith often flew together to accumulate flight hours.  After he earned his multi-engine pilot certificate, Smith accepted a pilot’s job with Continental Air Services, Incorporated or CASI.  CASI was a subsidiary of Continental Airlines which was under contract to the Central Intelligence Agency to provide airlift support during the conflict in Laos.

A CASI Pilatus Porter in Laos

On July 14, 1973, Smith was flying from Vientiene, Laos on what was ostensibly a mission to drop rice in support of the Agency for International Development.  In reality, Smith and his observer were taking aerial photographs for intelligence purposes.  Their airplane, a Pilatus Porter, crashed into a mountain near the village of Muang Phoum, about 130 kilometers northeast of Vientienne.

Smith’s fellow CASI pilot, Richard Bridges, speculated that the crash might have been caused by a faulty pitch control mechanism on the aircraft’s propeller.  Bridges said that the same mechanical problem had contributed to other Porter accidents.

Smith was survived by his wife, LeShia and their daughter, Lyn.  His body was recovered and returned to Charleston for burial in Magnolia Cemetery.

For more information on Wilson Harvey Smith, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/wilson-harvey-smith-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Clifford Gormley and Daniel Pope

Staggering Statistics; Staggering Sacrifices

Written by: Kelly Durham

The figure is staggering: the Army Air Forces averaged 1,170 aircraft accidents per month during World War II—not including losses from combat.

 At its peak strength, the Army Air Forces consisted of 2.6 million people and nearly 80,000 aircraft, ranging from simple, single engine trainers to the complex, state-of-the-art, four-engine B-29 Superfortress.  The urgent need for airplanes, fuel, ammunition and above all pilots and crews meant that training regimens were kept to a minimum.  Capable flyers were needed to fight the enemy—not punch holes in the skies over the United States.  As a result, accident rates were high, very high compared to modern tolerances.  The workhorse heavy bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, averaged 30 and 35 accidents per 100,000 flight hours compared to modern Air Force accident rates of less than 2.

Clemson classmates Clifford Gormley and Daniel Pope were two victims of one such accident.

Gormley, left, and Pope

Gormley and Pope were members of Clemson’s Class of 1939 and were both islanders:  Gormley was a Rhode Island Yankee; Pope hailed from Edisto. “CJ” Gormley was a textile chemistry major and a member of Phi Psi honorary society.  He was a cadet second lieutenant as a senior and was a member of the rifle team.  Pope was a cadet captain and company commander.  He majored in agricultural engineering and served as president of ASAE and business manager of the Agrarian, the student publication of the School of Agriculture.  He was a member of the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior Platoons and Tiger Brotherhood.

Following graduation, Gormley returned to Rhode Island, where he enlisted as an Aviation Cadet in the Army Air Corps.  He trained to become a pilot and received his wings at Maxwell Field, Alabama in June 1940.  He was released from the service but recalled to active duty in July 1941 as the Army embarked on its rapid, pre-war expansion.  Gormley was assigned to the Air Corps Advanced Flying School.  Following service in the states and overseas he was assigned to the Smyrna Air Army Airfield, where he became a pilot instructor.

Pope enlisted as an Aviation Cadet in December 1940, and was accepted by the Air Force for pilot training.  Army Air Forces pilot training was evolving by this time as the service’s leaders developed equipment, airfields, training doctrine and cadre to prepare an ever-growing number of pilots and air crewmen for the looming conflict.  Flight training was divided into stages, the first being pre-flight, which was a six-week “boot camp” focused on physical fitness and basic military training. Cadets were taught the mechanics and physics of flight and required to pass refresher courses in mathematics and physics. They were evaluated for 10 hours in a flight simulator and then performed a one-hour dual flight with a pilot-instructor. Those who passed were given Cadet Wings and promoted to Primary Pilot Training.  Here, cadets were taught basic flight using two-seat training aircraft.  Successful cadets would finish this stage with 60-65 hours of training and would be sent to Basic Pilot Training.  Formation, cross-country, and night flying were taught in this phase using single-engine training aircraft.  Seventy more flight hours would be accumulated before the cadet moved up to Advanced Pilot Training.  Here, cadets would receive an additional 75-80 flight hours in advanced single-engine aircraft or, for those going into bombers or transports, in twin-engine trainers.  In the final phase, Transition Pilot Training, pilots would get two months of flying in either operational fighters or bombers based on their anticipated combat assignments.

Two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army authorized the construction of a bomber training base at Smyrna, 25 miles southeast of Nashville, Tennessee. By the middle of 1943, the Army Air Forces’ 660th School Squadron (Special) was conducting transition training for pilots who would soon fly the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber in combat theaters.

On the morning of Wednesday June 16, a B-24 training flight was scheduled with Captain CJ Gormley as the pilot instructor and his classmate Captain Daniel Pope as student pilot.  By this point in his training, Pope would have earned his pilot’s wings.  His mission that late spring morning was to continue his familiarization with the B-24D, the type of aircraft he was projected to soon be flying into combat.

As the aircraft clawed its way into the air, something went wrong.  Gormley, Pope and the other three members of the flight crew were killed in the crash and the airplane was destroyed.  This accident was one event among more than 2,000 aircraft accidents recorded by the Army Air Forces that single month.  That staggering figure includes no combat accidents and is restricted to mishaps occurring in the United States.

Gormley’s remains were returned to Cranston, Rhode Island where he was buried on June 23 with full military honors in the family plot in the Cranston Cemetery.  He earned the American Defense Service Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.  He was survived by his wife, Maxine, formerly of Fitchburg, Massachusetts and his brother, John H. Gormley, Jr. of Cranston.

Popeʼs body was returned to his parents, and he was buried in the Presbyterian Church Cemetery on Edisto Island.  He received the World War II Victory Medal and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, Dorothy, who returned to her home in Alabama following his death.

According to the Army Air Forces, more than 14,900 personnel and 13,873 airplanes were lost inside the continental United States during World War II.  Among them were classmates CJ Gormley and Daniel Pope whose sacrifice is no less tragic for having occurred in training.

For additional information on Clifford James Gormley see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/clifford-james-gormley/

For more on Daniel Townsend Pope visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/daniel-townsend-pope/

For information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Richard Samuel Proctor, Jr.

Phantom

Written by: Kelly Durham

Richard Samuel Proctor, Jr. was an economics major from Sumter and a member of Clemson’s Class of 1969.  He married the former Lorri Loyd and taught at McLaurin Junior High School before serving in the Air Force in Vietnam.

Proctor was assigned as a flight crew member on an F4D Phantom.  The Phantom was a two-seat, twin engine, supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber used by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines beginning in 1961.  The aircraft was a mainstay of American airpower with a total of 5,195 built through 1981, making it the most produced American supersonic military aircraft in history.  The Phantom was a highly capable aircraft, setting numerous speed and altitude records.

Proctor served in the 49th Tactical Fighter Wing which flew missions during Operation Linebacker, the 1972 bombing campaign over North Vietnam.  The Wing flew more than 21,000 combat hours from July through September and did not lose any aircraft or personnel.  The wing returned to its home field, Holloman Air Force Base neat Alamogordo, New Mexico, in October 1972.

On June 22, 1974, First Lieutenant Proctor was assigned to a training mission in an F4D fighter.  The airplane crashed in bushy, desolate country near the northern edge of White Sands Missile Range.

First Lieutenant Proctor was survived by his wife, their daughter, his parents, and a sister.  He was buried at Evergreen Memorial Park in Sumter.

For more information on Richard Samuel Proctor, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richard-samuel-proctor-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Arthur Raymond Sellers, Jr.

On Okinawa

Written by: Kelly Durham

Okinawa was the last great land campaign of the Pacific war—and by many accounts the most vicious.  The Japanese considered Okinawa the last barrier between the Allies and the home islands.  The Allies viewed the island, some 600 miles from Tokyo, as a vital staging area for the inevitable invasion of Japan.  The 77th Infantry Division, which had been reorganized and trained at Fort Jackson, was among the American divisions fighting on Okinawa.  First Lieutenant Arthur Raymond Sellers, Jr. of Florence was a member of A Company in the division’s 306th Infantry Regiment.

Sellers was a member of the last pre-war class, the Class of 1941.  An industrial education major, he was a member of Iota Lambda Sigma, the national industrial education honor fraternity.  He served as a member of the Wesley Foundation Council and the YMCA Council.  He was also a member of the Pee Deeans, a social group formed by the boys from the counties along the Pee Dee River.  Sellers completed ROTC training at Fort McClellan, Alabama during the summer of 1940 and served as cadet First Lieutenant and executive officer of Company D, First Battalion, Second Regiment in the Cadet Brigade.

Sellers married the former Patricia Noble of Central.  Like most of his classmates, he reported for active duty shortly after graduation.

Assigned to the 77th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson, the 306th Infantry participated in the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1943.  In March 1944, it shipped out from San Francisco, arriving in Hawaii on April 1.  After amphibious training in Hawaii, the regiment saw its first combat during the liberation of Guam in July.  It then helped liberate the Philippines in November.  At some point, Sellers became ill and was evacuated to a hospital in New Guinea.  He recuperated there for six weeks.  Upon his release for duty, he was granted five days leave.

Sellers used his leave to track down and visit his brother, an aviation machinist mate in the Navy, who was then stationed in the Philippines.  From there, in early May 1945, Sellers made his way back to the 306th Infantry on Okinawa.

The invasion of Okinawa had commenced with amphibious landings on April 1st.  The Japanese, repeating the tactics employed so effectively on Iwo Jima, conceded the landings but retreated to well-fortified positions in the jagged coral cliffs of central Okinawa.  With interlocking fields of fire, pre-sighted artillery targets, higher ground, and firing positions dug into the ridges and connected by tunnels and caves, the Japanese high command intended to hold out to the last man.  In the process, the Japanese planned to inflict such severe losses that the Americans would be willing to negotiate peace terms rather than continue to demand unconditional surrender.

Shortly after his arrival at A Company, Sellers was ordered to take over new duties leading the company whose commanding officer, a friend of Sellers, had been wounded.  By May 22, American Army and Marine divisions had penetrated to the inner ring of the Shuri line of Japanese defenses.  Now the enemy line held against all attacks with little or no advances to report.  On this day, under rainy skies that turned the battlefields into mud and restricted the use of Allied airpower and armored vehicles, First Lieutenant Sellers was fatally wounded while leading his company against the enemy.

Sellers was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, his father, his wife and their ten-month-old daughter whom he had never seen, a sister, and his brother in the Navy.  He was buried at the Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

For more information on Arthur Raymond Sellers, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/arthur-raymond-sellers-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Daniel Cary Morgan

Breakout from Anzio

Written by: Kelly Durham

Finally, the long-awaited breakout began. What had started in January as an amphibious end run to outflank the German defenders in Italy had devolved into a stalemate as Allied troops had been unable to press their short-lived advantage following their surprise landings at Anzio on Italy’s west coast.  It was May 23, 1944 and Second Lieutenant Daniel Cary Morgan was in the thick of the fighting as the 3rd Infantry Division attempted to resume the march on Rome.

“Chick” Morgan had come to Clemson in the Depression-era days of the mid 1930s as a member of the Class of 1939.  An agronomy major from Wellford, Morgan was a member of Kappa Alpha Sigma, the agronomy honor society.  He participated in ROTC training at Fort McClellan, Alabama in the summer of 1938 and served as a cadet Second Lieutenant his senior year.

After graduation, Morgan took a position with the Farm Security Association in Lancaster.  He married Doris Dickson of Duncan.  When war came, Morgan was called to active duty In January 1942 and ordered to report to Fort Jackson where he was assigned to the 77th Infantry Division.  In January of 1943, Morgan shipped overseas to the 30th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division.  The 30th provided security for the Casablanca Conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, but its next assignment would be more perilous.  On July 10, the division landed on Sicily as part of Operation Husky. It marched ninety miles in three days to reach Palermo and then liberated Messina.  Its performance in Sicily earned the 3rd a reputation as one of the best divisions in General Patton’s Seventh Army.

After a short rest to receive and train replacements, the 3rd Division landed at Salerno on the Italian mainland as part of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army.  The 3rd battled northward through some of the fiercest fighting of the war, reaching the Volturno River and Monte Cassino, the high ground controlled by the Germans and dominating the road to Rome.  In mid-November, the 3rd was pulled from the line to rest and receive replacements.

On January 22, 1944, the 3rd Division landed at Anzio as part of Operation Shingle, an attempt to turn the Germans’ flank and breakthrough to Rome.  But the Germans mounted furious counterattacks and the 3rd, along with the other Allied units in the beachhead, battled to keep from being driven back into the sea.

For months, the situation in Anzio more closely resembled the trench warfare of World War I, with enemies facing each other from static positions.  Finally, on May 23, the Allies commenced their breakout from Anzio.  At 0545, fifteen hundred Allied artillery pieces began firing.  For forty minutes, they showered enemy positions with searing metal and crushing concussions. When the barrage paused, infantry and armored forces moved forward, supported by close air support from P-40 fighters.

The breakout gradually built momentum as Canadian tanks joined in, punching through German lines and opening up the Liri Valley and Highway 6 leading to Rome.    But the cost, as always, was high.  The 3rd Infantry Division suffered 955 casualties on May 23, including Second Lieutenant Morgan who was killed in action.  The Italian capital was liberated on June 4.

Daniel Cary Morgan was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, his wife, five brothers, and three sisters.  After the war, his body was returned to South Carolina and buried in the Florence National Cemetery.

For more information on Second Lieutenant Daniel Cary Morgan see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/daniel-cary-morgan/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

Scroll of Honor – Robert Eugene Adams, Jr.

Kamikaze Over Japan

Written by: Kelly DurhamRobert Adams

Robert Eugene Adams, Jr. of Atlanta began his collegiate career at North Georgia College in Dahlonega, which like Clemson, was a military school.  Unlike Clemson, North Georgia was a two-year institution so Adams crossed the state line to complete a degree in civil engineering.  A member of the Class of 1943, Adams was an honor student and was selected for membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers.

After graduation, Adams volunteered for the Army Air Force and was trained as a flight engineer on America’s newest, most technologically complex, and most expensive weapon, the very heavy B-29 Superfortress bomber.  The B-29 had been hurriedly developed to meet the demands of the Pacific War, particularly the extremely long range that Air Force planners determined would be needed to bomb Japan’s home islands.  Compared with the venerable B-17, the Air Force’s workhorse heavy bomber in Europe with its range of 2,000 miles and 4,500 pound bomb load, the B-29 could travel 3,250 miles and carry 12,000 pounds of bombs—and at higher altitudes and cruising speeds.  The B-29’s superlative specifications came with a cost: the aircraft was accident prone and its engines were subject to catastrophic failures.  As flight engineer, Adams’s duties included inflight management of the aircraft’s four temperamental 2200-horsepower Wright 3350 engines.

The importance of realizing a quick return on the three billion dollars invested in the B-29 prompted General Hap Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Force, to insist that control of the new bombers be retained at the strategic level.  Rather than operating as an air arm of Admiral Chester Nimitz’s central Pacific forces, the B-29s were assigned to the newly created Twentieth Air Force commanded by Arnold and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, completely independent of other commands and dedicated exclusively to the attack of strategic targets in Japan.

The Marianna Islands, just 1,300 miles from Japan, were the objectives of Nimitz’s summer offensive in 1944.  Once captured, air bases were quickly established on the islands, including Isley Field on Saipan.  Robert Adams and his 497th Bomb Group deployed to the Pacific in September, but before they could begin flying missions, the group had to participate in constructing the Quonset hut facilities needed to sustain their operations.  The 497th’s initial combat missions were October attacks against Iwo Jima and the Truk Islands.  It’s first attack on Japan came on November 24.

Weather conditions frustrated the B-29s in their efforts to accurately bomb aircraft production factories and other key facilities.  Winter clouds and the high winds of what came to be known as the Jet Stream prevented the B-29s from causing the damage Air Force leaders expected from their expensive new weapon.

The arrival of a new commanding officer, Major General Curtis LeMay, ushered in a change of tactics.  LeMay ditched the high altitude, daylight pinpoint bombing tactics in favor of low altitude, nighttime area bombing.  Rather than blowing up aircraft production plants, the B-29s switched to burning down Japan’s cities.

Gonna Mak'er B-29

Gonna Mak’er takes off from Saipan 1944.

On April 18, 1945, Adams was the flight engineer on Gonna Mak’er, a B-29 piloted by First Lieutenant Robert Anderson.  Gonna Mak’er departed Isley Field as part of a one hundred twelve bomber formation ordered to attack Japanese air bases on Honshu and Kyushu.  The battle on Okinawa was raging, and kamikaze aircraft had been causing severe damage and high casualties among the Navy fleet supporting the ground operations there.  The B-29s were about to learn that kamikaze attacks were not reserved for naval ships.

Lieutenant Mosaburo Yamamoto was the commander of a group of Japanese aircraft sent aloft to intercept the B-29s.  Rather than engage the fast-flying, well-armed bombers in dogfights, Yamamoto’s airplanes were ordered to ram the larger aircraft.  Yamamoto singled out Gonna Mak’er and approached from two o’clock, making a high pass at the bomber.  The B-29’s right gunner fired a long burst into the fighter, striking it as it began a turn.  On its second pass, the fighter rammed into Gonna Mak’er, snapping off the bomber’s right wing and tail.  Without aerodynamic control, the bomber began spinning and tumbling, trapping its crew inside.  No parachutes were observed and the bomber crashed at Ogori in Fukuoka Prefecture killing all aboard.Robert Adams grave stone

After the war, Adams’s remains were returned to Georgia and buried in the Decatur Cemetery.

For more information on Robert Eugene Adams, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/robert-eugene-adams-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

Scroll of Honor – Heyward Hunter Fellers

Into Germany

Written by: Kelly Durham

The graduation day forecast for Clemson was for mild weather with a high only in the mid-seventies, just right for the planned ceremony in the campus’s Outdoor Theater.  The commencement speaker, in a sign of the times, was Major General Robert Eichelberger, the commander of the 77th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson.  Eichelberger would go on to command the 8th Army during General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific campaigns. He was one of three general officers scheduled to receive honorary degrees for distinguished service in military science and tactics on that Monday morning, May 25, 1942.  Among the cadets lining up for their bachelors’ degrees was Heyward Hunter Fellers of Prosperity.

Fellers, who grew up on a Newberry County farm, majored in agronomy.  He was selected for membership in Alpha Zeta, the national honor fraternity for agriculture, which he served as scribe his senior year.  Fellers also served as president of Kappa Alpha Sigma, Clemson’s student chapter of the American Society of Agronomy.  He was a member of the Sears Scholarship Club and completed ROTC training camp at Clemson during the summer of 1941.  Like General Eichelberger, Fellers would soon be heading overseas as an officer of the United States Army. Unlike the general, who’s fighting would be with the 8th Army against the Japanese, Fellers would carry the war into Germany as an officer with the 8th Infantry Division.

One month after graduation, Second Lieutenant Fellers reported for duty at Camp Wolters, Texas, the largest infantry replacement training center in the country.  After a stint at Fort Meade, Maryland, Fellers shipped overseas in August 1944.

Upon his arrival in France, Fellers was assigned to K Company of the 13th Infantry Regiment, a part of the 8th Infantry Division.  The division had already liberated the port city of Brest and now turned its efforts toward closing on the French-German border.  The 8th cleared Brittainy’s Crozon Peninsula in September and drove across France to Luxembourg, moving into the Hürtgen Forest in late November.  The division continued to battle its way toward the east, clearing Hürtgen in late November and pushing on to the Roer River.  The Roer was finally crossed on February 23, 1945 and the division reached the Rhine two weeks later, occupying positions overlooking Cologne.  In early March, the 8th advanced into the Rhineland and fought its way into the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.

Even though Germany was clearly beaten, Hitler refused to surrender, calling on his troops and German civilians to make even greater sacrifices to save the Third Reich.  While attacking Hitler’s holdouts in the Ruhr pocket, Fellers was killed by a German sniper on April 4.  He was  temporarily buried at Ittenbach, Germany and was later moved to the US military cemetery at Margraten, Holland.  After the war, Feller’s remains were returned to Prosperity where, in December 1948, he was buried in the Zion United Methodist Church cemetery.

First Lieutenant Fellers was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his parents and brother.

For more information about First Lieutenant Heyward Hunter Fellers see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/heyward-hunter-fellers/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

Scroll of Honor – Boyd Preston Lawhon, Jr.

Icing

Written by: Kelly Durham

Boyd Preston Lawhon, Jr. wasted no time.  He enlisted in the Army Air Force just six days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor yanked the United States into World War II.  Lawhon had attended Clemson College the previous two years to study civil engineering, but had then left school and was working as a machinist at Sonoco Products in his hometown of Hartsville. When war came, Lawhon responded.

Building on his civil engineering studies, Lawhon was sent to Keesler Field at Biloxi, Mississippi for technical training to become a flight engineer.  As such, his duties were to assist the pilot and copilot of multi-engine aircraft with the inflight monitoring of powerplants and fuel supplies.

On March 13, 1943, Lawhon was detailed as part of the crew to ferry a Lockheed Ventura RB-34 reconnaissance aircraft from Red Bluff Army Airfield in Northern California to Medford, Oregon.  The RB-34 was a twin-engine, medium bomber which the British Royal Air Force had employed with limited success in Europe during the early days of the war.  The RAF discovered that the bomber’s lack of speed and armament left it to vulnerable on long missions over enemy territory where the range of escorting fighters could not reach.  By early 1943, the Venturas were relegated to patrol and reconnaissance missions, particularly along coastal areas.

The Ventura was normally crewed by six men, but on this flight, with no operational mission en route, Staff Sergeant Lawhon and the two pilots, Second Lieutenant Joe Hanna and First Lieutenant Robert Smith, were the only official crew members.  Three other service men were listed on the flight manifest as passengers.  The aircraft departed Red Bluff at 1300 hours on a flight plan to Medford.  With pilot Hanna at the controls, the Ventura penetrated a light overcast soon after departure and continued to climb through layers of clouds.  In the vicinity of Redding, California, the weather closed in and Hanna switched to instrument flying.  At this point, extreme icing conditions were encountered.

Icing occurs when rain or other moisture freezes along the wings or control surfaces of an aircraft.  The ice distorts the flow of air over the wing, reducing its lift, increasing drag and weight.  The ice adversely affects the handling of the aircraft and can lead to aerodynamic stall, the loss of the wing’s lift that keeps the airplane aloft.

According to Lieutenant Smith, the copilot, the Ventura quickly lost its “stable flying characteristics.”  Hanna attempted a 180 degree turn to escape the icing conditions, but it was of no avail.  Smith instructed the passengers to don their parachutes.  At approximately 1315, Hanna ordered his crew and passengers to bail out.  Only Smith was able to do so successfully.

The Ventura, in an out-of-control descent, struck the southwest slope of Hirz Mountain.  The aircraft was completely demolished and the bodies of the remaining crew and passengers were found near the wreckage.

Sergeant Lawhon was survived by his parents and two brothers, one of whom was serving in the Navy.  He was buried in Hartsville’s Magnolia Cemetery.

For more information on Staff Sergeant Boyd Preston Lawhon, Jr. see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/boyd-preston-lawhon-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

Scroll of Honor – Richard Worrell Kapp, Jr.

‘This Was a Man’

Written by: Kelly Durham

Richard Worrell Kapp, Jr., “Dickie” to his friends, was impressing people long before he arrived on the Clemson College campus.  Kapp was from Orangeburg, where his friend Carolyn Stone Lewis remembered, he “excelled at EVERYTHING he did.”  “Everything” included Boy Scouts, academics, work, and sports.

Daniel Brailsford was a friend and coworker during summer breaks from school.  “Dickie and I toughened up by working construction. We installed roofing and insulation for a home builder the first summer and, the summer before our senior year, we worked for Daniel Construction which was building a tool plant, Utica Drop Forge, outside of Orangeburg. That summer we drove lay-out stakes, hauled block and lumber around the site, and wired together mats of rebar across the bottoms of huge square pits dug out of the clay. At the end of every day, Dickie would come back to the car covered with sweat and grime, but still smiling impishly. Dickie liked hard work. He took pride in whatever he did.”

Dickie’s work ethic helped him build an impressive record at Orangeburg High School.  A two-way starter on the football team, Dickie was a powerful linebacker who, according to Brailsford, “hit like a piston.”  One of the team’s captains, he was described by the Times-Democrat newspaper as “a sixty-minute man when the going gets tough.”  Dickie’s achievements were not restricted to sports.  He was a strong student, a member of the student council, and served as president of the Key Club, a profile which earned him Orangeburg High School’s coveted Bill Davis Trophy, awarded annually to the person who best displays the qualities of scholarship, athletic ability, and sportsmanship.

Dickie exhibited the same discipline and leadership traits at Clemson, where he enrolled as a member of the Class of 1966.  A history major, Kapp was a member of the Numeral Society, Phi Kappa Phi national scholarship society, and Phi Eta Sigma national honor fraternity.  He was a member of the Young Republicans and served on student government’s high court.

Fraternity brother Steve Hixson described Kapp as “the most focused, mature, sincere, and all-around nicest person I had ever met,” adding that Dickie was a role model for putting studies first.  At Clemson, as he had in high school, Dickie achieved an enviable record.  He applied and was accepted to law school, but there was something else he felt called to do first.  Dickie volunteered for the Marine Corps, according to his cousin Lloyd Kapp, because “he felt he was duty bound to serve his country.” Fraternity brother Dave Merry agreed.  “He believed in what he was doing and what the country was doing and was looking forward to leading a marine platoon even though he was fully aware of the life expectancy of such a position.”

Kapp graduated from Clemson on December 17, 1966. He reported to Quantico, Virginia for Marine Corps Officer Basic Training School, Class 6-67 which convened on June 1, 1967.  Also in the class was Kapp’s Clemson classmate, Stephen Hilton.  Both young alumni graduated as Second Lieutenants on November 1, 1967.  Their Quantico class sent more lieutenants off to battle and suffered more combat casualties than any Basic School class since the Korean War.  Sadly, both Kapp and Hilton would be included in this tragic tally.

After completing his basic training, Second Lieutenant Kapp was sent to Camp Schwab, Okinawa in December 1967.  He arrived in Vietnam in January 1968 and was assigned as platoon leader of 2nd Platoon, M Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. His unit was assigned the mission of engaging and destroying elements of the North Vietnamese Army which had been interdicting traffic along the Qua Viet River in northern South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were seeking to disrupt a vital supply link between the sea and the Marine Corps’ Dong Ha combat base in preparation for their upcoming surprise Tet Offensive.

The largest village in 3rd Battalion’s area of operations was Mai Xai Tsi, the site of two major battles, one on the last day of January and the other on the first day of March.  John Potts was a squad leader in Kapp’s platoon.  “On March 1, 1968, Lt Kapp led his platoon of thirty-five marines into battle in the North Vietnamese Army occupied village of Mai Xai Tsi, along the Qua Viet River about 10 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. The entire 3rd Battalion was involved in the attack and met heavy resistance. Causalities were heavy and continued to mount throughout the day. Despite the loss of his platoon right guide, two squad leaders, his radioman, and about a dozen other men, Lt Kapp continued the attack deep into the village. In the late afternoon, Lt Kapp was reorganizing the remaining members of his platoon when an unobserved NVA soldier rushed from behind a structure and fired a burst from his AK-47 automatic rifle.  Tragically, Lt Kapp and his platoon sergeant were killed instantly, but his last spoken words served as a warning to the other members of the platoon, preventing additional casualties.”  Potts remembered his platoon leader as “quietly confident,” someone whose “lack of fear in the face of extreme personal danger distinguished him as a leader and served as an example to all who served with him.” Potts recalled that Lieutenant Kapp “treated his men with respect, and related his trust in those of us who had been in-country for some time and encouraged us to help the newer guys…  We were all willing to follow him into battle.”

After his death, the Numeral Society at Clemson, now SAE fraternity, named its pledge award in Dickie’s honor.  Orangeburg High School created a scholarship in his memory which is awarded each year to a deserving senior.  The school’s principal, Eugene Smith eulogized Kapp in the Orangeburg newspaper.  “All teachers in the public schools,” he began, “have the privilege of knowing truly worthy, open-faced, clear-thinking young men.”  He described Dickie Kapp as “quietly sincere… modest but confident,” someone who “earned respect and love by becoming what many of us wish to become – a clean-cut, solid thinking, a willing and responsible giver of his talents and strength.”  Smith concluded by quoting Shakespeare. “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a Man.’”

Richard Worrell Kapp, Jr. was awarded the Purple Heart, Combat Action Medal, Presidential Unit Citation, Navy Unit Commendation, National Defense Service Medal; Vietnam Service Medal; Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Palm, Individual Award for Valor; National Order of Vietnam Medal, 5th Class; Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross Unit Citation with Palm; and Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal.

Kapp was survived by his mother, stepfather, sister, and brother.  He is buried in Orangeburg’s Sunnyside Cemetery.

For more information about Second Lieutenant Richard Worrell Kapp, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richard-worrell-kapp-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Cloudy Gray Conner, Jr.

The Purple Heart Battalion

Written by: Kelly Durham

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, General Delos Emmons, the military governor of the Hawaii Territory, supported placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps and classifying them as enemy aliens.  But Emmons recognized that many among Hawaii’s Nisei, the American-born children of Japanese immigrants, wanted a chance to prove their loyalty to the United States through military service.  An effort was mounted to organize some 2,000 Japanese-American soldiers into a fighting force to be sent to Africa or Europe to fight the Germans and Italians, but the War Department initially turned down the request.  Then in June 1942, more than 1,400 Nisei serving in the Hawaii National Guard had their weapons confiscated and were ordered aboard a US Army transport ship bound for Oakland, California.  Upon arrival, the men were designated the 100th Infantry Battalion.  Given the social attitudes of the day, the Nisei of the 100th felt they had something to prove.

Cloudy Gray Conner, Jr. of Lamar was another soldier with something to prove.  Conner was a 1937 graduate of Clemson College who had posted an unremarkable record as a general science major.  According to one account, Conner had elected to forgo participation in ROTC as an upper classman because he was judged too short to qualify for an Army commission.  Following graduation, Conner married Anza Willeford of Florence.  He took a job teaching school and also worked as a railroad telegraph operator.  Despite his alleged lack of stature and his not pursuing a commission, Conner was called to active duty in October 1941.

The Benedictine Abbey atop Monte Cassino in February 1944.

Conner trained at Fort Jackson in Columbia, then at Camp Wheeler, Georgia and Camp Clay, Louisiana before being ordered overseas in September of 1943.  He was assigned to D Company of the 100th Infantry Battalion which was committed to action in Italy as part of the 34th Infantry Division.  The 34th was a veteran of the bitter fighting in North Africa.  By the winter of 1944, it was slugging away as part of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army attempting to break through the heavily fortified Bernhardt Line of German positions in central Italy.  In harsh winter conditions, Clark’s forces were battling to capture Highway 6, the main route through the Liri Valley leading to Rome.  But Clark couldn’t control the valley or the highway without first wresting from the Germans key high ground: Monte Cassio. Dominating the heights was a Benedictine monastery with structures dating back to the Sixth Century.  To knock the Germans off of Monte Cassino, Clark called on the 34th Infantry Division, including the 100th Infantry Battalion.

On January 30, the 34th managed to cross the north-south running Rapido River and seize ground north of Cassino. prompting Clark to predict that Cassio would fall “very soon.”  But the uphill fighting, in snow and freezing weather, crept forward.  During the first two weeks in February, the division made repeated attempts to dislodge the Germans from Monte Cassino.  Historian Rick Atkinson writes that “Hills were won then lost, then won and lost again,” as the fighting raged back and forth.  “Each yard, whether won or lost pared away American strength.”

Despite coming within “100 meters of success,” the 34th eventually spent its strength.  On February 12,  Lieutenant Conner was killed by a sniper’s bullet to the head.  The 34th was relieved by a British Indian division the following day.  Casualties among the men of the 100th were so high—one forty-man platoon was down to just five soldiers—that reporters dubbed the 100th the “Purple Heart Battalion.”  The Nisei had indeed proved something: their commitment to the United States and to the freedom even then being denied to many of their family members in stateside internment camps.  And Cloudy Grey Conner had proved his ability as a combat officer leading loyal Americans in battle.

Lieutenant Conner, like so many others in his battalion, was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, his mother, a sister, and a brother.  After the war, his body was returned to Lamar and buried in the Baptist Church Cemetery.

For more information on Cloudy Grey Conner, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/cloudy-gray-conner-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson, 2007.

 

Scroll of Honor – John Calhoun Hubbard, Jr.

Takeoff

Written by: Kelly DurhamJohn Calhoun Hubbard, Jr.

The missions flown by the heavy bombers of the 8th Air Force were fraught with dangers.  Mechanical failures and equipment malfunctions were always a hazard at the high altitudes at which missions were flown.  The Germans were an even greater threat with swift, swarming fighter planes and deadly antiaircraft artillery.  But sometimes, the most dangerous part of the mission was simply getting off the ground.

John Calhoun Hubbard, Jr. of Bennettsville enrolled at Clemson College as a member of the Class of 1939.  After his freshman year on campus, Hubbard left school and took over the Nehi Bottling Plant in his hometown.  Over the following years, Hubbard joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Woodmen of the World.  He was a member of the Methodist Church and was building a reputation as one of Bennettsville’s outstanding young businessmen.  Hubbard was also interested in flying.  In his free time, he took flying lessons with a local instructor.

Just two months after Pearl Harbor, Hubbard entered the Army as a private.  He qualified for and completed officer candidate school and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.  With his flying experience, he applied for and was accepted into flight training at Maxwell Field in Alabama.  He graduated to advanced flight training at George Field, Illinois where he earned his pilot’s wings.  From there he was ordered to Arkansas where he served as a flight instructor for several months.  He was then sent to Texas, Ohio, Nebraska, and Louisiana for additional training.

Bomber from the 388th Bomb SquadronHubbard was soon ordered back to Nebraska where he received additional training in combat flying in preparation for deployment to Europe.  In December 1944, Hubbard arrived in England as a pilot assigned to the 388th Bomb Squadron, an 8th Air Force unit stationed at Snetterton Heath in the southeastern part of the country.

The 388th, like the rest of the 8th Air Force, was fighting an aerial war not only against the Germans but also against what Masters of the Air author Donald Miller calls “one of the most capricious weather systems in the world.”  Fog and clouds often extended from ground level up to 20,000 feet or more.  Low clouds meant that pilots had to fly blind—using only their flight instruments—to navigate to a clear altitude and join their assigned formations.

By the time Second Lieutenant Hubbard began flying combat missions, the 8th was regularly launching operations composed of hundreds of heavy bombers.  With nearly a hundred 8th and 9th Air Force bases concentrated in southeastern England, and with bombers taking off every thirty seconds from the area’s many runways, the takeoff and climb into formation could be as dangerous as the flight across the English Channel and over German-occupied Europe.

On January 29, 1945, the 8th Air Force launched 1,158 bombers toward industrial targets in Germany.  In addition, 700 fighters were dispatched to escort the bombers.  This vast armada filled the airspace above East Anglia.  That morning, Hubbard was the copilot of a 388th B-17 piloted by Second Lieutenant Alex Philipovich. As their aircraft climbed into the murky sky, it collided with another B-17 from its sister squadron the 337th.  Both aircraft were destroyed and their crews killed. On that day, the 8th recorded seventeen non-combatJohn Hubbard grave stone accidents, including eight takeoff accidents.  Mercifully, not all of them were fatal.

John Calhoun Hubbard, Jr. was survived by his parents, his wife, and their daughter.  After the war, his remains were returned to Bennettsville and interred in McCall Cemetery.

For more information on Second Lieutenant John Calhoun Hubbard, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/john-calhoun-hubbard-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by Donald L. Miller.

Scroll of Honor – Guy Benjamin Taylor

Navy Doctor

Written by: Kelly Durham

Guy Benjamin Taylor of Lexington entered Clemson in 1912.  Upon completion of his junior year in the spring of 1915, Taylor enrolled at the Medical College of South Carolina.  His graduation with a medical degree coincided with the United States’ declaration of war on Germany in April 1917.  Taylor immediately reported for active duty as a Navy lieutenant (junior grade).

The new Navy doctor was soon sent to France and England where he tended to wounded and sick soldiers.  With the end of the war in November 1918, the Army began to send its troops home.  The tight confines aboard troop ships ensured that the soldiers weren’t the only passengers.  Along for the voyage was the Spanish Influenza.  The first wave of the deadly flu had appeared in early 1918.  Now, assisted by the return of soldiers to points all across the United States, a more deadly second wave was poised to break.

Corpsmen await patients at a Navy influenza ward in December 1918.

Lieutenant Taylor reached the United States at the beginning of December and was assigned to the Long Island Naval Hospital in Brooklyn, New York.  Soon, the hospital was filling with flu patients.  The first wave of the pandemic had resembled typical flu epidemics of the past, with the sick and elderly at the greatest risk.  This second wave broke from the usual pattern.  Now, twenty to forty-year-olds—which included most of the returning soldiers—experienced high mortality rates even among otherwise healthy people.

Like 2020’s Covid-19, the Spanish Flu was highly contagious, spreading easily from person to person through coughs and sneezing.  Even mild cases of the flu could severely weaken the body’s immune system.  The flu constricted and inflamed the body’s airways, slowing down the movement of air and reducing the body’s ability to clear mucus.  With more mucus in the body, bacteria was more likely to form.  The combination of a weakened immune system and the buildup of virus and bacteria often led to pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs leading to high fever and difficulty breathing.

With no vaccines available, officials attempted to limit the spread of the flu through non-pharmaceutical interventions like isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, and reduced public gatherings, but these interventions were unevenly applied.  Lieutenant Taylor, surrounded by sick patients, contracted the flu himself.  Falling into one of the more susceptible demographic groups and without antibiotics with which to treat his infection, Taylor’s flu soon advanced to pneumonia, from which he died on January 23, 1919.

Dr. Taylor was described as “a young man of strong character, striking personality, and unusual ability with a bright future before him.”  Instead of that “bright future,” Taylor became one of the estimated 300,000 Americans who died from the Spanish Flu between September 1918 and January 1919.

Dr. Taylor was survived by his father and was buried at the Shiloh Methodist Church in Lexington.

For more information on Lieutenant Guy Benjamin Taylor see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/guy-benjamin-taylor/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Francis Marion Zeigler

Namesake

Written by: Kelly Durham

Like his namesake, the legendary Swamp Fox of Revolutionary War fame, Francis Marion Zeigler of Denmark seemed destined for renown as a warrior.  As a cadet, Zeigler was quickly recognized as a leader, being elected vice president of both his freshman and sophomore classes.  He also served as vice president of the YMCA, and as secretary and treasurer of the Clemson chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  In Clemson’s cadet regiment, Zeigler advanced through the ranks each year, starting out as a private, promoted to corporal as a sophomore, sergeant major as a junior, and cadet captain as a senior.

Zeigler was also a fine athlete.  He was a member of the football team where he played fullback “as very few men have played it,” Taps reported.  “Zeigler is an earnest worker at all times; he plunges the line, tackles hard, and is always a fighter.”  In addition to football, Zeigler was a member of the Tiger track team which he served as captain.  In 1921, he set the Clemson record for 880 yards at 2 minutes, 3 and 3/5 seconds.  He contributed to the school’s mile relay record as well, 3 minutes, 34 and 3/5 seconds.  His athletic prowess earned him membership in the Block “C” Club which he served as president.

Zeigler’s classmates observed his “individuality, sincerity, and fineness of purpose” and elected him as president of the Class of 1923, an august group that included a future governor and US senator as well as a world famous journalist and author.  Taps wrote that Zeigler had “been recognized as a leader among us, and has tackled every problem set before him in his quiet honest way.”

In 1927, Zeigler joined the Army and displayed the same level of commitment to military service that he had shown at Clemson.  Zeigler was attracted to the field of aviation and earned his pilot’s wings.  Over a career that included assignments in the Philippines and China, Zeigler accumulated 2,900 flying hours, making him one of the Army’s more experienced flyers.  While stationed at the Army Air Depot in Fairfield, Ohio, Zeigler was tasked with planning and organizing the new Warner Robbins Army Air Depot in Georgia.  In the fall of 1942, with the United States embroiled in a global war, the forty-year-old colonel was assigned as executive officer at the new air base.

On Wednesday, December 2, 1942, Zeigler was the pilot of an Army A-20 Havoc medium bomber on a transition training flight.  His copilot was Arvil Copeland, the assistant general manager of the depot’s aircraft repair shop.  At approximately 1550 hours, Zeigler took off  to the west.  Upon reaching an altitude of twenty to thirty feet, the aircraft leveled off and then nosed down into a flat dive, striking a road about 150 feet from the end of the runway.  The impact sheared off the landing gear and the faring of the right engine’s nacelle.  The A-20 bounced into the air and appeared to continue straight ahead while climbing to about 200 feet.  Zeigler attempted to make a wide turn to the left to return to the field, but witnesses reported that the airplane was flying in an “extremely tail low position and gradually losing altitude.”  Faced with a deteriorating situation, Zeigler elected to land in a small field about two miles southwest of the runway.  The plane hit the ground on its belly, the force of the impact flipping it onto its back and causing “total damage.”  Both Zeigler and Copeland were seriously injured.  Copeland died four days later on Sunday, December 6.  Zeigler passed away the following Wednesday, December 9.

Colonel Francis Marion Zeigler was survived by his mother, his wife, the former Mildred Van Ausdel, a son, a step-daughter, four brothers, and four sisters.  He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

For more information on Francis Marion Zeigler see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/francis-marion-zeigler/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Richards Daniel Van Allen

Take the High Ground

Written by: Kelly DurhamRichards Van Allen

Richards Daniel Van Allen reported for active duty with the United States Army in March 1942.  He attended basic training at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana and then was ordered to officer candidate school at Fort Benning, Georgia where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant on October 16, 1942.  The newly minted lieutenant was assigned to the newly activated 100th Infantry Division then organizing at Fort Jackson.  This wasn’t the first occasion for Van Allen to wear a uniform in the Palmetto State.

Van Allen, from Savannah, Georgia, had attended Clemson College during the 1933-34 school year.  A textile chemistry major, he was assigned to the 2nd Platoon of Company M, 3rd Battalion of the Cadet Regiment.  After leaving Clemson, Van Allen returned to Savannah and took a job with Turpentine and Rosin Factors, Inc.  He married the former Dorothy Austin and they established their home in Savannah.

As American military mobilization accelerated in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Van Allen became the executive officer of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 399th Infantry Regiment of the 100th Infantry Division.  The division trained stateside for its planned deployment overseas, participating in maneuvers in the Tennessee mountains before traveling to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for further training.

The 100th sailed for Europe on October 6, 1944, completing its two week voyage at the southern France port of Marseille.  Attached to Seventh Army, the 100th moved into the front line on November 2 with Van Allen’s 399th Infantry Regiment relieving elements of the 45th Infantry Division.  3rd Battalion occupied positions about two miles southeast of St. Remy, France.

German troops on high ground overlooking St. Remy fired heavy machine guns and mortars at American forces impeding their forward movement.  A spell of rainy weather further hindered the American advance.  Any American troop movements were inevitably answered by German mortar fire.  The regiment was pulled off the line on November 9, but the rest period lasted only a couple of days.  On November 12, the 399th was back on the offensive, seeking to seize high ground from the Germans to allow for greater freedom of movement.

On November 19, the weather cleared and a warm sun shone down on the soldiers of the 399th.  The following day, Van Allen’s K Company attacked Hill 467 supported by a platoon of tanks. While advancing against fierce resistance to destroy enemy heavy machine gun emplacements, the tank platoon leader was killed and the tanks began to withdraw.  Lieutenant Van Allen reorganized the tankers and sent them back into action to support his company’s infantrymen.  With the foot soldiers and tanks working together, Hill 467 was secured, but Van Allen was mortally wounded by enemy mortar fire.  He died the following day in an Army hospital at Neuf Maisons, France.

Richards Van Allen grave stoneFirst Lieutenant Richards Daniel Van Allen was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, his wife Dorothy, and a daughter, Richards Dorothy Van Allen who was born after his untimely death.  Van Allen is buried at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

For more information about First Lieutenant Richards Daniel Van Allen see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richards-daniel-van-allen/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Robert Earle Agnew

Storm Clouds

Written by: Kelly Durham

When Robert Earle Agnew arrived on the Clemson campus in 1937, the storm clouds of war were gathering.  In China tensions with Japan erupted into full scale war that summer.  In Europe, the German invasion of Poland in the fall of Agnew’s senior year precipitated yet another continental crisis.  By the time of his graduation with the Class of 1940, France was effectively out of the war and the British were retreating to their home island.  Agnew was one American who understood that those storm clouds in Asia and Europe were likely to continue to spread until they eventually reached the United States.

Agnew came to Clemson from Donalds, the small Abbeville County community of less than three hundred souls.  At Clemson, he studied mechanical engineering and was a member of the track team, the Greenwood Club, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  During his senior year, Agnew participated in the Civilian Pilot Training Program [CPTP], a government sponsored flight training program attempting to increase the number of civilian pilots as a potential pool from which to draw military fliers if needed.  Agnew was the first of the Clemson participants to solo.  He also completed ROTC training at Camp McClellan, Alabama preparing Agnew for a commission in the Army.

Following graduation, Agnew reported for Army basic training.  Given his CPTP experience, Agnew was accepted into Army Air Force flight training and sent to Randolph Field at San Antonio, Texas.  His training continued at Kelly Field, also in San Antonio, where he earned his pilot’s wings in March 1941.  In a sign of the times, the new pilot was assigned as a flight instructor and ordered to Moffett Field outside of San Jose, California.  Agnew was delighted with his assignment, writing to his parents, “If I should die in a plane crash, I will die happy; everything will be all right.”

Of course, Agnew wasn’t the only observer of the gathering storm.  In Washington, officials of the Roosevelt administration were scrambling to catch up with Germany’s fearsome Luftwaffe, then regarded as the most powerful air force in the world.  On October 23, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced plans to double the nation’s fleet of first-line combat aircraft.  Noting that the increase in strength was needed to meet the “growing requirements” for adequate defense of the Western Hemisphere, Stimson explained that the Army Air Force would extend its growth plans from fifty-four combat groups to eighty-four. In the process, the number of pilots trained annually would increase from 12,000 to 30,000.

Those pilots would advance through three phases of flight training.  After primary flight training in simple aircraft, phase two pilots moved into more complex trainers like the BT-13 Vultee.  It was equipped with a more powerful engine, was faster and heavier than the primary aircraft, and required student pilots to manage more in-flight tasks, such as the use of flaps and a controllable-pitch propeller.

On the morning of November 3, 1941, Agnew and crew member Dan Fisk departed Stockton, California  in a BT-13 Vultee bound for their home field at Moffett.   The airplane never arrived.  Army investigators hypothesized that Agnew was descending through or attempting to fly below storm clouds when his aircraft crashed into the side of  a hill at an altitude of only 1,900 feet.  Both Agnew and Fisk were killed.

Agnew would not be the last Army pilot to perish before reaching a combat zone.  Training accidents would continue to plague the Army Air Force as it raced to meet the demands of an increasingly fragile peace and then outright war.

Robert Earle Agnew was survived by his parents and was buried in the Turkey Creek Baptist Church cemetery in Ware Shoals.

For more information on Second Lieutenant Robert Earle Agnew see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/robert-earle-agnew/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

Scroll of Honor – Henry Alexander Coleman

The Global Pandemic

Written by: Kelly Durham

From early 1918 to mid-1920, the Spanish Flu epidemic raged across the world, infecting 500 million people and causing an estimated 50 million deaths.  The pandemic coincided with the final months of the First World War.  The close living conditions of soldiers, both at the front and in training garrisons, fueled the spread of the disease.

Henry Alexander “Hal” Coleman came to Clemson from the Fairfield County rail stop of Shelton when the campus was still in its infancy.  He likely arrived in the late summer of 1910 and was a member of the Class of 1914.

When the United States went to war in the spring of 1917, Coleman went too.  He was an Army private first class assigned to Company C of the 306th Field Signal Battalion of the 81st Infantry Division.

The 81st Infantry Division, the “Wildcats,” was organized at Camp Jackson outside of Columbia in August 1917.  The division took its nickname—and its unit patch—from Wildcat Creek which ran through its training area.  The division’s soldiers were mostly draftees from the southeastern states and they became the first division in the United States Army to wear a distinctive unit shoulder patch on their uniforms.

The division sailed for France in August 1918 and by early October, was defending a sector around St. Dié.  Coleman, remembered as someone with a happy, optimistic disposition, was assigned as a switchboard operator, connecting calls between field phones linked by wires running through the trenches and dugouts scarring the battlefront.  His switchboard was located in a muddy, dank, subterranean dugout.  These conditions, combined with physical fatigue, probably contributed to a weakening of Coleman’s physical strength resulting in the contraction of an illness.  Even so, Coleman remained at his post, continuing to facilitate the critical command and control functions between the various units of the division.

Eventually, Coleman’s illness reached the point where he could no longer effectively discharge his duties and he was evacuated to a hospital near Baccarat, France.  His condition developed into pneumonia and he died on October 20, 1918, less than a month before the armistice that would end the war.

The end of the war did not mean the end of the dying.  Soldiers returning from overseas were packed into close quarters aboard troop ships.  As they were mustered out of the service, the soldiers returned home to all corners of the country, carrying the flu virus with them.  More than 675,000 Americans would die from the Spanish Flu, a ratio that would equate to about 2.15 million in terms of today’s population.  Clemson’s Scroll of Honor includes thirty-four heroes who died during the First World War.  Of these, thirteen succumbed to pneumonia.

Henry Alexander Coleman was buried at the Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery in France.  There is also a marker placed in his memory at Antioch Cemetery in Fairfield County.

 

 

For additional information about Henry Alexander Coleman see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-alexander-coleman/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Scroll of Honor – John Hetrick

From Civic Leader to Service Member

Written by: Kelly Durham

John Paterson Hetrick made his way to the Foothills of South Carolina from his hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to study civil engineering.  He entered Clemson College in the last years of the Roaring ‘20s and would graduate in the early years of the Great Depression as a member of the Class of 1932.

Hetrick was active in campus life demonstrating military proficiency and academic prowess.  He was a member of the Society of Civil Engineers and the Glee Club, which he served first as business manager and then as president.  He marched with the Drum and Bugle Corps and was a member of both the Sabre Club and the First Sergeants’ Club.  He attended ROTC summer training at Camp McClellan, Alabama between his junior and senior years and was selected to serve as the Regimental Staff intelligence officer as a senior.

After graduation, Hetrick married Marjorie Shealy of Anderson.  The couple made their home in Easley where Hetrick worked with the Rogers-Hetrick Lumber Company and served as a deacon in the First Baptist Church.  Considered one of the community’s business and civic leaders, Hetrick and his wife raised two children, a son and a daughter.

Following the United States’ entry into World War II, Hetrick was called to active duty and ordered to Camp Davis, North Carolina.  Camp Davis had been constructed in late 1940 as the country began its belated mobilization for the conflict many feared was approaching.  Located near Holly Ridge in the coastal southeastern part of the state, it was a 45,000 acre antiaircraft artillery training facility which eventually grew to include two paved runways.  Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, used the runways to tow aerial targets aloft for Army antiaircraft gunners to perfect their marksmanship.

In mid-autumn of 1943, Hetrick was admitted to the post hospital for treatment of symptoms diagnosed as a cold.  On October 2, during his brief hospital stay, Hetrick died from an acute heart attack. He died two days short of his thirty-sixth birthday,

First Lieutenant Hetrick was survived by his wife and children, his parents, and two sisters.  He was buried at Springbrook Cemetery in Anderson.

For additional information on First Lieutenant John Paterson Hetrick see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/john-patterson-hetrick/

For more information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Lester Miller

Trained for War

Written by: Kelly Durham

Lester Laneau “Pete” Miller was born in the Dillon County community of Hamer.  He attended public schools in Dillon and entered Clemson in 1935.  A vocational agricultural education major, he participated in 4-H, the Grange, and Future Farmers of America.  He reached the cadet rank of second lieutenant and was assigned to Senior Company Number 2.  After graduating with the Class of 1939, Miller returned to Dillon and took a job teaching at Centenary High School.

On February 11, 1942, Miller was called to active duty. He trained first at Fort Benning, Georgia and was then assigned to the 314th Infantry Regiment of the 79th Infantry Division. The 79th was a Selective Service division composed of men called up by the draft.  Miller’s training as a member of the 79th is instructive.  The division was activated at Camp Pickett, Virginia in June 1942 and subsequently trained at Camp Blanding, Florida and then at Forrest, Tennessee.  The division was next ordered to the Desert Training Center in Arizona and later continued its training at Camp Phillips near Salina, Kansas.  The division sailed from New York in April 1944 and completed its training in England.  It crossed the English Channel and landed on Utah Beach, entering combat on June 19.  While the 79th’s twenty-four months of training compared most favorably with the eleven months this same division had to prepare for battle in World War I, its training period for this new conflict was well below average.  According to War Department figures reported by the Washington Post in July 1944, the average American division in World War II had trained for thirty-one months prior to its commitment to combat.

The reduced level of training received by the 79th didn’t seem to impact its combat effectiveness. A week after its commitment, the division entered the key French port of Cherbourg.  It held a defensive position in early July before capturing LaHaye du Puits on July 8th.  This battle pitted the infantry against German tank units in brutal fighting that cost the division more than one thousand casualties.  On July 26th, the division attacked across the Ay River and took Lessay.  It crossed the Sarthe River and entered Le Mans on August 8th.  The division continued to advance as German resistance began to weaken, crossing the Seine River on August 19th and the Therain River on the 31st.

As the Germans fell back, the 79th reached the Belgian frontier and captured Charmes in heavy street fighting on September 12.  On September 22, First Lieutenant Miller was killed in action.

Lieutenant Miller was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his parents, one brother then serving in the Army, and three sisters, one of whom was serving in the WAVES, the Navy’s auxiliary branch for women volunteers.  Lieutenant Miller was buried at the military cemetery in Andilly, France.  In 1948, his remains were returned to the United States and were reburied at the Riverside Cemetery in Dillon.

For more information on First Lieutenant Lester Laneau Miller see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/lester-laneau-miller/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Henry Hahn

Tank Commander

Written by: Kelly Durham

HT HahnIn September 1944, Allied forces in France were attacking across a broad front, slowly pushing stubborn German defenders back across France toward the Rhine River and the German border.  Second Lieutenant Henry Tutt Hahn was a tank commander in the 7th Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army as it battled to cross the Moselle River, the last major water barrier before reaching the Rhine. 

 Hahn came to Clemson as a textile engineering major from Greenwood.  He was a member of the Greenwood County Club, which he served as president his senior year, and also Phi Psi, the national honor fraternity for textile engineers.  Hahn graduated from Clemson in May 1943.  His was the last class allowed to complete its collegiate course before being called to active duty to help meet the military’s wartime manpower needs. 

 In August, Hahn reported for active duty, training as an armor officer at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  Following his training, he served as an instructor at the post before being transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia and assigned to the 31st Tank Battalion, part of the 7th Armored Division. 

 Hahn’s division reached France in mid-August 1944, coming ashore across Omaha and Utah beaches.  Thetank division was quickly committed to the battle, driving on the city of Chartres on August 18. From Chartres, the division advanced to liberate Dreux and then Melun, where it crossed the Seine River on August 24. The division continued its advance to places well-remembered from the First World War, Château-Thierry and Verdun, liberating these storied towns on August 31.  After a brief halt for maintenance and refueling, the 7th Armored resumed its offensive on September 6, crossing the Moselle River near Dornot.  Coordinated fire from German fortified positions around Metz forced the division to withdraw.  It moved slightly south of the city and assisted the 5th Infantry Division in expanding a bridgehead across the river east of Arnaville.  Second Lieutenant Hahn was killed in action on September 14 within half a mile of the bridgehead. 

Grave markerHahn was survived by his mother, whom he had visited on Mothers’ Day before shipping overseas. He was also survived by three brothers, one of who was serving on Guam.  Following the war, Hahn’s remains were returned to the United States and he was laid to rest in Aiken’s Bethany Cemetery. 

 For more information about Henry Tutt Hahn see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-tutt-hahn-tut/  

 

 

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Pugh Rogers

Occupation Relocation

Written by: Kelly Durham

The war was over and it seemed as though much of the world was migrating.  Civilians chased from their former homes by authoritarian regimes or flushed by the violence of combat were clogging European roads, searching for some place better to restart their lives.  It wasn’t only civilians on the move.  Military units from the victorious Allies were relocating to new duty stations from which to carry out peacetime missions that had more to do with rebuilding than retribution.  The 495th Bomb Squadron was one of these organizations and one of its members was Pugh Geddings Rogers, Clemson Class of 1933.

The 495th was activated in late 1942 as a replacement training unit.  A year later, it was reorganized as an operational squadron and deployed to Europe as part of the IX Bomber Command.  From its bases in England, the medium bombers of the 495th attacked enemy tactical targets in occupied Europe.  After D-Day, the 495th moved to the continent, establishing new bases in France and Belgium.  The squadron often attacked enemy airfields to disrupt Luftwaffe fighter defenses against 8th Air Force heavy bomber formations flying to and from strategic targets in Germany.

Pugh Rogers studied engineering at Clemson beginning in 1928.  He left school after three years, but his engineering background helped prepare him for his wartime duties.  Pugh was an Army Air Force master sergeant and crew chief.  It was his job to supervise and lead a team of mechanics, armorers, technicians, and fuelers who often worked through the night to keep one of the squadron’s B-26 Martin bombers flying.

The end of combat operations meant a new role for the 495th and a new duty station.  The 495th was designated to serve as part of the US occupation forces in Germany.  In early September 1945, Rogers wrote that his squadron was packed and ready to move its base of operations from Florennes, Belgium to an airfield outside of Munich, Germany.

On September 10, Rogers climbed into a B-26 Martin medium bomber for the two hour flight to Schleissheim, on the northern outskirts of Munich.  The aircraft, piloted by Captain Jerald Davies, was part of a multi-ship formation. In addition to three other crewmembers, the flight carried six passengers on their way to their new post.

Enroute from Florennes, Davies’s bomber became separated from the rest of the formation.  Davies apparently lost his bearings and strayed to the southwest of Munich—and into the Bavarian Alps.  All ten aboard the airplane were killed when it crashed into a mountain near Trauchgau, Germany, some fifty miles from its intended destination.

Master Sergeant Pugh Geddings Rogers was survived by his stepmother, two sisters, and one brother.  In his last letter, Rogers wrote that he expected to return home a few weeks after the move to Munich.

Rogers was awarded the Bronze Star.  He is buried in the Lorraine American Military Cemetery.

For more information on Pugh Geddings Rogers see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/pugh-geddings-rogers/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

 

 

 

Scroll of Honor – Kevin N. Earnest

Presidential Mission

Written by: Kelly DurhamCaptain Kevin Earnest

Shortly before a scheduled mission to the western United States, Air Force Captain Kevin N. Earnest and his wife Carol dropped by Summerville to visit his college roommate Robbie Albertson, his wife Pam, and their one-year-old son Brett.  Kevin presented little Brett with a stuffed bear, which was quickly christened “Boo.”  That seemed appropriate as Kevin’s Air Force call sign was “Boo-Boo.”  That was the last visit the two families would share.

For his summer vacation in 1996, President Bill Clinton traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  From there, the president was scheduled to fly to New York for a fiftieth birthday party.  Whenever the president travels, his Secret Service detail, their equipment, and security vehicles go along.  Moving the Secret Service’s vehicles from one destination to the next is the mission of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command.  Kevin N. Earnest, Clemson Class of 1988, was the pilot of an Air Mobility Command C-130 aircraft supporting the presidential trip.

Earnest was a mechanical engineering major from Kingsport, Tennessee.  An Eagle Scout, he had served as student body president of his high school and had earned his pilot’s certificate while still a student there.  At Clemson, Earnest continued his record of achievement.  He was an Air Force ROTC cadet earning the commission of a second lieutenant.  He served as president of the Student Alumni Council and was selected for membership in Tiger Brotherhood, Blue Key, and Mortar Board.

By the summer of 1996, Captain Earnest was assigned to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas.  On Saturday, August 17, Earnest and his crew of seven other Air Force personnel, were dispatched to Jackson Hole Airport to load one of the presidential security vehicles into their C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and deliver it to New York City, the president’s next scheduled stop. Jackson Hole’s is the only airport located wholly inside a national park.  It rests on a plateau near the base of the spectacular Tetons mountain range, the peaks of which rise to heights of more than 13,700 feet.

Earnest’s aircraft took off at about 10:45 pm.  Approximately three minutes into the flight, fifteen miles southeast of the airport, the C-130 slammed into the side of Sheep Mountain, 1,000 feet below the peak’s 11,300-foot summit.  The airplane exploded in a fireball seen twenty miles away at Teton Village resort community.  Earnest, his crew mates, and a Secret Service agent were killed.  Searchers were able to reach the crash site only on foot or by horseback.  The force of the impact and resulting explosion demolished the large airplane.  The Air Force would subsequently attribute the accident to the crew’s failure “to monitor the aircraft’s position and flight path relative to high terrain surrounding the Jackson Hole Airport.”

In the fall of 1997, three of Kevin Earnest’s friends established the Captain Kevin N. Earnest Leadership Award to be presented annually to a rising Clemson Air Force ROTC senior cadet who demonstrates outstanding leadership in the program and within other student organizations.

Captain Earnest and the other victims of the crash are memorialized on a plaque near Sheep Mountain, Wyoming.  Brett Albertson, earned a civil engineering degree from The Citadel in 2017 and a master’s degree from Clemson in 2022.  Now an Air Force captain himself, this summer Brett trekked to the crash site to remember and honor the sacrifice of his family’s friend.  And Boo, the stuffed bear, though showing his age, continues to reside with Brett’s mother Pam.

For more information about Kevin N. Earnest see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/kevin-n-earnest/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/