Captain Elmer Norval Carter 

115th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division

KIA, June 17, 1944

*****

Elmer Norval Carter was a battalion surgeon from Huntington, West Virginia. Closer to the front line than his position ever required, Norval heard the sounds of  wounded soldiers in an open field. Trusting in their Red Cross armbands, Norval and two medics left the cover of a hedgerow and ventured into no-man's-land. It was in this field, while doing his job to save a wounded soldier, that Norval was shot and killed by a German sniper. In one instant, by an old wooden fence, his young family was left without a father, and the men he so admired were left without their strong and capable doctor.

In September of 1933, just as they finished their college degrees, Norval Carter married Emmafern Lowry, known most often to her friends as Fernie. They had loved each other since age 11, since they were both children on the same Huntington street. Through their many unwilling separations – from high school band trips to Norval’s deployment overseas – they always exchanged passionate and heartfelt letters, making sure their relationship never faltered due to the distance between them. They had two sons, Tom in 1937, and Walter Ford in 1940.

Although he was originally posted at a station hospital in England, Norval requested and was granted a transfer to the 29th Infantry Division, to serve as battalion surgeon. To his friend John he wrote "I’ll never tell Fernie, but I requested the transfer. It is impossible to say why, my feelings & emotions are all mixed up about it, but I was unhappy in the Station Hospital & I am happy here--or as much so as one could be away from home." On June 6, 1944, the 29th formed the first waves to hit bloody Omaha Beach. As the division moved inland, Norval and his men worked quickly to set up aid stations and treat the constant flow of wounded soldiers. Fighting outside of St Lo, the front line was pushed back and Norval ventured out into that fateful field. He was just 33 years old when he was killed. His sons were seven and four, and Fernie never remarried.

Following his mother’s death in 1995, Walter Ford Carter began the emotional inquiry into the life of his father. In the process of sorting out his mother’s belongings, he uncovered the hundreds of letters Norval and Fernie had exchanged. In a series of interviews, Walter spoke eloquently about reading Norval’s letters and his journey to learn about the father he barely knew, which he was able to document in No Greater Sacrifice, No Greater Love: A Son’s Journey to Normandy, published in 2004. Walter’s wife Bonnie and children Catherine and Norman emphasized what was lost after Norval’s death. Donald Null, a soldier with the 29th, described in wrenching detail the harrowing Norman hedgerows. Thomas Scott and Charles McKown of the Norval Carter Memorial Medical Society completed the chronicle of a loving, capable doctor, father, and husband taken in the prime of his life.

© 2007-8 Dog Green Productions