The Real Golden Lions

When Jim McNeish went into the Army early in 1943, he had been married for a little less than three years and had one child, my sister Jane Ann. He had basic training at Camp Grant in Illinois. He was initially trained as a medic and eventually became the senior NCO in a battalion aid station (the first stop for casualties) prior to his transfer to the Infantry. My brother, Denny, was born just prior to his shipping out for Europe; he was not allowed to come home to see him and did not see him until he returned home from Europe after the war was over. His unit landed in France in early August, 1944 and he made it to Paris within a day or so after the liberation in late August 1944. When he received word that his brother Francis had been killed in action on September 11, 1944, he requested and received a transfer to the Infantry. Because he was a senior NCO (E-7) at the time, he was sent to OCS, commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant, and assigned to a rifle platoon in the 106th Infantry Division in December 1944.

The 106th had landed in France on December 2, 1944 and was immediately placed in the American lines in what was then a quiet sector in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a surprise attack and what was to prove the largest land battle on the Western Front in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge. Two regiments of the 106th were quickly surrounded and surrendered three days after the attack began. (Kurt Vonnegut, noted author, was a member of the 106th and was captured in the Bulge. His novel, Slaughterhouse Five, is about his time spent in German POW camps.) Fortunately for my father, he and most of his regiment, the 424th, escaped and fought through to the end of the Battle when it was taken off the line in January, 1945. The division was then reconstituted and did not see further action until late March/early April, 1945.

In March, 1945, when my grandparents received word that their third son, 2Lt. Cecil C. McNeish, was missing in action over Germany, they began the process to have my father brought back from Europe to the US as the sole surviving son. In a real "Saving Private Ryan" story, he was not located until after the war was over and the 106th was training for the invasion of Japan. He did not return home until Fall, 1945.

Jim McNeish lived a long and productive life. He married my mother, June, in 1941 before the war started. They were married for 63 years when he died July 19, 2004, and had three children, nine grand children, and a whole host of great grandchildren. Dad was the manager of a retail furniture for 40 years when he retired in 1989. He was a published author and poet, community activist, environmentalist, and an accomplished and passionate fly fisherman who could worry a trout out of a stream when no one else believed there were any to be had.
 

2Lt. James M. McNeish
D Co., 2d Bn., 424th Inf. Reg., 106th Inf. Division
1919-2004

Cpl. Francis E. McNeish
Troop E, 113th Cavalry Squadron (Mechanized)
Killed in Action September 11, 1944

2Lt Cecil C. McNeish
837th Bomber Sqdn./487 Bomber Grp. (Heavy)
Killed in Action March 15, 1945

When I was growing up, every Memorial Day and Veterans Day my friends and I would go to the park and watch the ceremonies. I knew many of those men in VFW uniforms as the fathers of the kids I grew up with. We would stand behind the firing squad and wrestle for the spent blanks ejected from their M-1s during the salute to the dead. It was hard for any of us to realize why it was going on except that we had a day off from school. In the back of my mind, though, I remembered the faces of my Father and his brothers in the triple picture in my grandmother’s living room and the gold fringed blue flag with the two gold stars she displayed in her window until she died in 1966.

Over the years, those who came back, those at the Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies have become gray and bent but no less proud. Many have gone on to join their fallen comrades. Those that remain don’t march anymore. They come to the park with their canes and crutches and walkers leaning on their sons and daughters or maybe their grandchildren. But they come. Their places in the color guard and firing squad have been taken by veterans of more recent conflicts, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and soon, those from Afghanistan and Iraq. The local high school band plays some martial music and the Star Spangled Banner. The firing squad fires its three volleys in salute and a lone bugler, some nervous 16 year old who wonders why he had to be there, plays Taps. Before my Dad died, I made it a point over the last several years to come home for Veterans Day and take him to the park for the ceremonies. I was humbled in the presence of these men, ordinary men who performed such extraordinary deeds as I am humbled by the memory of the 35 names on the bronze plaque in the park.

War memorial plaque in Osceola Mills town park.
"That the people of this place may be worthy of their honored dead."