John Sherman Cooper - Service in World War II

Service in World War II

Although well above the draft age at 41 years old, Cooper enlisted for service in the United States Army in World War II in 1942. Immediately offered an officer's commission, he chose instead to enlist as a private. After basic training, he enrolled in Officer Candidate School at the Fort Custer Training Center in Michigan. He studied military government and graduated second in his class of 111 students. In 1943, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned to the XV Corps of General George Patton's Third Army as a courier in the military police. Cooper served in France, Luxembourg, and Germany. After liberating the Buchenwald concentration camp, Patton ordered the entire population of the nearby city of Weimar to go through it and observe the conditions; Cooper also viewed the camp at that time.

Following the cessation of hostilities, Cooper served as a legal advisor for the 300,000 displaced persons in his unit's occupation zone seeking repatriation after being brought to Germany as slaves by the Nazis. Under the terms of the agreement reached at the Yalta Conference, all displaced Russian nationals were to be returned to the Soviet Union, but Soviet negotiators decided that the agreement did not apply to non-Russian spouses and children of the nationals. Cooper brought this to the attention of General Patton, who rescinded the repatriation order in the Third Army's occupation zone. Cooper received a citation from the Third Army's military government section for his action. Cooper also oversaw the reorganization of the 239 courts in the German state of Bavaria in an attempt to replace all the Nazi officials, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. Among the judges installed by Cooper were Wilhelm Hoegner, future Minister-President of Bavaria, and Ludwig Erhard, the future Chancellor of Germany.

In 1943 or 1944, while he was still in the Army, Cooper married a nurse named Evelyn Pfaff. Cooper was elected without opposition as circuit judge of Kentucky's twenty-eighth judicial district in 1945, despite still being in Germany and not campaigning for the office. He was discharged from the Army with the rank of captain in February 1946 and returned to Kentucky to assume the judgeship.