Biography
Frank Peter Witek was born on December 10, 1921, in Derby, Connecticut. He was of Polish ancestry. When he was 9, the family moved to Chicago. It was there he finished his student days at Crane Technical High School and went to work at the Standard Transformer Company.
On January 20, 1942, he left for recruit training after enlisting in the United States Marine Corps. He left almost immediately for Pearl Harbor and in January 1943, his family heard from him while he was in New Zealand. From there he went to Bougainville where he fought in three major battles. Then he went to Guadalcanal for a rest. On July 21, 1944, the 3rd Marine Division invaded Guam. PFC Witek was a Browning automatic rifleman and scout behind the Japanese lines.
On September 8, 1944, his mother received a telegram from Washington informing her that her son had been killed on August 3,. According to a combat correspondent's release, he was slain at the battle of the Mount Santa Rosa road block. He had only eight cartridges left out of an original 240 rounds when he was found.
On Sunday, May 20, 1945, 50,000 people, including his mother and Gen Alexander A. Vandegrift, Commandant of the Marine Corps, met in Soldier Field, Chicago, to do honor to his memory. PFC Frank Peter Witek, 23 years old, had earned the highest military award his country could give him — the Medal of Honor.
Initially buried in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Cemetery on Guam, PFC Witek's remains were reinterred in the Rock Island National Cemetery, Rock Island, Illinois, in 1949.
Read more about this topic: Frank P. Witek
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)