Homer Buford Hanes

Homer went into the Army from the National Guard a year before Pearl Harbor and came out a staff sergeant, with credit for three campaigns in Europe, days before Japan’s surrender was announced. His discharge papers, kept by his granddaughter, say so in the Army’s own words.

He was born on November 23, 1919, at Woodville, Texas, the only one of the three brothers born outside Louisiana. His own draft registration, which he signed, gives the date and the place, and the 1930 census, which finds him at ten in his parents’ house in Tioga, Rapides Parish, agrees.

He joined the National Guard at eighteen, about December 1937 by the reckoning of his discharge, while he was still at Tioga High School. He finished there in 1939 and worked in Pineville as a mechanic’s helper and as a clerk in J. S. Bottoms’s grocery. On November 25, 1940, two days after his twenty-first birthday, he was called into federal service at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, as a corporal in the Quartermaster Corps. That was also the day the 31st Division, the National Guard division of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, was called into federal service, which suggests he was one of its Guardsmen.

The 31st Division trained at Camp Blanding, Florida, and that is where the newspapers find him. On Sunday, May 11, which by the calendar was in 1941, his parents gave a dinner at Rigolette for their son, “Corporal Homer B. Hanes of Camp Blanding,” home on a week’s visit. Lunch was served picnic style on the lawn, and the afternoon was spent visiting the army camps near Alexandria. Aubrey Lee and Eloyse came from Colfax, and Anna Beth and Roger were there with their parents.

In August 1942 he left the United States for the American Theater, and he stayed outside the country for seventeen months, until January 1944. The family account is that he served with the Army that built the Alaska Highway, the road pushed through Canada to Alaska in 1942. His discharge does not name the place, but the dates fit. The family also holds that he did survey work, and it identifies him in a photograph of two soldiers surveying in deep snow. That identification, and the photograph’s source, are not yet verified.

On January 13, 1944, at Tyler, Texas, Sgt. Homer B. Hanes was married at noon, and his best man was his brother, Sgt. A. L. Hanes. Fifty years later his children gave a party at Gladewater for his and Joyce’s fiftieth anniversary.

On April 16, 1944, seven weeks before D-Day, he arrived in the European Theater, and he served there for fifteen months. He was a platoon sergeant in a quartermaster truck company. By his separation record he directed 42 men and 16 semi-trucks and trailers, trained the replacements who came into the company, and for six months drove heavy trucks himself, hauling soldiers, supplies and equipment from the supply bases to the line. His discharge credits him with three campaigns: Normandy, Northern France and the Rhineland.

The Normandy campaign ran from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to July 24. His discharge lists no arrowhead, the device for an assault landing, so the Foundation does not claim that he landed with the first wave. It says what the record says: he served in the Normandy campaign.

The family account is that Homer and his older brother Aubrey Lee entered service together, deployed together, and that Homer served under Aubrey. The records now show two brothers who took different roads to the same war. The notes below set out what fits and what does not.

His granddaughter keeps his medals in a case beneath a folded flag: sergeant’s chevrons on either side, and four medals between them. They are the four his discharge lists: the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, for service before Pearl Harbor, the American Campaign Medal, and the European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal.

He sailed for home on July 24, 1945, landed on August 8, and was discharged at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, on August 12, three days before Japan’s surrender was announced. The next year the Veterans Administration in Dallas issued him a certificate of eligibility for a home loan under the GI Bill. He made his home at Gladewater, Texas.