Landing on Omaha Beach
US Navy Seabee Museum photograph
Battle of the Hedgerows
US Army photograph
Destruction of St. Lo
German Federal Archives photograph
517th Precinct in the Hurtgen Forest
US Army photograph
American infantrymen of the 290th Regiment fight in fresh snowfall near Amonines, Belgium. January 4, 1945.
US Army photograph
Battle of the bulge – The 101st Airborne troops move out of Bastogne, after having been besieged there for ten days, to drive the enemy out of the surrounding district. Belgium December, 31, 1944.
US Army photograph
The June 6, 1944 landings on the beaches of Normandy (Operation Overlord) were just the beginning of the Allied efforts to defeat Germany in Europe. It alone took until July 4 to land a million men, nearly 150,000 vehicles, and over 100,000 tons of supplies. The liberation of France met with fierce and costly counterattacks until the Allied armies were finally able to force the Germans’ retreat across the Seine, resulting in the liberation of Paris, August 25, 1944. The Allied advance from Paris to the Rhine occupied the following six months. The most famous offensives of this period, the Battle of the Bulge, Bastogne, and Ardennes Forest, overshadowed the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, generally regarded as an expensive defeat for the Allied forces.
Aggies participated in these actions in many capacities: as medics, snipers, parachutists (82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions), in tank battalions (the fabled 12th Armored Division), the military police, and Signal Operations, as personnel or mail clerks at HQ, tactical officers, as airborne glider crews, combat engineers, members of a band, anti-aircraft artillery specialists, interpreters, rifle company or battalion commanders, pilots in tactical reconnaissance squadrons, members of bomb disposal squads.
Thirteen Aggies were killed, many were wounded and decorated, and some ended up as prisoners of war. Some wrote moving, often eloquent letters back to the college relating their experiences during this period. In the following exhibit we wish to honor many of those participants through photographs and correspondence maintained in the New Mexico State University’s Archives and Special Collections Department. Principal sources are the Letters of Dean of Engineering Daniel B. Jett; the Era Rentfrow Papers from the Records of the NMSU Registrar’s Office; and the NMSU publication, The Whole Damned World: New Mexico Aggies at War: 1941-1945.
Lt. Willis W. Baird
T/4 Ernesto G. Burciaga
Andrew B. Candelaria
Sgt. Thomas R. Edmondson, Jr.
Sgt. Frank Tracey Haggard
Lt. William W. Harris
Lt. Hans Richard Heyne
Capt. James F. Redford
Capt. Oren R. Reichelt
Lt. George Salazar
Brig. Gen. James E. Warton
Lt. Delmar Yenzer
20 Nov 1944
Dear Prof. Jett,
This afternoon, I half believed that I cried. That’s a strange statement but it's true. The names of those deceased and injured were just names until I came to the names of those that I knew intimately like “Copper” Harris “killed”. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was sitting in the classes with him or walking across the campus or gabbing in the Dorm. It's hard to believe. It isn’t right. Then I read about the rest of the class that graduated with me being wounded or missing, it is hard to realize that I won’t see them again.
Right now my thoughts go back to our senior year when the drive for a War Memorial Fund sort of deteriorated. A Memorial, even that at this time seems like an idle gesture. The memory of those friends is by far a greater memorial to them than an inanimated slab of stone. I wonder now how we would have contributed if we knew how much we would lose, and it is a loss, greater than I ever believed it would ever be. I suppose that I feel it so badly because I spent the best years that I’ve known so far down there at Aggies and all the men I knew were an integral part of that memory. What can we do to really keep them with us?
Letter from Lt. Bernard Kaplan to Professor Daniel B. Jett
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
Letter to Dean Daniel B. Jett from Lt. Daniel Harris “Red” Howell
The ASTP soldiers, unfortunately, did not sit for individual photographs while at the college. The letters many wrote back to Dean Jett, however, described in often vivid detail their wartime experiences and created an impression of highly perceptive, articulate, and heroic young men.
Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pfc. Robert Zulin [Radio Operator in Tank Destroyer Battalion] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Typed Letter from Sgt. Julian Fields Granger [HQ and Service Troop, Thirty-second Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron] to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] mother to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] mother to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Typed Letter from Bob Foster to Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] parents
Typed Letter from Bob Foster to Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] parents
Typed Letter from Bob Foster to Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] parents
Handwritten Letter from Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] mother to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Pvt. Garnett Belden Long's [Infantry] mother to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Typed Letter from Sgt. Michael Joseph Deffley to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Typed Letter from Sgt. Michael Joseph Deffley to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Typed Letter from Sgt. Michael Joseph Deffley to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
Handwritten Letter from Sgt. Ward Douglas McGill to Dean Daniel B. Jett
The letters Dad Jett wrote currently reside among the holdings of the Hobson-Huntsinger University Archives of the New Mexico State University Library. These vivid letters bring alive the daily activities as well as the struggles and achievements of the young Aggie men and women who participated in cataclysmic and world-changing events.
Miss Rentfrow has been named an Aggie Legend for her contributions to, and impact on, what is today New Mexico State University. She came to the school as a preparatory student and graduated from the college in 1919, the same year she began working there. In 1922 she became a college registrar, a position that guaranteed she know every student in the institution. More than a mere recorder of information, she was renowned for her whole-hearted support of the school’s students and alumni.
As a young woman, she had lost her fiancé, Joe Quesenberry, killed during World War I. Perhaps motivated by this loss, she dedicated herself to preserving the memory of the nearly 150 Aggies who perished during World War II. Over the years she gathered photographs and biographical information for display in the University’s Memorial Tower.