By Brad Cychosz and Lea Schneider, Stories Behind the Stars Volunteers

As a WAC Major, Lillian Reilly had scored some firsts in history. She was one of the first officers for the WACS. Along with her husband, Captain John “Jack” Aloysius Reilly, Sr. and her son, Second Lieutenant John Aloysius Reilly, Jr. , the Reilly’s became the first “all commissioned officers” family in WWII.

Major Lillian Reilly of the Women's Army Air Corps, lost her way on a fog-shrouded mountain top and plunged to her death on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.[i]

Major Reilly died under mysterious circumstances. Visiting Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, she left a club she belonged to and walked into the very dark, foggy night on mountainous terrain. She never returned and was discovered at the bottom of a cliff – deceased.

Various articles describe an investigation by police and military officers. Why did she not drive? She knew the terrain and the danger, why would she go into the woods in the dark? Some thought it was perhaps a short-cut to a friend’s home yet it was closer walking on the main road. The investigation ended when there was no evidence of foul play nor evidence that anyone pushed her off the road.[ii] The questions as to why she was in the woods on a dark, foggy night remain unanswered.

Major Lillian Winter Reilly was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin on May 3, 1895, to William Henry “W.H.” Winter and his wife, Jessie Southwell Winter. She had eight siblings, Roy Southwell Winter, William Herbert Winter, Coila Marie Winter Westcott, Archie S. Winter, Dora Mildred Winter Goninen, Mabel Winter Whitney, Carrie Candee Winter Clark, Josephine May Winter Whitney. Her father supported the family as an electric engineer.[iii]

She had grown up athletic. An article in the Wisconsin State Journal lists Lillian, then age 17, as coming in third in diving at a swim meet at the Brittinham Bath House.[iv] She also participated in dance[v] as well as playing the piano, which she did for her sister’s wedding.[vi]

When she was 22, she was the Swimming Director at the Tenney Park Bath House in Wisconsin. In one newspaper article, she was the expert voice in discussing if it was safe to swim in August. There was a dread of swimming during the “dog days” of summer. Lillian told the reporter that it was “Nothing but a foolish superstition.” She added that there was a bloom in seaweed that made people think the water was dirty but it was clean.[vii]

WWI

Before there was the Women’s Army Corp, Lillian found a way to be involved in WWI. During World War I she served as a reconstruction aide at an army hospital at Colonia, N.J.[viii]

She had studied Physiotherapy at Rush Medical College in Chicago. From there, she went on to work with WWI injured military.[ix] She worked for two and a half years with the medical corps providing physiotherapy, today more known as physical therapy.[x] She worked at the United States General Hospital No.3 in Colonia.[xi]

By the end of 1920, Lillian, then 25, was the Assistant Chief Aid of the United States Public Health. She took courses at the United States Public Health Service Hospital, No. 50.[xii]

During WWI, Lillian met her future husband, Captain John “Jack” Aloysius Reilly.[xiii] The young couple were married on July 30, 1921, in Livingston, Illinois. They had a son on Christmas of the following year and named him after his father. John Aloysius Reilly, Jr. was born on December 25, 1922, in Springfield, Illinois.[xiv]

Chicago

While in Illinois, Lillian served as the Director for the Athletic Department for the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club in Chicago.[xv] During this time, she saw a demonstration of “ornamental swimming,” now known as synchronized swimming, on a trip to Canada. Excited by this, she returned to Chicago and started her own “ballet team.” They were the first water ballet team not connected to a university, according to author Dawn Pawson Bean in “Synchronized Swimming : An American History.”[xvi] In 1928, she was taking her swim team across the South and drumming up matches with a goal to interest women in the sport of swimming.[xvii] She also served as a swimming instructor for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for physical education teachers during the summer. The summer program for teachers included training in a wide variety of sports. It was the only program of its kind in the United States.[xviii]

Phoenix

Around 1929, Lillian, Jack and John moved to Phoenix, Arizona.[xix] Upon her move to Phoenix, she assisted with recreational activities for surrounding airfields, while her husband was the KOY radio station manager.[xx] He also was the special event director of The New York World Fair and Chicago’s Century of Progress. After each, he’d return to the KOY station. The couple were quite prominent in social and civic activities in Phoenix.[xxi]

As the war years arrive, Jack Reilly returns to the army. He takes a refresher course at Fort Oglethorpe.

Des Moines

Major Reilly, enlisted in the Woman's Army Corps in Phoenix, AZ and went to Fort Des Moines, IA, July 10, 1942, as a first officer to begin serving her country for the second time in its armed forces.[xxii]

It was in July of 1942 when Lillian was chosen to go to WAAC (later known as WAC) Officer Training School in Des Moines, Iowa.[xxiii] She was in the first class of WAACs.[xxiv] There was a lot of interest in women in the military and Lillian’s enlistment news even saw print in “Broadcasting,” a weekly magazine for the radio industry because her husband was in the radio field.[xxv]

Lillian Reilly was commissioned a Third Officer, equal to a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the Basic Academic Section.[xxvi] By January of 1943, Lillian is wearing double silver bars of a First Officer, equal to a Captain. It is there that she is assigned to the Office of the Secretary where she was the Secretary for the first WAC Training Center.[xxvii] At the time of receiving her bars, The Arizona Republic newspaper noted that “Officer Reilly was a member of the group of officer candidates who initiated the corps at this historic old cavalry post.”[xxviii]

“Victory is never a gift. Victory must be earned. The contract demands rigid adherence to its terms. You are going to pay, in coin of service, the amount you owe your country for the democracy and the freedom you have enjoyed.”

– Captain Lillian W. Reilly, graduation address for new officers, May 1943.[xxix]

In The News

The headline read “The Nations’ First Officer Family” when Lillian, Jack and John all made the newspapers. Accompanied by a photo of Lillian pinning Second Lieutenant bars on her son, 2nd Lt. John A. Reilly, Jr. with her husband, Captain John A. Reilly Sr. of the military police, looking on. John Jr. was first in his class of 70.[xxx] The three, all in their uniforms, were at Camp Hood, Texas for the ceremony for John Jr.’s graduation from Tank Destroyer Officer Candidate School. The family became the first all-commissioned family in the nation.[xxxi] This would never have been possible prior to WWII as women were not allowed to serve in the military. It was the last time the three were together.[xxxii]

Fort Oglethorpe

At the end of August, the army transferred the WAC’s Officer Candidate School from Des Moines to Oglethorpe in Georgia. It was there that candidates showing outstanding ability would take an eight-week course. They would then be commissioned as second lieutenants.

Transferred along with those Candidates was Lillian Reilly, where she takes on a significant leadership role in the war effort. She has moved to be the secretary for the WAC’s Officers Training School there with the title of Field Director, equal to a Major.[xxxiii]

In September Major Lillian Reilly was pinned with a new service ribbon by Col. Hobart B. Brown. The ribbon was designed especially for the Women’s Army Corps. The ribbon was given to members of the WAC who had reenlisted from the WAAC in recognition of their service in the corps. The ribbon featured the corps colors of moss green with narrow gold edges.[xxxiv]

Her Final Day

Late afternoon of January 27, 1944, Major Reilly borrowed her roommate’s, Major Pauline Muller’s, car. Alone, she drove from Fort Oglethorpe to a club she belonged to, The Fairyland Club, about a 12-mile drive. She arrived about 5 p.m.[xxxv]

Built in the 1920s, The Fairyland Club offered dining, social and recreation activities. It is set in a landscape featuring large, unusual rock formations including two large ones, called the Twin Sisters, which guard the entrance. It still a functioning club many decades later and is on the National Register of Historic Places.[xxxvi]

Major Reilly had gone to the clubhouse on Lookout Mountain to make reservations for a dinner party.[xxxvii] Inside the Fairyland Club, Lillian met with F. E. Funk, the manager. After the meeting, she left the club, alone, sometime between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m. Her car was parked at the club.

The mountain was covered with dense fog, and it is assumed that she made the wrong turn as she left the clubhouse and tumbled over the cliff on which it stands.[xxxviii] Being winter, this time of the night was dark. The mountainous region, filled with the unusual rock formations, was blanketed with one of the “worst fogs in its history.”[xxxix]

The manager, Funk, speculated she’d gone to visit friends saying, “evidently she set out afoot to visit friends.” Lillian did indeed have friends in the area. Speculation included her taking a short cut through the woods.[xl]

The newspaper reported that the “terrain is rough, uneven and full of boulders and jutting rock ledges.” No explanation was suggested on why she would walk past her car to enter dark, foggy woods into rocky terrain and walk off a cliff.[xli]

Her body was found in the early morning of the 27th by a search party ordered out when she failed to return to her quarters at Fort Oglethorpe, GA, near-by.[xlii] The search began as the evening grew late and Lillian did not return, her roommate, Pauline, grew worried. She and Captain Shirley E. Snyder, the WAC provost marshal at the base, began looking for her. At 3:55 a.m., they found her. She was just four-tenths of a mile from the Fairyland Club. Lillian’s body was at the bottom of a 45-foot bluff. She was in a ditch between the wall of the cliff and the very highway she’d driven on earlier. Her clothing was only slightly mud stained and her glasses were several feet away.

Examination of the body showed a severe fracture of the skull, compound fracture of both legs, spinal and internal injuries.[xliii]

While they’d found no evidence of foul play, Col. Howard Clark II, commanding officer of Camp Oglethorpe, set up a board of army officers along with two Chattanooga police detectives to look at every angle of the case.[xliv]

Col. Clark asked Homer Edmonson, Chief of Police to assign detectives to the case. Joining military investigators were Detective-Sergeant Everett Smith and Detective Claude Knowles. Col. Clark thought she might have tried to take a short cut and became lost, although as a member of the Fairyland Club, Lillian knew of the terrain and setting. Another suggestion was that Lillian had tried to take a shortcut to the nearby Chanticleer Lodge but it was revealed that it would be quicker to walk there along the highway than navigate rough woods. The operator of the Lodge said Lillian was not expected that evening.

Doctors estimated her time of death between 8 and 9 p.m., a two-to-three-hour gap from her last sighting.

At the time of Lillian’s death, her husband, Jack, was at a Chicago hotel, having just completed training at Fort Custer, Michigan. Her son, Lieutenant John A. Reilly Jr, was on duty as a tank destroyer officer in the army.[xlv] Jack and John set out immediately for Lookout Mountain.[xlvi]

The investigation into Major Reilly’s death was concluded quickly. She died on January 27th and by the 30th, The Columbus Ledger newspaper is reporting it as “No Foul Play.” According to their article, a special investigating board concluded she fell from the cliff. Col. Howard Clark II, commanding officer of Fort Oglethorpe, said they did not find evidence of fowl play nor of a car hitting her.[xlvii]

The newspaper account leaves many questions unanswered. Why would a college educated Major in the army, a leader of hundreds of officers, go out in the dark of the night, in inclement foggy weather, into the woods, not on a path but across very rough terrain leading to a fall off a cliff? If she stumbled through the dark, rocky woods and fell into a ditch, how were her clothes only slightly mud stained? Where was she for the three unaccounted hours?

Her story remains a mystery.

Commendations

World War II Victory Medal

American Campaign Medal

Army Presidential Unit Citation

Army Good Conduct Medal[xlviii]

Funeral and Grave

A memorial service for Major Lillian W. Reilly was held at Fort Oglethorpe.

Major Lillian W. Reilly’s body was returned to Phoenix, Arizona. She was accompanied by her husband, Captain Jack Reilly. Their son, Second Lieutenant John Reilly, Jr. came to Phoenix from Camp Hood, Texas.

According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, the funeral was to be held at St. Francis Xavier Church with burial at St. Francis Cemetery. Research did not reveal the circumstances that altered these plans. Major Lillian W. Reilly is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Lillian’s son, John, and his wife, Nancy Richburg Reilly, are also buried at Arlington and all share the same grave marker.[xlix]

Memorials

Major Lillian Winter Reilly is remembered on a bronze memorial plaque at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia. Her name is on plaque two.[l]

After the War:

Both Lillian’s husband and son survived the war. Jack Reilly later remarried. John Reilly stayed in the Army ending his career as a Lieutenant Colonel. He married and had children of his own, the grandchildren Lillian would never meet.[li]

Both Lillian and her husband, Jack, as well as his second wife, Herta Liselotte Reilly[lii], are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

More Information:

There is a collection of archived letters and documents at the University of Nevada’s University Libraries Archival Guides, “Series 12: Mable Winter Whitney’s Personal Files, 1908 to 1944.” These include letters from her sister, Lillian Winter Reilly. There is also a file of correspondence related to Lillian’s death.