It’s possible that Harris’s fellow Clemson alumnus David Hill Henry Jr. ’36 heard about his death before Frances did. Like Harris, Henry was assigned to the 22nd Infantry; he was an officer in Company A in the 1st Battalion. Even though they were in different battalions, news of the death of another company commander in the regiment likely would have reached Henry, especially since they were fellow alumni of the same small A&M college in South Carolina.
Henry had been one year behind Harris at Clemson, a textile engineering major of the class of 1936. Outgoing and popular, Henry was affectionately called “Duck” or “Squat” by his classmates. He served as a cadet officer and was a member of Alpha Chi Psi and Tiger Brotherhood. After graduation, he accepted his reserve commission and began working at Union Bleachery in Greenville.
Henry, like Harris, was called to active duty shortly after Pearl Harbor and assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. Henry landed at Utah Beach on D-Day and from there had fought his way inland with the rest of the 22nd Infantry. After Harris’s death on June 14, Henry fought on as the 4th Division pivoted northwest into the Cotentin Peninsula to capture the vital port of Cherbourg. As the battle continued, heavy casualties in the 22nd Infantry resulted in vacant positions — Henry was promoted to captain and took over command of Company A. He was soon recommended for a Bronze Star for valor. But on July 11, 1944, Henry fell while leading his company in action near the village of La Maugerie, about six miles from the town of Saint Lô.
Henry’s loss, of course, was a severe blow to his family. His mother, Etta Sandler Henry, had been widowed in 1932. She still had two other sons in the service — Rufus Henry ’42 was a lieutenant in an Army Air Forces B-29 squadron in south Asia and would complete seven bombing missions against Japanese forces in Burma, China and Japan. Albert Henry ’44 was a private in the Army about to deploy overseas. Albert had been scheduled to graduate from Clemson in the spring of 1944 but had postponed graduation earlier in the year to go on active duty. And yet the Henry family was destined to make yet another sacrifice for their nation’s cause: Rufus’s B-29 crashed in China on November 21, and Etta soon learned that she had lost another son within the same year. Because Albert was now the last surviving son, the War Department decided that he would not deploy overseas after all. He spent the rest of the war serving stateside and was discharged from the Army in 1946.
Albert would go on to receive master’s degrees from the University of South Carolina and the University of Missouri, and he taught for 23 years in Charleston. Later, he resettled in Clemson, where he died in 2014 at the age of 91. He named his eldest son David Hill Henry after his eldest brother.
In the early postwar years, Etta Henry made the difficult decision of what to do with her sons’ remains. Like the Harrises, she decided not to reinter her sons in South Carolina. David Henry lies in the Colleville-sur-Mer cemetery in Normandy, not far from Jim Harris, and Rufus lies in a military cemetery in Hawaii. Etta had memorial stones emplaced for David and Rufus in the cemetery at the Old Stone Church in Clemson. Both stones list their birth and death dates, the battles or bombing missions in which they served, and a quote from Scripture: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.”
Over the course of World War II, few colleges in the country would lose more alumni than Clemson. A total of 376 were lost.