BRATTLEBORO-George Stone Sr., closing in on his 101st birthday, is one of the last members of a dwindling fellowship - veterans of World War II.
Stone served in the Army's 623rd Engineer Light Equipment Company as a combat engineer. His unit, assigned to the 1103rd Engineer Combat Group, landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 23, 1944, just 17 days after D-Day.
Driving a Caterpillar D7 armored bulldozer across Europe through some of the toughest battles in the European Theater of Operations, Stone cleared obstacles for advancing Allied troops.
The Tuesday morning Veterans Coffee Hour at American Legion Post 5 decided to start the group's March 25 gathering with a brief ceremony to honor Stone and his service and present him with a handmade quilt from the Deerfield Valley chapter of Quilts of Valor.
The national nonprofit organization has awarded veterans more than 200,000 quilts since its founding in 2003.
Originally started as a way to honor combat veterans in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, it has expanded its focus, according to its mission statement, "to cover those service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor."
Lynn Carrier of Jacksonville, the organization's Vermont state coordinator, and her husband, Michael, gently draped the handmade quilt over Stone's shoulders to great applause.
Called to serve
Valerie Gragen, Stone's daughter, provided the biographical information about her father and his journey from rural Maine to the battlefields of Europe to his postwar life as a heavy equipment operator for Lane Construction, driving his D7 to build instead of destroy.
Stone was born on May 31, 1924 and grew up in Pownal, Maine. He skipped seventh grade and attended nearby North Yarmouth Academy, graduating in 1941, just after turning 17. He wanted to join the Army's Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program after graduation, but his parents did not want to sign his enlistment papers.
After working in a shoe shop and a shipyard, he joined the Army. After completing his training to become a combat engineer at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and before was shipped off to England to be part of the growing Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to invade the French coast, Stone got a pass to visit his family in Maine. He walked the last 10 miles to the homestead to surprise them on Thanksgiving night.
His mother gave him a metal-covered Bible, which he carried in his shirt pocket throughout the fighting in France and Germany. He still has it.
After landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy, Stone spent the next 20 months moving from town to town as General George S. Patton's Third Army drove toward Germany. Stone stood just a few feet from Patton one day when his unit found itself on the wrong road and Patton told them that they needed to learn how to read a map.
Stone was the only member of his outfit to receive a Croix de Guerre award for his service in France from General Charles de Gaulle. He also received the Bronze Star for his performance under fire during the battle for St. Lô in July 1944. That battle was the key engagement in the Allied effort to expand the Normandy beachhead to eventually liberate France and push the German army back.
By the end of the war, Stone was able to sit on the front porch of one of Adolf Hitler's mountain retreats in Germany and greet the Russian forces that were sweeping from the east toward Berlin.
Like many U.S. soldiers in the European Theater, he was expecting to be shipped to Japan to participate in the planned U.S. invasion of the island. But the war ended in August 1945, and he was honorably discharged not long after at the rank of technician fifth grade.
Home from the war
After the war, Stone came home, got married, and started a family. He and his wife, Estelle, who died in 1986, had three children. He now has eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Stone put the engineering skills he learned in the Army to good use, working for Lane Construction in Washington, D.C. and in Connecticut before landing in Vermont to help build Interstate 91. He and his family moved to Brattleboro in 1957, and he has been here ever since.
After 30 years of service with Lane Construction, Stone retired at age 62 and stayed active right through his 90s, traveling with his many friends up and down the East Coast.
Being a centenarian runs in his family. Stone had a grandmother who lived to 104.
But after nearly six decades in Brattleboro, Stone still considers himself a Mainer.
"You can't take the Maine out of the boy," he says.
This News item by Randolph T. Holhut was written for The Commons.