?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(WORLD WAR TWO.) Family papers of paratrooper Lt. Frederick G. Humphrey, who died in combat in the Netherlands. More than 100 items (0.5 linear feet), including: 3 letters from Humphrey to his family, 1943-44; 8 enlistment and training documents, 1943-44; 9 letters relating to his combat death, 1944-46; his posthumous Purple Heart certificate and other memorial notices; his military-issue pocket Bible; 4 items relating to the service of twin brother Sgt. William F. Humphrey Jr., badly wounded in combat in 1944; 32 photographs, most of the twins in uniform or before the war; a group of 9 badges and insignia including a paratrooper's insignia and a pair of Second Lieutenant's bars (but not the Purple Heart); and a small group of earlier family papers. Vp, 1857-1949
2nd Lieutenant Frederick George Humphrey (1923-1944) was a native of Kansas City, MO, serving in the 508th Parachute Infantry in the 823nd Airborne Division. On 14 December 1944, a fellow lieutenant in the 508th wrote to his parents: "We were attacking a Dutch village at eleven o'clock that nite and found it much more heavily defended than was expected. Frederick was at the head of his platoon and well into the town when the Germans opened up on us. He was kneeling at the time he was hit. A German machine pistol got him through the neck and chest." The regimental chaplain added in a letter of the same date that "as a platoon leader it was only necessary for him to send his platoon sergeant. Fred was not the type of officer that would ask his men to do anything that he would not do himself." with--the May 1942 to October 1943 diary of recent high school graduate Eloise Jennifer Humphrey (born 1924), daughter of Earl and Dola Humphrey of Independence, KS and first cousin of the Humphrey twins. It is a lively diary with frequent discussion of politics, and of beaux in the military. 44 manuscript pages.
