Two La Grange brothers were honored Sunday at the La Grange American Legion Post 1941, 80 years after they died in battle in the European theater of World War II.
Paul “Bud” Barnes and Hugh “Doug” Barnes were the sons of prominent federal judge John P. Barnes and grew up in a Victorian home at 205 S. Spring Ave. About 60 people came out to Post 1941 to hear their story as told by Kevin M. Callahan, a businessman turned author who read from his 2020 book, “Brothers in Arms: Remembering Brothers Buried Side by Side in American World War II Cemeteries.”
“After graduating from high school, Bud joined the Army specialized training program that allowed him to take advanced engineering classes at universities,” Callahan said. “Unfortunately the program was cancelled in February 1944, so Bud had to join the Army as a private in the 324th Infantry Regiment, 44th Infantry Division. … Doug had been accepted to Harvard, but rather than enroll in college, he joined the 248th Engineer Combat Battalion.”
Both brothers progressed through the ranks, with Bud taking the Army physical three times in order to get approved after initially being rejected because of an old football injury.
Bud was killed in combat November 21, 1944, while fighting to liberate the city of Strasbourg, France. Doug was killed by a German artillery shell in his barracks January 3, 1945, just weeks after he had learned of his brother’s death.
The Barnes brothers are buried side by side in the Epinal American Cemetery in Dinoze, northeastern France. The cemetery is the final resting place of 5,255 American military dead.
Two nieces of the Barnes brothers were in attendance. One, Sally McNeily said the discussion brought back lots of memories.
“It’s kind of hard,” she said. “I can remember when my family was notified. We were living at my grandparents and my mother thought she was going out to play bridge with her friends or bowling or something, and she opened the door and got the telegram.”
When McNeily’s mother got the news of Bud’s death, “she got down on the floor and she was pounding and crying.
“I got down on the floor and asked her what was wrong and she said that Bud had been killed,” she said.
Being only five years old, the news was baffling to Sally.
“I didn’t know what that meant,” she said, noting that her grandfather’s position as a judge might have kept the boys out of the war. “My grandparents decided that was not the thing to do, that they should serve. It was a hard time.”
McNeily’s “baby sister,” Becky Eichstaedt, was “thrilled” to learn more about her relatives through Callahan’s presentation.
“I met Kevin back in 2018 … when he started researching this. He had such empathy for the families and what they went through. … This is just nice.”
Author Kevin Callahan discusses La Grange war heroes Paul “Bud” Barnes and Hugh “Doug” Barnes during a presentation Sunday at La Grange American Legion Post 1941. (Hank Beckman/Pioneer Press)
Callahan highlighted the stories of three other sets of Chicago-area brothers who made the ultimate sacrifice, including Martin and Bernard Goland, brothers from the South Side of Chicago.
Bernard came ashore at Utah Beach the week after D-Day and was killed July 3, 1944, during house-to-house fighting in the French town of La Haye-du-Puis.
Martin Goland came ashore the day after D-Day at Omaha Beach and was killed July 11 while attacking an enemy stronghold at Saint-Lo-Hill 192.
They were buried side-by-side in the Normandy American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, scene of, by far, the bloodiest battle of D-Day.
“They (the Goland parents) received a telegram announcing that their only two sons had been killed just 8 days apart and 40 miles from each other on the continent the Golands had fled a half-century before,” Callahan said.
John Duffy and his brother Eddie Duffy were from the West Side of Chicago, growing up in an apartment in the West Garfield Park neighborhood.
Eddie was with the 45th Infantry Division that fought all the way up the boot of Italy and then joined the liberation of southern France. He was killed in action on September 12, 1944.
John Duffy was killed in action with the 274th Infantry when his platoon came under attack in Rothbach, Germany.
Like the Barnes brothers, they were buried in the Epinal American Cemetery.
The Walsh brothers, William (Bill) and John, grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the South Shore neighborhood.
John attended Notre Dame University, where he was class president In 1939 and excelled in English, writing poetry.
Bill was enrolled at Loyola University in Chicago when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
John was a navigator on a B-17, flying 6 missions before being killed on April 18, 1944, when German fighters attacked his squadron. One of his crew mates that survived said that John was unable to eject before the plane exploded.
Bill was killed by a sniper while crossing Joseph Goebbels Boulevard in Saarlautern, Germany.
They were buried in the Luxembourg American Cemetery, the same cemetery where General George S. Patton is buried.
Aside from the four Chicago-area families that he focused on, Callahan’s talk revealed some little-known facts about our nation’s war dead.
There are 14 American service cemeteries overseas, housing the remains of 90,000 fallen Americans and listing another 80,000 missing. They are ““kept in meticulous care” by the American Battle Monuments Commission, he said.
“Any visitor is struck by the endless rows of white burial markers,” Callahan said. “Fallen heroes resting far from their homes but among their comrades and often near the battlefields where they fell.”
Most of the cemeteries are in continental Europe, with several in France, two in Belgium, one in the Netherlands.
There is also one in England, one in North Africa, and one—the largest—in Manila in the Philippines.
But none in Germany or Japan.
“Eisenhower didn’t want any American cemeteries on enemy soil,” Callahan said.
While the book was originally published in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented Callahan from going on a book tour then.
“This is kind of a second career for me,” he said. “I had a 25-year career in business and then returned to my original love of history and writing.
He got interested in the brothers buried together while touring an American cemetery in Italy.
“We came across two crosses with the same last names and I wondered if they could be brothers,” Callahan said.
The cemetery superintendent said they were and that’s when Callahan learned that the War Department had a policy of trying to get brothers buried together.
Here I was with three boys of my own and I started thinking about those parents and what they went through,” he said. “That was the original spark.”
Hank Beckman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
