Researching the feature article on the 80th anniversary of D Day was a labor of love, and pain. The story of Clifford Douglas Murray, Jr. is one that was repeated in our community, around the country and around the world. We can’t tell all of those stories, and so Clifford represents all of the soldiers who died in service to their country. But in finding his story, I also found the stories of about 20 young men from Marple, Newtown and Edgmont who enlisted, fought and died in the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
As the article explains, a couple from the community set this all in motion – they were going to tour Normandy and wanted to pay their respects to any local boys. When they returned with stories and pictures, the decision was hatched to do an article about the anniversary.
I double checked my research and found inconsistencies in the lists that had been compiled over the years. So I ended up searching out every name of any soldier from this area reported as being killed. I scoured the daily newspapers from 1941-45; checked government lists of war casualties; verified family connections through ancestry.com; and found draft cards, death notices, military burial records and Veterans Compensation files. My search led to a man in upstate New York whose uncle had been killed parachuting into Normandy on D Day. He compiled an amazing set of WW II resources, and gave me access to daily combat records where the Company clerk noted the dead, wounded and missing, and where they were located that day.
In seeking them all out, I re-lived their deaths, and the pain of their loved ones. My mother lost her brother in the war. He was just 21. She recalled on his 70th birthday that not a day had gone by since then when she did not think of him. And so with each confirmed death, I imagined the same lifetime of pain in each house that received the awful news.
Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby, on the loss of her sons in an earlier war, most eloquently captures my thoughts: “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
For more history on Newtown Square, Delaware County, and membership information, please visit our website at: https://nshistory.org/
For more on all Veterans of Newtown Square through the years, go here: https://online.fliphtml5.com/hplxj/gjxi/#p=1