Memorial

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S/Sgt Thomas J. Forte was a carpenter. He enlisted at Camp Shelby, Mississippi on 18 April 1941 and trained at Camp Livingston and Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. He went overseas in February 1944.

He was captured by German troops during the Battle of the Bulge in the town of Wereth, Belgium on December 17, 1944. He along with 10 other African American prisoners of the same unit had their helmets and rifles taken, were forced to sit on the cold and wet ground until dark and eventually made to run nearly 800 meters out of town, chased by a vehicle driven by the German soldiers. They then were brutally murdered and their bodies dumped in a roadside ditch. This atrocity is know as the Wereth Massacre or the Wereth 11.

An autopsy report on the 11 is ghastly: broken legs and arms, jaws shattered, fingers severed, bayonet wounds to the face and body and bullet wounds designed to inflict anguish rather than death.

Since 2004 there is a memorial at the site were these soldiers were murdered.

The complete story of the massacre can be found here: http://www.wereth.org