Here!

OP, please keep the posts coming.

Thank you! Great tribute to our Aggie Forefathers.

Ralph Hartgraves, A&M College of Texas class of 1941, KIA July 13, 1944.



Captain Hartgraves was the commanding officer of A Company. The morning report for July 17, 1944, on page 39 shows him killed in action on July 13, 1944, and Lt. Holland assumed command of the company.



On July 9th at 11:30 am, the 2nd Battalion of the 331st Infantry Regiment (83rd Infantry Division) commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel James F. Faber engaged in the fight for the liberation of the village of Sainteny. The latter is defended by paratroopers of the Fallschirmjger Regiment 6 (91. Infanterie Division), SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment 38 (17 SS Panzer-Division "Götz von Berlichingen") which is reinforced by elements of the SS Panzer "Das Reich" Division.

Despite the destructive firepower of the Germans and the catastrophic loss rate of the 331st Infantry Regiment, the Americans hold fast and maintained control of the village. The fighting continued at the gates of Sainteny until 21 July, when the 83rd Infantry Division commanded by Major General Robert C. Macon resumed its southern advance.

CPT Ralph Hartgraves is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery

James Thompson, A&M College of Texas class of 1928, KIA April 1, 1944.



James was in Flight B Air Corps



Colonel James Thompson was the CO of the 448th Bombardment Group, B24 Liberators, based in Seething UK.



Colonel Thompson was killed in his parachute as he made his descent--by German machinegun ground fire.

He is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery

Frank Daugherty, A&M College of Texas class of 1941, KIA April 20, 1944.



Frank was in the Chemical Warfare Service outfit, as well as the Larado A&M Club.



Frank was born on the 13th of August 1919 in Laredo, Webb County Texas. He graduated from Laredo High School in 1937. He then went on to complete his degree in Petroleum Engineering at Texas A & M College, then volunteered to join the Army Air Corps, and attended Roswell Army Air Field, where he was a student at the four-engine pilot transition school.

In 1944, Frank arrived in England and joined the Eighth Air Force at RAF Deenethorpe, AAF Station - 128. Home to the 401st Bomb Group, Frank was assigned to the 613th Bomb Squadron.

2nd Lt. Frank Daugherty's first and last operational mission was on the 20th of April 1944. Mission Log 53, (Operation Crossbow). The target is to strike the V1 & V2 Rocket sites at Bois Coquerel, on the Pas de Calais, France. He was on the rookie crew of the B-17g (42-31593), "Carrie B". No3 & No4 engines were hit by flak and about 3 to 4 minutes later the aircraft pulled up vertically and went into a dive to around 12000ft, and exploded the aircraft crashed near the target area, at Pont Remy, France.

Just before the explosion, Frank went to the nose of the aircraft to warn his crew to bail out, but due to lack of oxygen, Frank fell unconscious. His co-pilot William Maher, pushed Frank out of the aircraft and pulled his rip cord for him. Dennis Beach the Navigator, found Frank on the ground two hours later guarded by the German troops. They refused to let Dennis anywhere near him, according to the guards Frank was already dead.

Frank was buried in the English Military Cemetery, Abbeville/Somme on the 24th of April 1944, Single grave number B-15. He was later moved to the Normandy American Cemetery, Colville-sur-Mer, France, and is interred at plot D, Row 18, Grave 42. His name is also on the Laredo WWII & Korean Conflict Memorial on Jarvis Plaza and is also registered on The American Battle Monuments Commission.

WWII Commendations - Air Medal, Purple Heart, Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal, Army Presidential Unit Citation, Army Good Conduct Medal, European - African - Middle Eastern Campaign Medal.

Joel Stratton, A&M College of Texas class of 1941 KIA June 30, 1944



Joel Stratton was in C Troop Cavalry according to the 1939 Longhorn



PVT Joel Stratton is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery

This is great! Are you the one who put on the covers at the bottom each marker?

Great thread OP!

Outstanding tribute. Lest we forget. Thanks so much

This is wonderful! Thank you for such a detailed and descriptive thread. I was also there last week and looked up the Aggies on the Wall of the Missing as well a few headstones. Here is my photo for Joel Stratton.

Thank you for honoring and remembering.

What a reminder of the staggering losses the United States suffered in that war. Imagine what the families went through.

We need to remember these good, brave men. Thank you so much, OP.

Blue Stars!

chick79 said:

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This is great! Are you the one who put on the covers at the bottom each marker?

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Yes, I designed the banner and had a local embroidery company do all the work for me

OldArmy71 said:

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What a reminder of the staggering losses the United States suffered in that war. Imagine what the families went through.

We need to remember these good, brave men. Thank you so much, OP.

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Rows and Rows and Rows of crosses

I admire you for being able to go to those cemeteries. I'm not sure I could do that now. Just so sad. We certainly fought monstrous foes, but it is so sad.

I am reminded of a passage in the second book of Rick Atkinson's WWII trilogy, The Day of Battle. Atkinson is writing about a military cemetery in Italy, but it's the same idea:

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Quote:

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....just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stocky, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker's platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Mark Clark as the Fifth Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. "It was, " wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin [the Stars and Stripes cartoonist], "the most moving gesture I ever saw." In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to Jack Toffey, to Henry Waskow [a Texan who was the subject of a famous column by Ernie Pyle], and to the thousands of others who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Maulding later recalled:

He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart that this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his own would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances....

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An article written by Ernie Pyle:

The Horrible Waste of War

Friday, June 16, 1944

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 16, 1944 I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead.

The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.

I walked for a mile and a half along the water's edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.

The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.

For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.

You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn't quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.

There were LCT's turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don't know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.

In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers' packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.

On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.

On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.

We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.

A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow's-nest view, and far out to sea.

And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.

Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.

As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.

The prisoners too were looking out to sea the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.

They didn't say a word to each other. They didn't need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.

If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.