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Aaron's Blog
Oct. 29, 2008: Ask me who won the Thirty Years War and I'm likely to answer with a question ... "Macy's? ... wait wait, Gimbel's?" I couldn't even tell you which countries took part in the Thirty Years War, even as I'm a third of the way through the 1907 classic "Marshall Turenne" (thank you, Google Books and the University of California Library) by Thomas Longueville, author of "The Life of a Prig" among other works of literature.
Why am I interested in the life of Marshall Turenne, you might ask.
Because, as is so often the case, of a question I asked in an interview some seven years ago.
In 2001, I posted a query on a genealogy web site asking if anyone had any information on a Marshall Warfield, who served with the 712th Tank Battalion in World War II. I received a response from Stephanie Tiburon, who said that Marshall Warfield's widow, Olga (pronounced Ahl-ga), was still alive, was in her eighties, and was quite the feisty character. If I went to interview her, Stephanie suggested, I should bring a bottle of cold duck.
To my surprise, when I looked up the name Warfield in Oakton, Virginia, there was a listing for Marshall Warfield, even though Marshall was killed in the war.
The 712th Tank Battalion was a spirited unit, due in large part to the competence of and respect for its leadership. In the course of its 311 days in combat, it would lose at least three of those highly respected leaders: Lieutenant Colonel George B. Randolph, killed in action at Nothum, Luxembourg, on Jan. 9, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge; Lieutenant Edward L. Forrest of A Company, killed in action April 3, 1945, at Heimboldshausen, Germany; and Lieutenant Marshall T. Warfield of Headquarters Company, killed in action on Sept. 27, 1944, in France.
"When we went overseas, Marshall Warfield was the commander of the reconnaissance platoon," Fred Steers, a veteran of Headquarters Company, told me at a battalion reunion in Oregon several years ago. "I was a corporal at that time, and one day he was assigned a daylight reconnaissance mission. Ordinarily, he always asked me to go with him wherever he went, because he liked the way I handled my rifle. I was a pretty good shot, I guess. He needed a little backup, maybe. But this day he said, 'I don't want you to come with me.' So he wouldn't take me. He took another corporal, Joe Patrick, and Tim Reilly. And they took off on this mission.
"Later that afternoon, Patrick came back, he's the only one that came back. Reilly got killed right on the spot. Warfield was shot there, too. Patrick got him back to the aid station, but he died there.
"Warfield always said, 'I know if I get hit I'm gonna die.' And he did. And Pat came back and made the report. Later, Smitty [Eugene Smith] and I were assigned to go out there and see if we could find Tim. We went out and found where they'd took off, and Smitty wouldn't let me go with him. He said, 'You wait here.' He was a staff sergeant and I was just a corporal. He anchored me right there. So I waited for him, and he was gone for a good half-hour, and I heard a rifle shot. And I just was so afraid it was him. I was just getting ready to take off and go down there anyway, and here he comes back. He'd picked up Tim's pistol and he handed it to me, and I carried that for quite a while.
"He found Tim and they finally got him out of there, but Smitty couldn't get him out then, there was too much firing there.
"I asked him about the rifle shot. He said he heard it, but it wasn't fired at him.
"One day Lieutenant Warfield, Tim Reilly, myself and Phil Felinsky were out scouting around. We came to a rise in the highway and we left our jeeps back down behind. And over across the valley probably a mile away we could hear the Germans moving around in vehicles. Pretty soon, here come some motorcycles, messenger carriers.
"The lieutenant and Tim lay down in the ditch alongside the road, while I sat upright behind an apple tree, probably about 30 feet from the road. Phil Felinski was behind me, behind another tree. And here comes this bike, it had two riders on it.
"Warfield jumped up and held up his hand and the bike rider just laid on the gas and was coming around him. Lieutenant Warfield and Tim each had tommy guns, Phil and I had M-1s. They emptied those tommy guns and they just shot the air, they never touched them, and they were as close as from here to the end of that building. And they were going to get by us.
"I fired, and at the crack of that gun the bike hit the ground, instantly. It went sliding down the highway. And the guy on the back, he jumped up and started to get his weapon and Phil killed him. The guy I shot wasn't killed. But that one bullet, I put six holes in him. Two in one arm, it went in his side, out the other side, and out the other arm. Six holes. And he was up walking around. He wanted to go to a doctor. So we finally loaded him up on the jeep and took him back to the medics. The last I saw him he was still going. Evidently, it didn't hit a bone anywhere, went in both sides and went right out."
True to Steffi Tiburon's prediction, Olga Warfield was indeed a character. I have not yet added her interview to the collection of audio CDs, but look for it to be available soon. Ironically, Olga was interviewed for a book called "Thanks for the Memories" by Jane Mersky Leder (thanks once again, Google Books).
On an impulse, while looking through one of her scrapbooks, I asked Olga what the T stood for in Marshall T. Warfield. I don't know what the B stands for in George B. Randolph and the L in Edward L. Forrest stood for Lester, his estranged father.
The T, Olga said, was for Turenne.
The men of the 712th Tank Battalion loved General George S. Patton and some of them would have readily followed him to Japan, but I don't think any of them named their kids after him. Marshall Warfield came from one of Baltimore's most prominent families -- either his grandfather or his great uncle was governor of Maryland, his brother Edwin was a general in the Maryland National Guard, and the family goes back to Revolutionary times. I don't know if Marshall Warfield was related in any distant ancestral way to Marshall Turenne, but Turenne's exploits, I'm learning from Longueville's book, make even Patton's accomplishments pale in comparison.
Thanks for reading.
-- Aaron Elson
Comments? email me, put "your blog" in the subject line, and I'll post all appropriate comments at the end of the entries.
