Charles T. Lanham
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Major General Charles T. Lanham known as "Buck" was born September 14, 1902 in Washington D. C. He graduated from West Point in 1924. He included among his many military adventures the command of the U.S. 22d Infantry Regiment in Normandy in July 1944, and was the first American officer to lead a break through the Siegfried Line on Sept. 14, 1944. He led a breakout in the Battle of the Bulge after surviving a bloody ordeal in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. It was in the Normandy battles that Lanham and Ernest Hemingway first met. Hemingway was doing battlefield stories for the American audience for Collier's and sought assignment with Lanham's regiment. Hemingway described Lanham as,
| “ | The finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known. | ” |
Colonel "Buck" Lanham was the model for Colonel Cantwell in Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees. He was a short story writer and poet. Colonel Lanham was brave under fire earning the Distinguished Service Cross (United States) in the Huertgen Forest. He retired from the military at the end of 1954, as a Major General, to join the Pennsylvania-Texas Corporation of Colt's Patent Firearms. He resigned in 1958 and joined Xerox in 1960 as Vice President for Government Relations, retiring from that post at the end of 1970. He died July 20, 1978 in Chevy Chase, Maryland from cancer at the age of 76.
