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Contact Info
Home Town Leonardtown, Maryland
Last Address Gibraltar
Date of Passing Oct 27, 1942
Location of Interment American Cemetery - Rhone, France
Wall/Plot Coordinates Plot: Tablets of the Missing
Captain Hume Peabody, Jr., son of Brigadier General and Mrs. Hume Peabody, was born in Riverside. California, on June 30th, 1919. He grew up in the Army Air Corps. Flying was his great interest and his major topic of conversation. He attended grammar school, like most Army brats, all over the world, and attended high school in Alabama, Washington, D.C., and Honolulu. At Roosevelt High School in Honolulu he became R.O.T.C. cadet captain during his senior year. Then from 1936 to 1937 he attended the West Point Prep School at Schofield Barracks and won a presidential appointment to West Point.
I first met him when we were plebes in E Co., suffering together under the scornful lashings of the Beast Barracks corporals in July 1937. In August we were together again in broiling summer camp by Kosciusko’s Monument. After academics came we roomed together in a four-man room up in "The Riding Hall” in the huge, barn-like, top adjunct to the 18th Division of Central Barracks (now part of Cadet Headquarters).
Later, when I last saw Hume, in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, England, we talked about our cadet days and what a long way we had come in the sixteen months since graduation. It was on Ocober 5th, 1942, only three weeks before Hume was to move to Gibraltar. We went into an English pub and ordered the best that three years of war had left the British innkeepers. We talked of the record that Hume had helped hang up on the wall of the swimming pool, the relay record that stood for so many years. We remembered our running together around the quarter-mile track at the North Athletic Field as we tried to make the track team during Yearling Year. We laughed over our Plebe Year exploit of tying shut the door of a room on a Yearling turnback, only to find later, to our horror, that this same Yearling had been found the first time for hazing plebes. When we parted that night neither of us was thinking much about the dangers of war or that we might not see each other again. We slapped each other on the back. Then I watched Hume stride down the platform and step into his train. On the 27th of that month he died in an air crash over Gibraltar.
As I think back over my memories of Hume, I realize that the Class of 1941 might more easily have spared one of the rest of us. Hume was going places! In fifteen months after graduation he had risen to captain. He worked hard and seriously at whatever job came his way. He lived fully and enjoyed life with a zest like that of few people I have even known. He left us abruptly and much too soon, but The Long Gray Line received a wonderful addition.
