Aubrey Lee Hanes

Aubrey Lee was the first of Thompson and Bethie’s four, born in Dry Prong, Louisiana, on August 12, 1917, four months after the United States entered the First World War. A year later his father sailed for Europe with the 347th Infantry.

He grew up in central Louisiana. The 1930 census finds him at twelve in his parents’ house in Tioga, in Rapides Parish. At eighteen he was already a soldier of a kind: the Official National Guard Register records enlisted service from September 1935 to January 1939, and again from June to October 1940. He married Eloyse Johnson in June 1940. By the end of that year he was twenty-three, living in Colfax and working for the Thompson Motor Company, and on December 16 he registered for the draft. The registrar recorded blue eyes, blond hair, five feet ten and a half inches, and a scar on his right wrist.

He went into federal service on November 20, 1942, and stayed in until March 15, 1946, as an enlisted soldier. In January 1944 he stood as best man at his brother Homer’s wedding in Tyler, Texas, and the newspaper named both brothers as sergeants. His obituary says he served in the Rainbow Division, the 42nd Infantry Division, which reached France in December 1944 and ended the war in Germany and Austria. The register lists the Bronze Star Medal among his decorations. The citation, and what it was awarded for, are still to be found.

On April 29, 1945, units of the Rainbow Division liberated the concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich. The family holds photographs of Aubrey Lee in Germany and Austria, and at the camp, and the family account is that he served in military intelligence. If the record bears that out, he stood inside one of the places the twentieth century has the least excuse for forgetting, and saw for himself what was there. That is the single most important thing this Foundation can hope to confirm, and it is the reason the education work exists at all.

He was commissioned after the war: second lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps in December 1947, then infantry, first lieutenant in 1952, captain in 1953, and major in 1960. A Shreveport Times photo negative held at LSU‑Shreveport records a promotion to colonel in May 1969, and his obituary says he retired as a colonel from the Army Reserve. It was a career in uniform of more than thirty years, begun with an enlistment at eighteen.

He finished a degree at Northwestern State College of Louisiana in 1950 and moved to Shreveport in 1951. He retired from the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation. He was a deacon and a Sunday School teacher at Northwood Baptist Church.

When he retired, he took up the family’s history and made it his work. More than four hundred pages of it survive: charts, letters and notes. The family account is that this was what he did with the rest of his life. He had no children, and he spent his last decades establishing who his people were. His pages are held by a member of this Foundation’s board. The Foundation’s work runs alongside his: his research is one of its sources, pooled with the records that have come available since.

He and Eloyse are buried under one marker at Forest Lawn, in Pineville, which carries her dates alongside his and the date they married. They had no children. Eloyse died in 1991 and he outlived her by ten years, and when he went in 2001 there was no son or daughter to take the house apart. Of the Four, he is the one whose things had nowhere to go.