Month: May 2021

George Fox of Thetford, heroic WWII chaplain

The oldest of the four chaplains on the USS Dorchester —Methodist minister George L. Fox—was from Thetford. When America had entered World War I, he had enlisted in the Marines at 17. Trained as an ambulance driver, he won a Silver Star on the Western Front for rescuing a wounded soldier from a battlefield full of poisonous gas—despite the fact that he had no gas mask. He stood just five feet seven; after Pearl Harbor, Reverend Fox enlisted in the Army the same day his 18-year-old son Wyatt, who survived the war, joined the Marines.