Memorial

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Lt Jere Seilhamer graduated from John Harris High School where he played football.

He joined the Regular Army in September 1938.

He was reported wounded in action during a scouting mission.

After receiving word last May that their son was missing in action, the parents contracted the War Department but were unable to secure any additional information concerning the fate of the officer. Then they placed a notice in a veterans’ magazine requesting further data from soldiers who may have known Seilhamer. In reply, they received letters from three members of the seven-man patrol who were serving under the local officer when surrounded by German troops. After a brief skirmish in which Seilhamer and one other soldier were wounded, the patrol surrendered and was taken prisoner. One of the letters, written by a returned soldier from his home in Monmouth, Ill., tells of a conservation between two German soldiers in which one mentioned the death of an American soldier on the operating table at the hospital in Wust. The writer of the letter says: ‘It is on the strength of this that I say Jere died in Wust as there were few, if any, Americans in that vicinity.’ A veteran writing from San Francisco informed Mrs. Seilhamer that he went to a Paris hospital after the war to see the other soldier who was wounded on the mission and that his soldier was also under the impression that Seilhamer had died on the operating table at Wust where he also had been a patient. The third writer, who escaped from the Germans after being taken prisoner, could offer no definite proof of Seilhamer’s fate but merely informed the local family of the rumors he had heard. Lieutenant Seilhamer was leading a seven-man patrol along the banks of the Elbe River at the time of the capture on April 17, 1945. The party was surrounded by a large number of German troops and Seilhamer was shot in the stomach. The Americans carried him and the other wounded man across the river and left them in a pill box until they surrendered a short time later.

Lt Seilhamer was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for rallying his exhausted crews to the additional task of building a treadway bridge during a river crossing’ shortly before he was reported missing.