Deadly Hero: The High Society Murder that Created Hysteria in the Heartland (32 page)

Pauline, an American Indian woman with two
children, divorced her husband Clifton on July 31, 1939—four months after
Lillie Kennamer died, and six months before she married the judge. Clifton was
the former caretaker of the Kennamer farm, where Pauline was also employed as a
cook and housekeeper. She left her new husband after one month of matrimony,
and fled to Missouri for some unspecified reason. Judge Kennamer was granted a
divorce on July 16, 1941, citing gross neglect, failure to prepare meals, clean
the home, and care for her husband who was ill. His retirement had come just
three months after his secret marriage, and some wondered if the two events
were linked together, and how.

Although Governor Phillips was a stern man, Judge
Kennamer was relentless in his quest to free his son through clemency. By 1941,
his backdoor lobbying had reached the level of desperation, and it consequently
blew up in his face when he tried to coerce the governor with a semicontroversial
letter between a Phillips political appointee and a Tulsa banker pushing for a
clemency hearing on behalf of the judge.

The Phillips appointee wrote a reply to the banker
explaining that the governor was too preoccupied with another legal problem, as
well as raising $2,500 for legal fees, to consider a drawn-out clemency hearing
for Phil Kennamer. When Judge Kennamer read the letter, he interpreted it as
subtle request for a $2,500 bribe. He then tried to leverage those letters into
an underhanded threat that the governor grant a clemency hearing or else he
would take the letters to the state senate, where they would be made public.
When Governor Phillips was informed of what was going on, he released all the
letters to the newspapers, and berated the former judge with language no one
had dared use before.

“He (Judge Kennamer) is not going to come out here
and get a public hearing,” Phillips told the Associated Press. “He doesn’t rank
it. We’ve wasted too much time on this matter as it is. He can go back and sit
down. He is not running my clemency policy or this state. If he has anything he
wants to say, or any names to name, he can give it to the newspapers or put up
a sign.”

A few days later, Governor Phillips answered a
reporter’s question with a declaration that no clemency for Phil Kennamer would
be considered for the remaining two years of his term. He was aware that in the
state’s thirty-four-year history, no other prisoner had received as much
attention in the press, or from the pardon-and-parole board, or from powerful,
influential people clamoring for his release, as Phil Kennamer. He was done
with the matter.

1942

But the Kennamers weren’t. After a failed bid to
get the case to the United States Supreme Court, Phil tried his luck with Gov.
Phillips again in 1942. With the nation in a two-front war, low-level prisoners
were being granted clemency on the condition that they joined the armed forces.
To fight for one’s country as a patriotic citizen was a noble endeavor, and it presented
ex-convicts with a perfect opportunity for redemption. In February, Phil took a
chance with Governor Phillips, offering to join the military as a condition of
his parole. Phillips, who had eleven months left in his term, kept his word,
and rejected his offer.

But everything changed for Phil Kennamer on November
3, when Democrat Robert S. Kerr won the general election to become the twelfth
governor of Oklahoma. He was one of the five members of the pardon-and-parole
board that had granted Kennamer a six-month furlough to be with his dying
mother.

1943

As soon as Kerr was sworn in, the Kennamer family
wasted no time in wrangling a clemency hearing for Phil, which was scheduled
for April 20. Like his previous inquest in the state-capitol building, this one
was crowded and came with a foregone conclusion under very peculiar
circumstances. Letters in favor of parole were read aloud with great animation
and flourish, while the letters against parole were mentioned, but never read. Despite
Dixie Gilmer’s contention that Phil had never expressed remorse and had
recently told him, “I’m not sorry and I will never be sorry,” the board retreated
to a private room where, in a matter of minutes, they voted unanimously to recommend
parole on condition of joining the army.

Phil, who was allowed to attend this hearing,
personally thanked the governor after the meeting adjourned. When the press
caught up with him outside, he said he wanted to sign up to become a
paratrooper. After serving six years, seven months, and sixteen days in prison,
twenty-seven-year-old Phil Kennamer was a free man.

While taking a philosophical outlook toward his
parole, an editorial from the
Tulsa World
blasted his father’s relentless
efforts to free his son.

“It is doubtful if any more official, legal,
social or political pressure has ever been used in this country to circumvent
justice. There has not been a month since the night of the shooting that
powerful friends have not been active, at many times under coercion, in the
intercessions for young Kennamer. These consistent efforts were directed toward
anyone who in any way might be helpful.”

His parole, fought and won by backdoor politics, discarded
the justice the Gorrells had fought so desperately to keep. The
World
,
disgusted with the hearing, and disgusted with the entire Kennamer saga,
expressed their “sincere hope that it will never be necessary to refer to this
case again.”

As noble as that ambition was, they should have
known better.

0400 Hours, August
15, 1944

Somewhere off the
coast of Southern France

THE CIGARETTE BUTTS IN PHIL
KENNAMER’S ears did little to buffer the roaring sound of the C47’s twin
Pratt-Whitney engines. With his arms resting on his reserve parachute, he
glanced now and then to the red and green lights adjacent to the opening where
the exit door had been removed. Red was for “get ready,” green was for “go,” and
after sitting in what was essentially a giant tube for almost four hours, he
was ready to jump into enemy territory. For him, as for all the other men, the
waiting to do something was much worse than actually doing it, and he just
wanted to get it over with.

Ever since he’d joined the army one month after
his parole, the last 449 days of his life had boiled down to this moment.
First, there were sixteen weeks of
basic training at Camp Mackall, North
Carolina, and then three weeks of jump school at Fort Benning, and then back to
Mackall. There, the famous Phil Kennamer became a small fish in a big pond. His
position in the world was demonstrated by how low in the Army’s hierarchy he
was assigned. He was a member of a three-man machine-gun crew commanded by
Corporal Lark Washburn, in a platoon from Charlie Battery of the 460
^th
Parachute Field Artillery Battalion (PFAB), which, at the time of his training,
was part of the 17
^th
Airborne Division.

When they weren’t marching, running, drilling,
eating, or sleeping, Charlie Battery was training—always training. There was hand-to-hand
combat training, judo training, bayonet training, training on the Springfield
M1903, training on the M1 Garand, training on the M2 .50-cal, the Thompson
submachine gun, the M3 submachine gun, the carbine, the Browning automatic rifle,
the M1911, the M1 bazooka, the M9 bazooka, hand grenades, the rifle-propelled
grenade, the field radio, the field telephone, gas mask with riot gas, no mask
with riot gas, compass training, map training, contour map training, field
first aid, and, last but not least, training on how to assemble, disassemble,
load, aim, fire, clear, and clean the 75-mm pack howitzer.

And that was all before jump school, which included
landing training, cable sliding in a harness, jumping out of a mock C47 with a
four-foot fall, tower jumping in a parachute chair with a 250-foot fall, and
then tower jumping with a real parachute. Then came the real jumps, five of
them over five days, which amounted to: stand up, hook up static line, equipment
check, shuffle toward door with seventy-five pounds of gear, brace on door with
both hands, push with right leg, tuck in arms, pray the tail section doesn’t hit
you, wait for the chute to snap-jerk you like a rubber band, watch ground, hit
ground, roll on ground, collapse chute, and remove harness.

To field-test that education, the 460
^th
PFAB spent the month of February participating in combat training maneuvers in
the Tennessee Mountains. By March, Kennamer’s unit was deemed ready for combat.
His battalion was reformed with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and a
company of airborne engineers, to form the 517
^th
Parachute
Regimental Combat Team. This outfit of roughly twenty-five hundred men was
expected to do battle as a small division.

On May 31, 1944, two troop-transport ships
carrying that small division landed in Naples, where they fell under the
command of the 36
^th
Infantry Division, which had been fighting in
Italy for the last six months. On June 18, the unit received their baptism by
fire on the Moscona Hills, north of Grosseto. For the next eight days, the 517
pushed the Germans back as they advanced up and down and up and down the hills
of Tuscany, while the sixteen 75-mm pack howitzers of the 460
^th
provided artillery support. By the morning of June 26, the 517
^th
PRCT, along with other units, had gained thirty-nine miles of enemy territory
and were on the outskirts of Suvareto when they were relieved by the Japanese-American
soldiers of the 442
^nd
Regiment.

As paratroopers, they had been sent to Italy for
one reason: “the big show,” the invasion of France. The allied invasion of
Normandy had already taken place, and the top brass were calling for an invasion
of southern France from the Mediterranean. This was Operation Dragoon, the
forgotten cousin to Operation Overlord—the Normandy invasion. The German 19
^th
Army Group had more than two hundred thousand soldiers spread wide and thin throughout
the south of France. The allies sought to open another French front that would
push the Germans back and secure the ports of Marseilles and Toulon, where troop
transports could deliver forty to fifty divisions of soldiers who were in
America,
waiting to fight in Europe. These ports had the facilities capable
of handling such a large-scale disembarkation of men and equipment.

The amphibious assault would come ashore west of
Cannes at the beaches of Fréjus, Saint-Tropez, and Cavalaire-sur-Mer, on the
morning of August 15. Leading this attack would be nine thousand British and
American paratroopers under the newly formed First Airborne Task Force. In the
predawn hours, the paratroopers would land a few miles north of those beaches,
secure their positions, and block German movement into the main assault area.
The landing zones for the five-one-seven would be just south of the populous
city of Draguignan, and were roughly shaped into a diamond marked by the
villages of Trans-en-Provence at the top, Les Arcs to the west, La Motte to the
east, and Le Muy at the bottom.

After the 517
^th
PRCT was pulled off the
line, it was moved to a staging area near Rome, where passes into the city were
liberally granted.
July 1944 was an exciting time for Phil, who wrote
letters to his father about the Roman Coliseum, and the Sistine Chapel, with
its famous ceiling painted by Michelangelo. On July 26, he celebrated his
twenty-ninth birthday with his pals from Charlie Battery, which included his
section leader, Corporal Lark Washburn, and Corporal Milton Rogers, who
remembered him distinctly in his 2007 online memoirs.

“He had been paroled from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary,
where he had been doing time for manslaughter. He was quite a revelation to us
country kids who had never been anyplace or done anything,” the Utah native wrote.

Often, Rogers was Kennamer’s partner in games of
Pitch against Washburn, who partnered with Private Owen Burnham. “I was on the
losing side most of the time because my partner overbid his hand severely,”
Rogers wrote. “He couldn’t let anybody else win the bid. We made fun of him and
reviled him. He named us (Washburn, Rogers, and Burnham) ‘those SOBs from Utah.’
In army language that is almost a compliment.”

But Rogers gave as good as he got, and he saddled
Phil with the nickname “Buffalo Phil.”

“I’d hung that name on him,” Rogers continued in
his memoirs. “He was bad out of shape when he got to our outfit and couldn’t
keep up on the runs. I said, ‘Kennamer, you look like a buffalo at the end of a
long stampede,’ and the name stuck.”

Another soldier from Charlie Battery, Merle
McMorrow, agreed that Phil was in poor physical shape because of his age, but
he persevered and was popular with the other soldiers. “Phil Kennamer slept in
the bunk above me at Camp Mackall,” McMorrow said in a 2015 interview. “At
night, after lights out at ten, Phil would recite Shakespeare by heart until we
fell asleep. He was a good friend and well-liked by everyone.”

In early August, the entire First Airborne Task
Force began their final preparations for Operation Dragoon. Charlie Battery,
under the command of Captain Louis Vogel, would be attached to the 1
^st
Battalion of the 517
^th
Infantry Regiment. Together, they were in the
ninth and last series of C47s that would drop
paratroopers at
approximately 0453 hours.

On August 10, the 460
^th
PFAB was on
lockdown, and “movement in and out of the bivouac area was banned, and no
further contact with military or civilian personnel was allowed,” a unit history
report stated.

In his memoirs, Cpl. Rogers recalled a
conversation he had with Phil on the night of August 14, just a few short hours
before his battalion boarded the 180 C47s that would carry them to the drop
zones.

“Phil . . . was three or four years
older than I was, and partly due to our advanced years we had become pretty
good buddies,” Rogers wrote. “We couldn’t sleep as well as those young kids
without nerves, so we sat up and talked till time to load in the planes.

“We were out of about everything to talk about,
and finally got to religion. He said he didn’t believe in God, didn’t believe
in much of anything. (Prior to joining the army, Cpl. Rogers had been an LDS
missionary.) I said, ‘You mean you think that if you get shot tomorrow it’s all
over?’ He said, ‘Yep, that’s what I think.’”

Several hours later, at a little past four in the
morning on August 15, 1944, Phil Kennamer and fifteen other paratroopers were
sitting impatiently inside the C47 as it neared the coast of France, taking
them closer and closer to the enemy. There wasn’t much to see in the darkness
except when one of them whipped out a Zippo, cupped his hands around the
delicate flame, and leaned in with the cigarette clenched in his mouth. Beneath
Kennamer’s jump boots was a small pile of smashed cigarette butts—evidence of
how long he’d been sitting there. While some of the other men—boys really—tried
to sleep through all that noise, he had stayed awake. And in staying awake
there was nothing else he could do except sit, smoke, and wonder. Wonder about
today. Wonder about the enemy. Wonder about home. There was a lot to wonder
about two thousand feet above the Mediterranean.

And then he saw it—the red light—and felt the
movement of fifteen men rising, hooking up their static lines, and checking the
chute and equipment of the man in front of them. Each of them sounded off:
Sixteen
okay! Fifteen okay! Fourteen okay . . .

The green light would come on three minutes after
the red. Three minutes can be a long time.
Waiting. Waiting. Wait for
it. Wait for it.

Twenty seconds after the light flashed green, the
cargo bay was empty.

Most of Charlie Battery landed north of Trans-en-Provence,
near the road leading to Draguignan, the after-action report stated. Like most
of the other task-force units, they had missed the landing zone by miles. They
were supposed to land further south, near Le Muy, but this was not unexpected,
and Captain Vogel managed to assemble two of the 75-mm pack howitzers, which
had parachuted down in fourteen pieces, and three-quarters of his men,
including Kennamer’s platoon led by twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Harry
Moore from Wichita, Kansas. Vogel radioed 1
^st
Battalion and received
orders to proceed south to a predesignated assembly area. With patrols set up
on the flanks, Charlie Battery moved out, keeping to the main road between
Draguignan and Trans, because the guns had to be hand-towed. They were soon met
by forty infantrymen from 1
^st
Battalion under the command of Lt.
Ralph Allison.

Three hundred yards from Trans, a German machine
gun fired on the group, sending everyone dashing for cover. Kennamer and his
platoon leader volunteered to take it out. After moving into position, Lt.
Moore took a firing stance and pressed the trigger on his Thompson submachine
gun.

After getting off a short burst, it jammed.

The German MG-42 swung toward their position and
opened fire, killing the platoon leader instantly.

According to what a “commanding officer” later
told another officer, after Lt. Moore was killed, Kennamer started shooting
with his Thompson. With the range and position already calculated, the MG-42
opened fired again, hitting Phil in the chest. Although he went down, he got
back up again, “four or five more times,” and each time he did, the machine gun
fired off another burst, eventually killing him.

The reports differ on how many times Kennamer was
shot. The commanding officer’s story was published in the
Tulsa Tribune
in
January 1945, and quoted an unnamed officer who assisted in the burial. He reported
Kennamer had been shot seven times, and that his commanding officer, presumably
Captain Vogel, said “Phil got up ‘four or five times’ after being knocked down
by enemy bullets.”

However, his pal Cpl. Rogers wrote in his 2007
memoirs that he saw Phil’s body later that morning and counted two or three fewer
bullet wounds.

We had another lieutenant from a battery, Lt. Roberts, and
pretty soon he came with the information that Phil Kennamer and Lt. Moore had
just been killed. I got down the line a ways and there they lay. Phil had a
nice row of bleeding holes, maybe four or five, across his chest. It had been
maybe seven or eight hours since we were talking about such matters; he then
knew more about the hereafter than I did. . . . When Charley
Nielson was mourning Phil, Lark [Washburn] said, “Well, it’s probably for the
best. He was always overbidding his hand.”

A third account published in a 2001 book about the
517 PRCT described what happened on the road to Trans-en-Provence this way: “En
route, shots sent everyone diving for cover. Lt. Harry Moore and PFC Phil
Kennamer yelled they would deal with the problem. Five minutes later, when the
firing ceased, the gun crews started forward. ‘We found Moore and Kennamer face
down in the road, both of them dead,’” reported a soldier who was there.

Soon after they were killed, the machine-gun nest
was knocked out with point-blank fire from a howitzer, and encirclement by a
squad of infantrymen led by Lt. Allison, Captain Vogel wrote in his after-action
report. During the skirmish for Trans-en-Provence, Jacques Debray, a French
paratrooper and guide for the American soldiers, was also killed during
hand-to-hand combat with two German soldiers.