PFC Kenard R. Schrock, H Company, 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division

PFC Kenard Ruebin Schrock was born on July 13, 1920, in Ramey, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, but the family then moved to nearby Barr Township, Marsteller (also known as Moss Creek), Cambria County, Pennsylvania. His parents, Fredrick J. Schrock (1894-1974) and Cora E. (Miller) Schrock (1899-1967), lived in Marsteller. Kenard had two sisters, Dorothy S. (Schrock) McClelland and Jona M. (Schrock) Hoskins. Kenard’s father was a coal miner in the Cambria area, one of the richest anthracite coal mining counties of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Kenard completed grammar school and decided on full-time work at the age of 14 but did not enter the mines until later. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, better known as the Federal Wage and Hour Law. This law established a minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek, and banned children under 18 from working in hazardous jobs, such as mining. At the legal age, Kenard began working in the mines for the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company in Marsteller, one of the largest coal companies operating in Cambria.

He registered for the draft at 21 on February 16, 1942, in Ebensburg, the seat of Cambria County government. He was 5’11” and weighed 140 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. His induction was imminent, and on July 10, 1942, he was enlisted in the Army with ASC # 33247554 at Altoona, Pennsylvania, and ordered to Camp Forrest, Tennessee, joining the 317th Regiment for initial training, lasting one year.

As one historian of the 317th describes it, the mission “was to mold recruits and draftees into a skilled fighting force capable of outperforming the Wehrmacht in Europe. Very few veterans were in the regiment and new citizen-soldiers packed its ranks. The troops were a representation of most of America—farmers, coal-miners, and blue-collar workers. Men who had never picked up a weapon now learned how to shoot-to-kill. The War Department designed the training to be as tough and realistic as possible.”

In mid-June 1943, the 317th departed for large-scale maneuvers designed to sharpen its capacity for battle. The troops trained alongside thousands of others during the Tennessee Maneuvers near Murfreesboro. The geography of the maneuver area gave the infantrymen a chance to practice the art of war in an environment similar to the European terrain.

The intensity of his training increased with transfer to Camp Philips, Salina, Kansas, a new 46,000 acre military outpost where PVT Schrock arrived in September. It is estimated that over 150,000 troops trained at Camp Phillips, including four infantry divisions: the 94th, 80th, 79th, and the 44th. After November 1944, Camp Phillips became a prisoner of war camp and surplus storage depot. They had about seven thousand German POWs imprisoned there, and they used them to dismantle most of the buildings.

Before leaving for Kansas, he became engaged to Freda M. Baer (1925-2005) from Utahville, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania. Once he settled in Salina, he requested permission to marry, and she joined him, marrying on October 15, 1943. Their time together was short and interrupted with his various training events, but when he left in mid-1944, Freda Schrock would give birth to a son in January 1945. Unfortunately, the child would die in February.

Soon, with his division he departed for the California/Arizona Desert Training Center (now known as Fort Irwin, California) in November 1943 for more than a month. The DTC was specially created as a key training facility for units engaged in combat during the 1942-1943 North African campaign. On his return to Camp Phillips, PFC Schrock learned his division would be departing for the European campaign instead, and the division left Newark, New Jersey, on the SS Cunard Liner, Queen Mary, in July 1944, landing in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland.

The 217th landed in France in early August 1944, and met the Germans in combat on August 8th, initiating 277 days of continual conflict. The 80th Division, with its three infantry regiments—317th, 318th, and 319th, liberated over ten French towns between August and September 1944. These actions were part of General Patton’s Third Army offensive, as Russell Weigley describes, through the Lorraine gateway in northeast France, with the large towns of Nancy and Metz, the river crossings on the Moselle and Muerthe, and the surrounding buttes and scarps commanding the countryside for miles around.

On September 5th, the 317th fought a desperate battle forcing the Moselle but were initially unable to cross the river due to excellent German preparations. But with the shift of American forces in the coming days, the regiment crossed to the east side of Moselle and moved up into the plateau on September 12th. The Germans continued counterattacking, even with the American 35th and 80th Divisions entering the city of Nancy, and the 317th, including PFC Schrock’s machine-gun platoon, part of Company H, holding St. Genevieve Hill (know on American maps as Hill 382, just west of Morey and east of the river), finding the fighting bitter and highly dangerous. However, another report finds his platoon was on nearby Moussin Hill (Hill 351).

Historians Andy Adkins and Dean Dominique report on the September 17th battle, when PFC Schrock was killed. The machine-gun platoon was under German artillery or mortar fire, and a shell had landed in a fox hole alongside three soldiers. One man was immediately killed in the blast, another blown to the side, and Schrock was mortally wounded, dying soon after.

September, the bloodiest month in the unit’s history, Dominique notes that “the 317th Infantry Regiment suffered over 3,000 casualties. In essence, the crossing of the Moselle cost the regiment the equivalent of its entire cadre of original personnel. September casualties from the regiment were equivalent to 20 percent of the 80th Division’s total casualties during the entire war.”

He was initially buried at the temporary American St. James Cemetery, near the eastern edge of Brittany, France, established on August 4, 1944, by the U.S. Third Army. His parents requested the return of his remains to Pennsylvania, and he was interred at Gettysburg National Cemetery (Plot 2; Grave 610) on December 12, 1948.

Commendations:

Purple Heart

American Campaign Medal-WWII

WWII Victory Medal

Good Conduct Medal

Presidential Unit Citation

Stories Behind the Stars

Thank you, PFC Kenard R. Schrock of the U.S. Army, for your sacrifice and service to our country.

This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars Project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 421,000+ of the US WWII Fallen saved on Together We Served and Fold3. Can you help write these stories? These stories will be accessible via smartphone app at any war memorial or cemetery.

If you noticed anything mistaken in this profile or have additional information to contribute to it, please contact me at pjd15@psu.edu.

Sources:

www.Ancestryinstitution.com/KenardR. Schrock.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/49468293/kenard-rubin-schrock .

www.Newspapers.com/Kenard R.

Schrock. Clearfield Progress: 22 October 1943; 2 December 1944; Pittsburg Press: 25 November 1944.

A.Z. Adkins Jr. and Andrew Z. Adkins III. You Can't Get Much Closer Than This: Combat with Company H, 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Division. Casemate, 2005.

Dominique, Dean James, "The Attack Will Go On: The 317th Infantry Regiment in World War II" (2003). LSU Master's Theses. 3946. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/3946

Weigley, Russell F. Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-1945. (Indiana UP, 1981).

Kenard R Schrock