Bookends

I was browsing through a folder of photos for my author web site when one of them stood out. It’s a photo of the second of two plaques on the 712th Tank Battalion monument in the Memorial Garden at the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

The plaque contains the names, in alphabetical order, of 50 of the 100 members of the battalion who were killed during World War II.

What struck me immediately was that the first and last names on the plaque were like bookends: Lt. Wallace Lippincott, Jr.; and Pfc. Billy Paige Wolfe.

I could go through the panel and tell you a story about many of the names engraved on it, and those I don’t recognize you can probably find mentioned in “A Tank Gunner’s Story,” by the late Louis Gruntz, Jr., who traveled his father’s combat route with his dad and recorded many stories of B Company. And there are some names that are a mystery, like Doye Smith, whose great-nephew Brian Smith knows only the date and location of his great-uncle’s death but has searched fruitlessly for further details.

But back to Wally Lippincott and Billy Wolfe. These are two of the tankers whose stories, along with that of Ed Forrest, whose name is on the first of the two plaques, have meant the most to me.

Wally Lippincott was killed at Sonlez, Luxembourg, on January 14, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was killed along with his tank driver, Quentin “Pine Valley” Bynum, whose name is on the other plaque, and his loader, Frank Shagonabe.

One day I received an email from Chris Bynum, who inherited his uncle Quentin’s dogtags. I went out to Springfield, Missouri, and interviewed Chris’s dad, James Bynum, Pine Valley’s brother. The tankers who remembered Pine Valley assumed that that was the town he was from, but there is no Pine Valley in the Ozarks where he grew up. There is, however, a resort town named Pine Valley in the mountains around San Diego near where they trained, so it was likely he had a girlfriend there during his days in the horse cavalry.

Frank Shagonabe was a Native American. I never met any of his kin but there was a deeply moving article in the Muskegon Chronicle in 2009.

A few years ago Vern Schmidt, a veteran of the 90th Infantry Division, returned from Europe with a canteen. His friend Norbert Morbe, a militaria collector, found the canteen in the woods in Belgium. It had Lieutenant Lippincott’s name etched into its side. He asked Vern to try and locate Lippincott’s family. I was able to put Vern in touch with Ted Nobles, Wally Lippincott’s great-nephew, and with the help of the Philadelphia Inquirer we were able to locate Elizabeth Pitner, Wally’s widow, who had remarried and was 92 years old.

The other bookend is Billy Wolfe. In 1992 I interviewed Maxine Wolfe Zirkle and Madalene Wolfe Litten, twin sisters who were 16 years old when their brother Billy, who was 18, was killed. Their mother, who never knew the circumstances of Billy’s death, saved everything from his short life, including an essay he wrote in high school.

Pfc. Billy P. Wolfe

“If I were to be blind today,I would want to go off by myself in the mountains, climb to the highest cliff, and look out across the valley at the towns, farms and farmhouses.

“I would want to see the squirrels running and leaping from one walnut tree to another, and the birds flying.

“I would like to see the deer run and jump swiftly and gracefully and leap across the fences, and lie in a tree that leans across the water and watch bass laying under the rocks and dart out after a fly.

“I would go through the house from one room to the other picturing each piece of furniture, every corner and everything, in my mind.

“I would like to see all my sisters, brother and parents together as we were, and picture each as they look for future reference.”

I’ll go through the other names on this and the other plaque at a later date, but each of these bookends could inspire a book by itself.