NORMAN LEE LANIER
Posted Friday, March 1, 2013 07:40 AM

REMEMBERING
NORMAN LEE LANIER

 

By Joe C. Fling

The war casualty news from Europe continued to grow worse, as reports of missing and killed soldiers appeared in the local papers regularly. Beginning with September, 1944, 12 of southern Colorado County’s young men would die in action before the war ended eleven months later. Private Norman Lee Lanier of Garwood was one of these.

On August 15, 1944, while the Allies were still short of liberating Paris from the north, the U.S. Seventh Army launched a second front on the Mediterranean coast of France. The goal of this fighting was to draw German forces away from Normandy and squeeze the enemy in a vise-like action. General Lucian Truscott’s VI Corps, veterans of North Africa and Italy, including the 3rd, 16th and 45th Infantry divisions, were the first troops ashore. Norman Lee Lanier of Garwood was involved in this fighting.

Lanier was born March 2, 1925, in Lissie, the son of David Leslie and Ola Belle Smith Lanier. The Lanier family had moved to Garwood in 1929 and Norman graduated from Garwood High School in 1942. He was inducted into the service on June 21, 1943, received six weeks of basic training and went overseas to join up with the with the 45th Infantry.

General Troy Middleton commanded the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry which took part in landings at Scoglitti, Sicily in July, 1943; Salerno, Italy in September, 1943; and Anzio, Italy in January, 1944, including the fighting for Rome; before the August 15 landings in Southern France. Lanier took part in the Italian portions of this fighting.

The landings in France took place on the French Rivera between Cannes and St. Tropez. At first they met little resistance and took only light casualties. Eleven days after the southern France D-Day; Lanier wrote to his brother Foy that he had been made a scout; and wrote to a friend in Garwood that he had seen the Coliseum in Rome; but had been unable to get a pass to get to the leaning tower of Pisa and other sights that he had studied in school.

The offensive in Southern France drove up the Rhone River valley, covering almost 300 miles in thirty days. They accomplished all of their objectives and linked up with Patton’s Third Army southeast of Paris on September 11. 7th Army then turned East to join the offensive toward the heart of Germany through the Alsace and Lorraine provinces of France. By the end of September, the line of battle extended from Belgium, through Metz and Nancy to the Swiss border. In the fighting along this line, Lanier met his death.

Lanier had the rank of private and served as an army scout in the 180th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division. His last letter to his parents told of a narrow escape when a bullet pierced his helmet and wool cap. Shortly after they received that letter, the family received the Army’s notice that he was missing in action. Two weeks later, the news was confirmed that Lanier had been killed in action on October 3, 1944. At nineteen years, seven months, Lanier was one of the younger men to die in the war from Colorado County.

Norman had several siblings. He was survived by four brothers, Jack, Foy and M. G. who were all already in army uniform and Leo, the youngest who would join later. M. G. reported that he was in Canada, receiving Air Corps radar training when he received the news of Norman’s death from his parents. Lanier was also survived by two sisters: Hazel, and Berta Rhea. Lanier’s mother was one of those honored mothers who had five sons in the military, a ‘five-star mother.’

Lanier was buried with military honors at the American Cemetery in Epinal, France, where 5,255 American war dead are interred. Though his remains were not returned to the United States, two markers in Colorado County commemorate his life, service and death. The Garwood Methodist Church where the Laniers were members erected memorial stones and planted oaks which have grown in the last sixty years to a huge size, one in honor of Lanier, and the other in honor of William N. Foster, killed in North Africa in 1943.

Several years ago, Lanier’s brother M. G. placed another stone in the family plot at the Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery in Columbus. Each year on Lanier’s birth date, his two surviving brothers, M. G. and Jack have flowers placed at the grave in Epinal.