Memories of soldiers lost so young fade to softest whispers

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U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Francis Ames Hayner

I never knew my Uncle Francis. He died on July 13, 1943, in an army hospital in Casablanca nearly a decade before I was born.

We share a middle name but no memories. Francis Ames Hayner, named after his Scottish grandfather, was my dad’s older brother and only sibling. Everything I know about him comes from a handful of documents, newspaper clips and my late dad’s remembrances.

The bulk of Francis Hayner’s Army records were destroyed along with some 16 to 18 million personnel files in a 1973 fire at the National Archives outside St. Louis.

OPINION

Francis died without a wife or children to remember him; his only survivors were his widowed mother and my dad, James. Francis was a lost piece of “the greatest generation,” one of the many fallen of World War II whose memory remains barely a whisper because they died leaving few to tell their stories.

At the beginning, Francis and my dad seemed to have an idyllic childhood, running through the woods hunting for arrowheads and exploring the lakeshore of Lake Forest.

They adored their mother, Jeannette, and revered their father, Fred Ames Hayner, sports editor for the Chicago Daily News, who once delighted his sons with a trip to Jack Dempsey’s training camp to see the champ workout.

Francis was artistic and a bit of a dreamer. He enjoyed designing and sculpting woodcarvings, some abstract or with an Art Deco motif, and signed with his large, confident signature.

He was also athletic, but unlike his father, who was once praised by Amos Alonzo Stagg for being a tough, hard-hitting football player at Lake Forest College (class of 1895), Francis preferred track and the solitary joy of running.

Francis graduated from Lake Forest College (’36), where he was a four-year member of the Garrick Players theater group; a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity; and a member the yearbook staff. One superlative stood out in his high school recommendations: he was described as a young man of exceptional character.

The summer after college he was a tutor and then taught for four years at a private school in Dundee. He next worked at U. S. Steel South Works on Chicago’s South Side, where my dad also worked.

On June 6, 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, Francis enlisted. He signed up for the “duration of the war or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law,” as described in his few surviving service records.

Francis seemed an unlikely warrior at six foot one and 144 pounds. He was assigned to the Signal Service (Signal Corps), trained for three months in Fort Crowder, Missouri, and then was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he shipped out as part of the invasion force headed to North Africa.

What happened next is largely lost due to the fire that destroyed his service records. It wasn’t the first time fire darkened his world.

On a bitter cold January 14, 1929, Francis, 15, and my dad, 11, were pulled out of a broken window of a second-story sleeping porch as fire destroyed their family home. They were quickly wrapped in blankets in the zero degree weather.

The boys and their mother escaped with minor injuries, but the badly burned body of Fred was found in the basement holding the remains of the family’s scruffy black and white poodle, a constant companion of the boys. They eventually took refuge with relatives in Oak Park and then came the Great Depression.

My dad always referred to his brother as “Franny,” and his eyes brightened when he talked of him. He was clearly proud of Franny and when my brother and I were kids he pulled a box out of a basement cupboard and showed us Franny’s ribbons and medals. Sadly, they are now lost to time.

Francis was part of “Operation Torch” under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in one of the first major British-American offensives of the war. As a member of Company A of the 2623rd Signal Corps Regiment, Francis landed on a North African shore with a rucksack and a submachine gun in early November of 1942.

He must have done all right since he was later promoted to staff sergeant just a few weeks before he came down with a searing headache and high fever. The diagnosis was encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. It came just months after the Allied victory in North Africa when his family presumed Francis was safe, at least for a while. Two days later, Francis was dead.

My grandmother learned of her oldest son’s death through a telegram she received at the local post office. She fainted with it still in hand.

A small article in the Waukegan News-Sun carried the headline: “Private Rights for War Hero,” but offered few details.

When I was in grammar school, my dad gave me a small wooden box with a sliding panel top. Inside were five sharp carving tools, each with a plump wooden handle fitted for your palm. These belonged to Francis. He used them to design and shape woodcarvings. The largest is a high-masted 18th Century warship carved on a barrel top. Three smaller ones include an abstract silhouette of a bow hunter; a smaller warship; and my favorite, an art deco rendering of the Three Wise Men. When I use his tools, I often think of Francis holding these same fat-handled instruments.

Francis A. Hayner’s woodworking tools and his carving of the Three Wise Men.

Francis A. Hayner’s woodworking tools and his carving of the Three Wise Men.

Once, on a trip to Washington D.C., I went to the World War II Memorial and found the North African campaign section. I took a moment to think of Francis and I said a prayer. I never knew my Uncle Francis, but I still hear the whisper of his story.

Don Hayner is the former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

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