A few weeks ago, the Fenton Research Center received a call from a gentleman in Massachusetts. He was looking for information on a young man named John Henry Mann.
John was Chautauqua County’s first casualty of World War II. He was born on June 16, 1919, to Fred and Emma Primrose Mann in Seattle, Washington. At some point in time before 1925 John and his family moved back to Chautauqua County and settled in Stowe. John attended Chautauqua High School and was a member of the Hurlburt Memorial Church in Chautauqua. He enlisted in the United States Army in November 1939 and his first assignment was at Fort Niagara. He re-enlisted and was assigned to Hickam Field in Honolulu Hawaii where he was promoted to Sergeant in January of 1941.
We do not know what the specific job title he held was. We only know that he was killed there during the Japanese attack. At the time of his death, he was serving as a Staff Sergeant in the 22nd Material Squadron, 17th Air Base Group at Hickam Field in Hawaii. Originally, John was listed as MIA (Missing In Action). Then his mother received a telegram notifying her that he was KIA or Killed In Action. He was awarded the Purple Heart, World War II Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal, Army Presidential Unit Citation, Army Good Conduct Medal, and the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. He was buried in the Tablets of the Missing at Honolulu Memorial.
The Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii is a collection of white stone tablets that honor American service members who went missing or were lost at sea in the Pacific Theater of War. There are over 18,000 men and women listed on the tablets.
The tragedy of John’s death was compounded by a series of tragedies for his widowed mother. His brother Alfred died four years previously following an operation and another brother Fred was killed in an automobile crash the previous year to John’s death. One bright spot at this time was that his sister Ruth’s commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army in October 1942. She trained at WCA.
John’s mother, Emma, became active in the salvage drives that were a part of the home front work. She wrote to the Jamestown Salvage Headquarters asking them to send a truck to her house for the scrap that she had collected, including a junk bed. She passed away in 1946 and was noted in her obituary as the first Gold Star Mother in Chautauqua County.
