Stanley Taylor & The Battle of St Lo

    Stan Taylor's cousin, Norma Sherer Fitzmaurice, '45, sent us the following recollections and reports about him. As she indicates, we're not sure that he was in the Class of '35. We have not found him in the '35 yearbook and do not have a '36.

"On a personal note, Stan , besides being good-looking, was a very nice person with a great sense of humor."

"I have another document which states Stan was 23 yrs.& 11 mo. when he was inducted into the service. The news clip states he joined the service July 3, 1941. Therefore his birthday must be in August, 1917, so wouldn't he have been 17 in June of 1935? Maybe it's possible he graduated in 1936. I wonder if his picture is in either '35 or '36 annual. Stan, according to another serviceman I contacted, was shot while trying to get out of the tank he was in."

Both Stan Taylor, '35?, and Dean Rose, '31, were killed in the area of St. Lo, France, which is not many miles inland from the Normandy beaches which the Allies invaded on June 6, 1944, in Operation Overlord, led by General Dwight Eisenhower. Weeks after the invasion, long past the invasion schedule, the Allied armies were still stymied by German forces in the area of St. Lo, finally breaking through on July 17 and 18. Taylor was killed on July 17, as the famous "Breakout at St. Lo" was taking place. (Dean Rose was killed on August 2 in the St. Lo area.) Among the notable aspects of the St. Lo battles are the extraordinaryly heavy preliminary bombing (partially misguided and tragic, done on successive days in attempts to get it right) just ahead of advancing Allied forces, the coordination of planes and tanks, and the subsequent emergence of General George Patton as a great commander (partly receiving the credit due to another unit, according to one account). While supposedly the Battle of St. Lo has not received the full treatment it deserves in terms of books written by military historians, there is much about it on the Internet. Not having time to read much of it, let alone rank the best or most accurate of it, we can offer only a few links to those with further interest, and hope that any such persons will respond to our memorial pages with anything they find relevant to the war experiences of Taylor and Rose.

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