Scott County, Tennessee
FNB Chronicles

This page was updated 06 Sep 2008

Scott County’s World War II
HONORS LIST

[EDITOR’S NOTE — The following is reprinted from the Fall 1985 Newsletter of the Scott County Historical Society. It is Scott County’s World War II Honors List. In June 1946 the War Department (Adjutant General’s Office) compiled a county-by-county "Honor List" of dead and missing soldiers and sailors of World War II from the State of Tennessee. According to Lewis B. Hershey, then director of the Selective Service System in Washington, D.C., copies of the booklet were circulated to all newspapers in the U.S.. These excerpts — first from the booklet’s foreword and then the listing for Scott County — are taken from a copy of the booklet which was donated to the Historical Society by Kolmer Burress of Oneida].

The Honor List of dead and missing for the State of Tennessee is published by the War Department for the information of public officials, the press, the radio and interested organizations. It contains the latest and most complete data available on all military personnel who were killed or died, or became and remain missing between the President’s declaration of unlimited national emergency on May 27, 1941, and the cutoff date of this report, January 31, 1946, and includes both battle and non-battle dead or missing. The complete work, of which this volume is a part, contains about 300,000 names of men and women who gave their lives while serving in the Army of the United States.

The State of Tennessee contained 2.17 per cent of the population of the United States and possessions (excluding The Philippine Islands) in 1940 and contributed 2.090 per cent of the total number who entered the Army. Of these men and women of Tennessee who went to war, 3.15 per cent failed to return. This figure represents 2.13 per cent of the Army’s total dead or missing.

The number of missing persons is being reduced daily through operation of Army Search Teams in all theaters of operations.

Most of the persons listed herein as missing disappeared less than a year prior to January 31, 1946, the cutoff date mentioned above. As time passes the fate of some of these missing will become known and others will be declared dead in the absence of hope that they are living. A few — too small a number to be considered as a percentage of missing — fall into a third category: persons who intentionally deserted the service and are bending every effort to avoid repatriation. Cases of this type have been discovered in the past but the number of these cases is exceedingly small.

The physical search for missing persons, which went on all during the war, has been expanded and extended since the collapse of enemy resistance. Experts in all fields of investigation and identification have been sent into areas where missing persons were last seen. Through conferences with local officials and clergymen and by means of checks of rosters and other military lists, the bodies of missing persons are being recovered and identified daily. Though the loss of officials records, as at Corregidor in 1942 and during the Ardennes counteroffensive of 1944-45, has increased the difficulties encountered by the search teams, the scope of the teams’ work has been so broad in the past eight months (in the case of Japan) to one year (in Germany) that the War Department is reluctant to hold out hope to next of kin that any missing personnel are still alive.

No civilians are included in this report. Red Cross personnel and other civilians serving with the Army became casualties during the War, but procedure for reporting civilian personnel differs from that for reporting military individuals.

NOTE — In the listing below, we have eliminated the serial number following the soldier’s name for the sake of brevity. Some of the abbreviations used are PFC (Private First Class), PVT (Private), 1 LT (First Lieutenant), 2 LT (Second Lieutenant), SGT (Sergeant), MSG (Master Sergeant), CPL (Corporal), WOJG (Warrant Officer, Junior Grade), MJR (Major), KIA (killed in action), DOW (died of wounds), and DNB (died, non battle). Since a page containing the abbreviation designations was missing from this report, we do not know what FOD stands for, however. [FOD means "Finding of Death" and references individuals declared dead under Public Law 490 despite the body never being found at the time of declaration.]

FNB Chronicle, Vol. 10, No. 2 – Winter 1999
First National Bank
P.O. Box 4699
Oneida, TN 37841
(page 10)  

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