The enduring story of POW Clint Chappell

By Tom von Kaenel
Special to the Courier
news@thepccourier.com

In a quiet house in Pickens, Cheryl Golden still keeps the things that tell her father’s story best.

There is the Honorable Discharge, folded and yellowed, with a right thumbprint in the corner. There are the German POW postcards, stamped Kriegsgefangenenpost and Gebührenfrei — postage free — addressed in a careful hand to family far from the wire. There is the framed Order of the Palmetto, signed by Gov. David Beasley in June 1996. And there is the American Legion citation that named Robert Clinton “Clint” Chappell what he had already been for half a century: a World War II prisoner of war who came home and lived a decent life.

Clint was born April 11, 1920, in the Nimmons community of Pickens County, a farmer’s son with blue eyes and blond hair, seven years of schooling, and a draft notice that found him at Fort Jackson on February 20, 1942. The Army classified him as a rifleman (MOS 745) and assigned him to the 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division — “Old Hickory.” His Honorable Discharge does not name a letter company.

Family memory fills in what a form cannot. His daughter tells of a sniper who went ashore at Omaha, and of French villagers who risked their lives to keep him out of German hands. They hid him in a barn. They hid him in the hedgerows. Searchers came with bayonets and stabbed through the hay. The hiding did not hold. He was found. Before that, she says, he had been in a defensive position on a hillside where the Germans fired from the top of the slope to the bottom. When they reached his hole the firing stopped. They killed the men around him. They took him prisoner. He never knew why they let him live.

Omaha Beach, Then the Vire

The first wave on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, was not the 117th. That slaughter belonged to the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions — the 16th and 116th Infantry — who took thousands of casualties on the shingle and the bluffs before the beachhead held. The 30th Division, Old Hickory, was a follow-on force. Its infantry came across the Channel from June 10 to 15 and went

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