Military History
The service records of Victor and Ellen's five sons.
Victor and Ellen Courtien had nine children in Washington Heights between 1902 and 1921. Four were daughters. All five sons have a service record: three in the Army, one in the Marine Corps, and the youngest in the merchant service.
What each record shows, and how much it shows, is not the same. Three of them are in the Army enlistment file with a serial number, a date and a civilian trade. One is an obituary. One is a headstone and nothing else. Each is given below with the document it comes from.
The Army
Francis, John and Victor
Francis went first, and early. He enlisted at Camp Upton, at Yaphank on Long Island, on 22 August 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor. The enlistment file gives his civilian trade as carpenter. He served as a technician fifth grade, a rank created in 1942 for skilled specialists, paid as a corporal and worn as corporal's chevrons with a T beneath them. Technicians were the mechanics, drivers, radio operators and medics of a unit. They held no authority to give orders, which was the point of the rank.
John enlisted on 29 May 1942 and Victor on 30 September, both at Fort Jay on Governors Island, in the middle of New York harbour. Both were office clerks in civilian life. Victor served as a corporal, and his headstone at Calverton names the war outright.
All three are in the Electronic Army Serial Number Merged File at the National Archives, with their serial numbers, their dates of enlistment, their residence and their trades. It is the firmest evidence on this page.
The three of them went in through the two places every New Yorker of that generation passed through. Camp Upton had been built for the first war, closed, and reopened in 1940. Fort Jay had been fortifying the harbour since the 1790s.
The Marine Corps
Arthur
The eighth of the nine, he served in the US Marine Corps and came out a staff sergeant. He is buried at Long Island National Cemetery, beside his wife Mary.
His is the thinnest of the five records, and it is worth being straight about why. He is the one brother absent from the Army enlistment files, because the Marine Corps kept its own, and his headstone gives his rank and his corps but not his war. His three Army brothers have enlistment dates in 1941 and 1942, and Thomas's obituary is explicit. Arthur was twenty-one at Pearl Harbor, which is the plain reading, but the war is not written on the record the way it is for the others.
The merchant service
Thomas
The youngest of them took a degree in engineering at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point during the war, and served on troop transports first as a cadet and then as an officer, in the Atlantic convoys and in the Pacific. All of that comes from his obituary, published in January 2010, and none of it from a service record.
It was the most dangerous work of the war. One merchant mariner in twenty-six was killed, a higher proportion than any American service; the Marine Corps, the next worst, lost one man in thirty-four. The ships were slow, they were carrying the fuel and the ammunition and the men, and they were what the submarines were hunting.
Kings Point is the only federal service academy permitted to carry a battle standard, and it earned that by its dead. The number on the standard is 142, for the cadet-midshipmen killed, and the ribbons hanging from it are the combat zones its cadets served in. No other academy sent its students into a war while they were still students.
Merchant mariners were nonetheless civilians in law. They were shut out of the GI Bill, and were not granted veteran status until 1988, forty-three years after the war ended. That is why Thomas's obituary records an honourable discharge from the US Coast Guard rather than from a fighting service: the Coast Guard administered mariners' papers, because the men themselves were not military.
He was also a lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve. Afterwards he went to sea for Moore McCormack Shipping, and then spent the rest of his working life with the Department of the Navy, latterly as Director of Materials for the Military Sealift Command, the organisation that moves what an army needs. He retired in 1981. He had spent forty years in sealift, from wartime troop transports to running the supply of it.
Where they lie
The graves
Calverton National Cemetery, on Long Island, holds Victor, in Section 9, and Francis, in Section 10. Calverton opened in 1978 and is now the busiest national cemetery in the country.
Long Island National Cemetery, at East Farmingdale, holds Arthur, in Section 2P, with his wife Mary in the same grave.
Saint Charles Cemetery, also at East Farmingdale, holds John, in Section 47, sharing a grave with his sister Helen.
Beechwoods Cemetery, at New Rochelle, holds Thomas and Agnes together.
In France
The monument at Coulonge
Henri Courtien's name is on the war memorial at Coulonge, among the names for 1914. Coulonge is not just any village in the Sarthe. It is where this family came from: the Courteaus were baptised, married and buried there from the 1680s, and they were still only a few miles away, at Sarce, a century later. Across those generations their trades were winegrower, mason, stonecutter, weaver and farmer.
Almost every commune in France built one of these after the First World War. Coulonge's is a stone pyramid ringed by four shells, standing at the fork of the roads to Le Lude and Mansigne. It carries twenty-four names from 1914 to 1918, and three more from 1940 and 1941.
Twenty-four men is a great many from a village that size, and it was ordinary. France mobilised more than eight million and lost close to a million and a half of them, something near one man in six. The year on Henri's panel was the worst of the war for the French army. On 22 August 1914 alone, during the Battle of the Frontiers, some twenty-seven thousand French soldiers were killed, the bloodiest single day in the country's military history, and by that winter the fighting had settled into the trench line it would hold for four more years.
The three later names belong to the Second World War, to the German invasion of May and June 1940 that defeated France in six weeks, and to the occupation that came after it.
In France
Roger Courtien, who died at Dachau
A memorial record gives a Roger Courtien, born 17 December 1910 and died 17 March 1945, buried at Konzentrationslager Dachau. The camp was liberated six weeks later.
Nothing has been found connecting him to this family. His parents, his nationality and the reason he was held there are all unknown here, and the surname is rare enough that the question is worth asking and not rare enough to answer it. He is set down because a man of this name died there and the record should say so. The source is here.
Sources
Where this comes from
The enlistment dates, serial numbers and civilian trades are from the Army enlistment file held by the National Archives. The ranks, services and plot numbers are from the Veterans Affairs gravesite records and the national cemetery registers. Everything about Thomas is from his obituary, published in The Journal News on 7 January 2010.
