Private First Class Harold "Gene" Sellers

Pathfinder, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

KIA, June 6, 1944

*****

Harold Eugene Sellers was born on Christmas Day, 1922, in Lawrence County, Arkansas, the youngest of David and Sarah Sellers’ 11 children.  Gene showed an impressive athletic ability throughout his young life.  Upon graduation from junior high in Swifton, Arkansas, he was recruited to play basketball and football at nearby Jonesboro High School.  His athletic success, "winning smile" and dashing charm left a great impression on many in Jonesboro.

Gene was a star on his high school football and basketball teams.  As point guard, he led the Jonesboro Hurricane to a state basketball championship in 1940 and once again 1942, the culmination of an undefeated 30-0 season.  Gene, along with several other starters from that undefeated team, was selected to the all-state basketball squad.  Gene also played four years of football as an end for the Hurricane, lettering twice and making his second all-state team.

With his impressive athletic skills and better-than-average grades, Gene received a football scholarship to the University of Arkansas.  But before the end of his first year, Gene left Arkansas to enlist in the army, volunteering first for the paratroopers and then the Pathfinders.  As a Pathfinder, Gene was a member of one of the first sticks to drop into Normandy on the night of June 5th and early morning of June 6th.  Along with others in the company, he was to mark the drop zones for the coming paratroopers in the invasion force.  But his parachute was caught in a tree beside a road in St Come du Mont, outside his intended drop zone, and he was unable to free himself.  Stuck, and hanging just a few feet from the ground, he was killed by a German soldier.  Gene Sellers was one of the first Americans killed in the Normandy invasion.  He was not yet 22 years old.

For his friends and family who knew his personality, it was no surprise that Gene had been on the front lines of the invasion, but there was little comfort to be had in the aftermath of his death.  Gene’s sister, Wanda Vance, was teaching school in Sedgwick when the Sellers family received the dreaded telegram.  Wanda’s daughter Ann Bailey, just four years old at the time, vividly remembers seeing her mother run from the school on that terrible day.  Sue Osment, whose family Gene had lived with while attending Jonesboro High, remembers the moment she and her sisters sat down and cried after hearing that Gene had been killed.  "I've talked to people that were there," said Buddy Bell, a football teammate, "a lot of people were kinda shocked...that he was killed.  They always talk about what a friendly person he was." 

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