A young life before the uniform

Sidney Fendel King was born on 21 July 1922 to Roland and Willie King. On 23 October 1943, he married Olivette Elizabeth Aston in Camden, North Carolina. These spare dates mark a life moving quickly into adulthood: a marriage during wartime, two children expected, and a future being planned under the shadow of military service.

His mother died soon after his birth. After his father remarried, family memory says that Sidney was raised principally by his aunt Edna Louise King Dunn, wife of Otto Bindawall Dunn. Her care gave him an enduring home during a childhood shaped by early loss and changes within the household. The surviving family account is clear about Edna’s importance in his life, although records documenting when he lived with her are still being sought.

The children were twin sons, born on 11 April 1945. By then their father had been dead for almost four months. They could know him only through photographs, records, and the memories of other people. That absence—not an invented account of a final heroic act—is at the heart of his story.

Before Europe: Panama and a final visit home

A surviving handwritten poem now provides direct evidence that King served at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone before he was sent to Europe. The heading appears to identify him with Battery R, 73rd Coast Artillery (Antiaircraft). Because the manuscript is undated and his individual orders have not yet been located, it does not establish the complete dates or itinerary of that assignment.

Panama was not a minor wartime outpost. The canal was essential to moving ships, troops, and equipment between the Atlantic and Pacific. The Army guarded its locks, dams, airfields, and approaches against attack or sabotage. By the end of 1942, almost 67,000 Army personnel were serving at bases and other defense sites in Panama. As the threat to the canal diminished, many troops were reassigned to active fronts, and by 1944 the area increasingly served as a training ground.

In his own words

The Fort Amador manuscript introduces the poem as the work of Private Sidney F. King and Private First Class Charles L. Verbeck. They called it “Down in Panama.” Its verses describe the tropical heat, mosquitoes, lizards, long workdays, military discipline, homesickness, and the hope of someday finding peace and rest away from Panama. This is not an official service record, but it preserves something those records rarely contain: how two young soldiers chose to describe their daily experience.

Read a transcription of the poem

Spelling and punctuation have been lightly standardized for readability. One difficult phrase is marked as uncertain.

Down in Panama

I. Down in Panama City in the torrid zone,
A thousand miles from no place,
Three thousand miles from home.

II. Don’t think that I am kicking
For the daily things we meet:
Mosquitoes flying around our heads,
And lizards crawling at our feet.

III. Thank heaven we don’t wear striped suits,
Although we may as well,
For they tell us when to come and go,
So that every liberty is hell.

IV. They say we are just dogface plain soldiers,
Scum of the earth.
They say we are learning a lesson
That we will remember to our dying days.

V. They take us out in the morning
And work us all day long.
It doesn’t pay to grumble,
So we try to sing a song.

VI. I saw men [word unclear] from this
Whiskey heat in hell,
Others crying away their life
For things they would not tell.

VII. But someday we will find
Peace and rest and maybe happiness
When we leave this place.
God bless us all; if they need us
In Panama, they will blow the bugle call.

—Verbeck and King

Before leaving for Europe, family memory says that King was able to visit Olivette one final time. It was the last time husband and wife were together. Their twin sons were born the following April, after his death.

What his surviving passes reveal

King’s enlistment record begins that trail on 8 January 1941, when he entered the Regular Army at Norfolk as a private—nearly a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. The record places him initially in the Coast Artillery Corps or Army Mine Planter Service. Before enlistment, he had worked as a driver. Coast Artillery soldiers protected American harbors with heavy guns and controlled underwater minefields; the assignment was very different from the infantry fighting he would later face in Europe.

Two family-held military passes preserve later pieces that the enlistment index cannot supply. A Class A pass identifies him as a private first class in Company H, 174th Infantry, and authorized recreation privileges while he was at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. A Good Conduct Pass dated 15 November 1943 places him at Fort Bliss, Texas, and permitted him to visit Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, when off duty. Together, the records document a progression from Coast Artillery service to the 174th Infantry and eventually the 315th Infantry. They do not, by themselves, establish Panama or the date of his final visit home.

Why parts of his military record may be missing

King’s Army personnel file belongs to a group severely affected by the 12 July 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center near St. Louis. The National Archives estimates that the fire destroyed about 80 percent of the files for Army personnel discharged between 1 November 1912 and 1 January 1960. Because no complete list of destroyed files exists, the fire alone does not prove that King’s entire file was lost. A surviving government response concerning his individual record could establish that more precisely. Meanwhile, passes, letters, morning reports, casualty records, and burial papers can help reconstruct portions of his service from other evidence.

A soldier of the 315th Infantry

King’s Portsmouth burial record identifies him as a private first class in the 315th Infantry Regiment, part of the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division. The division was known by its Cross of Lorraine emblem. Its regiments fought from Normandy across northern France and into Lorraine and Alsace. Without King’s individual service file, it would be unsafe to assume that he took part in every one of the division’s earlier movements; the record establishes his regiment, not the date on which he joined it.

By mid-December 1944, the 79th Division was serving with the Seventh Army in northeastern France. The division had reached the Lauter River and the German frontier. Its next attacks would press toward the Siegfried Line through cold, mined, and heavily defended ground.

What happened on 16 December 1944?

King died on 16 December—the same day Germany opened the great offensive farther north that became known as the Battle of the Bulge. The date makes the family association with that battle understandable. The surviving division histories, however, place the 315th Infantry on the Alsace front, not in the Ardennes battle area.

Unit histories narrow the regimental setting further. The 79th Infantry Division’s combat history states that the division reached Lauterbourg and Scheibenhardt on the Lauter River on 15 December and that 2nd Battalion, 315th Infantry, constructed a footbridge west of Lauterbourg that day. A history of the neighboring 314th Infantry records that at 0645 on 16 December the 314th was ordered to prepare to cross the Lauter and move through the 315th Infantry’s position near Scheibenhardt. Together, these accounts place the 315th Infantry Regiment in the Lauterbourg–Scheibenhardt sector around the date of King’s death. They do not place King himself. His company and battalion remain unknown, so the evidence does not establish that he was in Scheibenhardt, crossed the Lauter, entered Germany, or participated in any particular action.

A neighboring regiment of the 79th Division was photographed advancing through Scheibenhard, France, at the German border that day.

Remembered in Alsace

On 15 September 2024, approximately eighty years after the fighting, the communities of Batzendorf, Niederschaeffolsheim, and Wahlenheim inaugurated a Cross of Lorraine memorial honoring the soldiers of the 79th U.S. Infantry Division and its affiliated units. The monument stands among villages liberated during the division’s advance through northern Alsace. Its dedication shows that the young Americans who fought there are still remembered by the communities they helped free.

The broader campaign was later designated “Ardennes-Alsace,” but those were distinct fighting areas. On the evidence presently available, the responsible description is that King died during the winter fighting in Alsace as the Battle of the Bulge began elsewhere. His company and battalion, exact location and circumstances of death, first burial location, and the evidence that may survive in morning reports and his Individual Deceased Personnel File remain open research questions.

The landscape in the photograph helps explain this less familiar front: border villages, churned roads, damaged buildings, short winter days, and fortified ground leading toward Germany’s Westwall. On 17 December, the day after King’s death, the 79th Division began its next attack toward those defenses. This sequence provides the setting around his final day, but it cannot substitute for the missing company-level record of what happened to him.

The long journey back to Portsmouth

A surviving family account says that King was first buried overseas and that an aunt arranged for his remains to be returned through Antwerp, Belgium. That detail fits the history of the Army’s postwar Return of the Dead program. Antwerp became a major departure point: in October 1947, the first large shipment from the European theater carried thousands of American dead from Belgium toward the United States.

A federal headstone application is indexed in Sidney’s name, and family research also identifies paperwork requesting the transfer of his remains. Those records offer a promising route to establishing who made the request, where he was first buried, and when he returned to Virginia. Until the original forms are fully examined and transcribed, the name of the ship and the date of his return remain open questions. What is documented is his final resting place in Portsmouth, where his government marker records his name, rank, regiment, dates, and service in World War II.

A life measured by more than its length

The record leaves no need to exaggerate. Sidney Fendel King entered the Army during a world war, served in an infantry regiment fighting toward Germany, and was killed in action at twenty-two before he could meet his sons. A surviving Purple Heart engraved with his name preserves official recognition of that sacrifice. The portrait restores a face to the military notation. The grave restores a name to the casualty count. Together they preserve the young husband and father behind both.