Walt Larimore was well into his adult years before he finally learned the truth of just what a hero his father was.
He’d grown up having an inkling of the impact Phil Larimore made during World War II, but he was never really sure as a child just what role he’d played.
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“When I was young, all us boys like to tell war stories and brag about our dads and you know, go back in the woods and recreate World War II scenes, and a lot of the boys bragged about their dads,” said Larimore. “I couldn’t because he never talked about it. But we knew he’d been a hero because he lost a leg in the war. We knew that. And in his office was a shadowbox of all these medals. In fact, every Medal of Valor the Army gives except the Medal of Honor. And then there were all these autographed pictures from generals, saying things like ‘to a fighting soldier’ and ‘one of the finest officers of World War II’ so we knew he must have been a hero but he just didn’t talk about it.”
It turns out Phil Larimore was the youngest candidate to ever graduate from Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia at just 17 years old. Phil was part of the 3rd infantry division during World War II, in Southern Europe’s “Forgotten Front”. The 3rd infantry division had the most combat days of any unit in Europe, battled more than 3,200 miles in seven countries, and was the only unit from the United States that served in all 10 campaigns of the war in Europe.
Not only was Phil the youngest commissioned officer in the Army as they landed on the Anzio beachhead in February 1944, after fifteen months on the frontline, he was sent on a top-secret mission to find and save the Lipizzaner horses Hitler had hidden.
But Larimore didn’t begin to learn much of his father’s bravery until after more than 50 years had passed since the war.
“On his 50th wedding anniversary, the four boys, myself and my three brothers, were visiting with him and my youngest brother Rick asked him, because Dad had told us, we’d say, ‘How’d you lose your leg?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I was swimming and a shark bit it off,’ or he’d say, ‘I was cleaning a pistol, and I accidentally shot my leg.’ And so Rick said, ‘But Dad, how did you really lose your leg?’ And that night, I guess it was just the right time for him,” said Larimore.
He said Phil began sharing his stories more and more, to the family, to his students at Louisiana State University and to the Boy Scouts in his troop. At the time, they were just great stories, and Larimore wasn’t quite sure how true they were, but when Phil suddenly passed away in 2003, he began to get his answers.
“My wife and I went down to help Mom and we found a footlocker up in the attic. And in that locker were 436 letters that he had written to his mother and to his best friend and to his father that told the same stories, we found three history books that had number of these stories,” said Larimore. “And then his mother had saved what turned out to be 12 scrapbooks of magazine articles, journal articles, and newspaper articles from all over the country that told the same stories.”
Larimore started by typing out Phil’s letters. Initially, he intended just to keep them for family purposes. But then he started to piece together the stories and the timelines.
“And then I began a process that took 15 years of going to military installations, National Archives, museum archives, eight states in this country and three foreign countries, Italy, France and England, and found documents in the archives that actually documented his stories. And that’s what became the book At First Light,” said Larimore.
It became a mission for Larimore; initially not so much of telling just his father’s story, but the stories of all the men and women who fought on the Forgotten Southern Front of Europe.
“They did not consider themselves heroes. All of them considered the heroes those who are still buried in Europe and in Northern Africa. Those were the heroes,” said Larimore. “You know, everyone knows the Northern guys had a D-Day on Normandy. No one knows the Southern guys had five D-Days, the Northern guys 336 days of hellacious battles and fighting, but the Southern guys had 913 days. Casualty-wise, the Southern guys had three times the casualties of the Northern guys. They had one quarter of the Medal of Honors, they had most of the Distinguished Service crosses and silver stars. But their stories have been forgotten. So my prayer and hope was this book would remind us, help us resurrect and remember, the suffering, the sacrifice and the successes that the Southern Front gave us. We’ve heard of the Battle of the Bulge, but almost no one has heard of the Colmar Pocket, arguably the coldest place in Europe in the coldest winter in history.”
But as the progress on the book was made, and Larimore teamed up with author Mike Yorkey, Yorkey suggested bringing some more of Phil’s stories to the forefront because of how amazing they truly were.
One witness account shows Phil was essentially credited with single-handedly stopped a group of German soldiers from completely destroying his squad.
“Exactly one month before the end of the war, he was now the youngest company commander in the army. He had taken over the L Company of ‘Footsie’ Britt’s, who was also a Medal of Honor winner, and one of his squads got surrounded by 120 to 150 Germans and they were being massacred. So dad jumped on the back of a tank and went in to save his men. We have these wonderful eyewitness accounts I found of this. So he’s manning a 50-caliber machine gun. They said he wiped out machine-gun nests and snipers firing that gun. He got up to where his men were, they were able to get behind the tank, he ran out of ammunition. And so he jumped off the tank. When he did so, he was shot through the through the leg. One of the eyewitnesses said that the wound was as big as a silver dollar. But the tank commander thought he was dead. And so they backed up to resupply themselves. When they came back, they found that that he was alive and evacuated him to a field hospital. He lost his leg. He didn’t lose his life,” said Larimore.
For his actions, Phil was given his third Purple Heart, and also the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest valor of honor that army that a soldier can get.
“But the interesting thing, this particular eyewitness was a Maj. McFalls. And he says in his eyewitness account that after dad’s body was evacuated to the field hospital, a German officer and the 30 remaining Germans out of the 120-150 that started the battle came out to surrender. And the German officer told Maj. McFalls, according to the eyewitness account, that he said ‘We would have defeated your men, except for the man on the tank that bullets couldn’t stop.’”
Another story in the book talks of that secret mission Phil was sent on to save the Lipizzaner horses, a harrowing mission that had it been unsuccessful, Phil would have been considered AWOL and disavowed by the Army. One of those horses turned out to be a light in a dark time for Phil, after he was discharged against his will due to having lost his leg.
Larimore said he believes some of those stories may have been lost or forgotten simply because World War II was difficult for many to speak about, difficult to remember, to go back to those times and places.
“I remember offering to take my dad to see Saving Private Ryan, when I was visiting once and he said, ‘I won’t go.’ And I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘A couple reasons.’ He said, ‘Number one, my friends who have gone said that that opening scene, you know, where Tom Hanks is getting out of the landing craft on D-Day and the bullets are whizzing by and guys are being killed. My friends say that it sounds exactly like the war. They’ve reproduced the sounds exactly. And I don’t want to hear those again.’ He said, ‘I don’t have nightmares anymore.’ He said, ‘The odors that were tattooed in my nostrils are gone now. And I don’t want them to come back.’ And so I think that was part of not talking about it,” said Larimore.
Larimore said to make sure no more stories are lost, he recommends making it a point to learn about your loved ones, veterans or not.
“Family members who are older, maybe aunts or uncles or great aunts or great uncles grandparents, what don’t you know about them? Interview them, they’ll be glad, what’s their favorite ice cream? When was their first date, who was their first love?,” said Larimore. ‘You can do that. By writing them, you can do that by calling them, you can do that by visiting them, but to be able to record for your memory and for posterity, all of their history, all of the treasures that they gathered during their life, because as soon as they pass away, those are gone forever.”
Since the book’s publication, At First Light has been awarded a Silver Medal by the Military Writers Society of America, was named the 2023 Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the International Page Turner Awards in London, was featured in the Louisiana Book Festival and led to the 2023 induction of Phil Larimore into the 3rd Infantry Division’s Hall of Fame. In addition Phil Larimore has been nominated by General David Petraeus for the Office Candidate School Hall of Fame.
At First Light can be purchased by clicking here. You can find more information on Walt Larimore by clicking here.