Junior Bradshaw (April 27, 1922–November 17, 1944)

Company A, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division

By Sian Heetai and Luci Meier

Early Life

Charles Junior Bradshaw was born on April 27, 1922, in Florida to Joseph and Margie Bradshaw.¹ His father, Joseph Marion Bradshaw, was born December 25, 1879, in Florida.² By the age of twenty-one, Joseph lived with a couple as their boarder and worked as a fisherman.³ By 1940, he owned his own home where he worked as a gardener.⁴ Charles’ mother, Margie (née Ezell), was born in 1891, also in Florida.⁵ At eighteen, Margie still lived with her parents, Robert and Francis. She worked as a housekeeper on their home farm.⁶ Margie and Joseph wed on January 28, 1913.⁷ At the time Joseph registered for the WWI draft in 1918, he had returned to work in the fishing industry.⁸

Joseph and Margie settled along Florida’s Gulf coast in Levy County where they started their family. By 1920, the couple had three daughters: Mildred (1914), Odell (1916), and Wilma (1919).⁹ The family continued to grow with the births of four more children: Charles (1922), Delma (1925), and twins, Winterfraie and Luther James “L.J.” (1927). Unfortunately, the family likely suffered a tragic loss as Wilma no longer appears on any records. In 1930, the Bradshaw family lived in Madison County, FL, near the Georgia border, where they labored on their rented farm.¹⁰ A few years later, they moved to Plant City, FL, about twenty miles northeast of Tampa, where they continued to move around living in rented homes.¹¹ Charles’ older sisters both married. Mildred married George Newman in 1935 and moved in with him and his family.¹² In 1937, they welcomed a daughter, Geraldine. However, George must have died prior to 1940 when Mildred returned to live with her family as a widow.¹³ Odell married Charles Logue in 1939.¹⁴ They lived in the same house as the rest of the Bradshaw family in 1940 where Logue worked as a public laborer and Odell, along with Mildred, worked as stemmers for a berry company. Charles’ father, Joseph, operated a farm while his mother, Margie, worked as a seamstress.¹⁵ The family likely stayed under the same roof to relieve some of the economic effects of the Great Depression.

Charles Bradshaw’s WWII Draft Registration Card

Charles registered for the draft on June 30, 1942, at the age of twenty.¹⁶ At the time of his enlistment five months later, Charles worked in the meatpacking industry.¹⁷

Military Service

Charles enlisted in the military on November 6, 1942, at Camp Blanding, FL.¹⁸ After months of training, Charles went overseas in April 1943.¹⁹ He served as a Private First Class in Company A, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division (ID).²⁰

The 1st ID entered World War II with the invasion of North Africa, known as “Operation Torch.”²¹ American and British troops sought to occupy French Morocco and Algeria and renew French support of the Allied cause. This venture proved successful. In response to the Allies’ success, Hitler sent forces to Tunisia in an effort to prevent Allied forces from gaining access to Italy.²² By early May 1943, shortly after Charles arrived overseas, the German and Italian forces in North Africa surrendered, allowing the Allies to invade Sicily; July 10, 1943, marked the beginning of “Operation Husky,” the invasion of Sicily. Faced with stiff opposition, the 1st ID fought to secure the Italian port city of Gela before heading north toward Troina, in central Sicily. After the successful capture of Troina, Charles and the 1st ID continued toward Messina in northwest Sicily. The encroachment by Allied troops forced the Germans to evacuate their troops from Sicily across the Strait of Messina concluding the Sicilian operation and granting the Allies access to supply lines in the Mediterranean Sea.²³

Charles, along with the rest of the 1st ID, returned to England in October to prepare for the Allied invasion of Europe. After seven months of training, the time to invade France via Normandy beaches arrived.²⁴ “Operation Overlord,” the codename for the invasion of Normandy, involved the landing of Allied troops on five beaches along Normandy’s coast.²⁵ Charles was among the first to land in France on June 6, 1944, D-Day.²⁶ He and the 16th Infantry Regiment spearheaded the landings at Omaha Beach.²⁷ German forces met the 1st ID with a deadly defense. The beach quickly became overrun with decimated equipment as well as wounded and dead soldiers, making it difficult to bring in reinforcements.²⁸ The fighting on Omaha Beach proved to be the deadliest of the D-Day beach landings, with survivors nicknaming it “Bloody Omaha.” The 16th Infantry Regiment lost hundreds of infantrymen in the hours it took to establish a beachhead and take the town of Colleville-sur-Mer. At a ceremony on July 2, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater of Operations, acknowledged the 16th Infantry Regiment as the “finest regiment in our army … which goes along with me and gives me luck.”²⁹

Newspaper article announcing the death of Charles Bradshaw

In July 1944, the 16th Infantry Regiment began its mission to break through German lines near St. Lo, France. The regiment then continued to follow the retreating Germans eastward, moving south past Paris. Charles and the 1st ID caught up with the Germans near Mons, Belgium.³⁰ The 1st ID participated in the liberation of Belgium in September 1944. It then crossed Germany’s Siegfried Line, the defensive line along the western German border, and faced incredibly grueling and bloody fighting for the next three months in the Hürtgen Forest. The first German city attacked and seized by the 1st ID was Aachen. The Germans surrendered on October 21, 1944, after days of bitter warfare.³¹ Over the course of several days, beginning on November 16, Charles’ regiment conducted relentless attacks on the German city of Hamich.³² Confronted with strong counterattacks by the Germans, Charles took an artillery shell to the chest. Charles Junior Bradshaw died on November 17, 1944, at the age of twenty-two.³³

Legacy

After Charles’s death, the 1st ID fought in other notable battles as the fight with Germany continued, including the Battle of the Bulge. Fought from December 1944 through January 1945, the Battle of the Bulge was the last major German offensive against the Allies. The 1st ID held a defensive position on the northern sector of the front lines, near Elsenborn, Belgium, thwarting German attacks. The division then pushed back across the Siegfried Line and captured several German cities before moving into Czechoslovakia.³⁴ On May 8, 1945, the 1st ID liberated two subcamps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp: Zwodau and Falkenau an der Eger. Zwodau housed female prisoners for the production of air force supplies. The 1st ID liberated over 900 starving women from Zwodau. For its efforts in liberating the concentration camps in Czechoslovakia, the 1st ID was recognized as a liberating unit in 1993.³⁵ A memorial stone marks the site of the Falkenau concentration camp. The stone is inscribed with a map of the camp and is also meant to remember Samuel Fuller, a movie director that served with the 16th Infantry Regiment, who filmed the conditions of the camp during its liberation.³⁶

Charles’ name appears on a memorial commemorating all the soldiers of the 1st ID who died between September 7 and December 15, 1944, near Henri-Chapelle. This obelisk is one of five similar monuments located throughout Europe in remembrance of the 1st ID soldiers that lost their lives.³⁷ The other four are located in Colleville-sur-Mer, France; Mons, Belgium; Büllingen, Belgium; and Cheb, Czech Republic. All of these memorials recognize the men, like Charles, killed “while fighting for the liberty of the world.”³⁸ Charles was one of 1,250 men from the 16th Infantry Regiment killed in action.³⁹ He was initially interred in the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium.⁴⁰ The 1st ID liberated the site of the cemetery on September 12, 1944.⁴¹

Charles’ family stayed in Hillsborough County and lived long lives after his untimely death. His oldest sister, Mildred, remarried, but continued to live near her parents. Her husband, John Arthur Jordan, served as a corporal in the US Army during World War II. He later worked as a prison guard in a Plant City prison while Mildred worked as a fruit packer in a fruit processing plant.⁴² They had two sons together, Robert and John Timothy, and raised her daughter from her previous marriage, Geraldine Newman. Mildred died August 15, 1996, at the age of eighty-two.⁴³ Odell and her husband, Charles Logue, divorced in 1944.⁴⁴ She later remarried Ulis Anderson and lived in Plant City until her death in 2005.⁴⁵ Delma married Robert Jackson Dillon on February 13, 1944.⁴⁶ However, they divorced the following year in 1945.⁴⁷ Like Mildred, she worked as a fruit packer while living with her family in 1950.⁴⁸ Delma was eighty-six when she passed in 2011.⁴⁹ Charles’ youngest sister, Winterfraie, married Homer Dwight Rose in July 1950.⁵⁰ Homer served in the US Army during World War II and the Korean War.⁵¹ The couple had three children: Diane, Brenda, and James.⁵² Winterfraie died January 7, 2011, at the age of eighty-three.⁵³ Charles’ only brother, Luther, was a member of a band in 1950.⁵⁴ In 1953, he married Edna Ellie Johnson.⁵⁵ The couple had two daughters, Sandra and Patricia, before their divorce in 1979. Luther died in 1994, at the age of sixty-seven.⁵⁶

Charles’ parents opted to bring their son’s remains home to Florida to be near the family. He was reinterred in St. Augustine National Cemetery on September 14, 1948.⁵⁷ His father, Joseph, continued to work on a farm while his mother, Margie, maintained the home that housed several of their adult children.⁵⁸ Joseph died August 11, 1966, at eighty-six years of age.⁵⁹ Margie lived until the age of eighty-two. She passed away after a long illness in October 1973.⁶⁰ Charles rests among his fellow Veterans in Section D, Site 133 of St. Augustine National Cemetery, just over 150 miles away from where his parents are buried, rather than an ocean away.⁶¹

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