Memorial

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Pfc Robert D. Burlison attended Colgate University. As an athlete of the baseball squad at the university he was a regular catcher with a perfect batting average. He graduated in 1943.

He volunteered for the U.S. Army Reserve on 28 August 1942 in the Federal building in Binghamton, New York, but was allowed to finish his course. He received orders to report for active duty on 18 May 1943.

He was assigned to an engineering corps at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri and was later transferred to the Air Corps in 1943 and trained at Oshkosh, Wisconson. He was then assigned to the infantry and went overseas in October 1944 from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

According to an official telegram his parents received from the War Department on 20 February 1945, Pfc Robert D. Burlison died in a French hospital on 23 January 1945 from wounds received in action on 5 January 1945.

According to an eyewitness, Pfc Philip C. Ellsworth of E Company, one day German armour surprised E Company. The company was about to be surrounded and started pulling back, over an open field. Pfc Ellsworth, turned to see where his friend, Robert Burlison was, saw him, standing up in his foxhole, firing his BAR at a German tank and the soldiers behind it. The tank stopped and aimed its gun on Burlison. It was the last time he saw Burlison.

Long after the war Pfc Philip C. Ellsworth wrote a poem about Robert Burlison:

“It seems unfair, considering all,
That I am here in this place now
With eighty summers on my brow
And you are there in Epinal
Among our comrades sleeping there,
That I can hear the robins sing
And see the almond tree in spring
And you are there. It isn’t fair.

Flowers, if you grow in Epinal,
Grow near where Robert lies.
I will dream that he has eyes
And sees some fairness after all.”