Boyd Van Horn of Arbon and the Silver Star at Anzio, 1945

In early June 1945, a month after the fighting in Europe ended, the Associated Press sent a short dispatch out of Tacoma, Washington. Its subject was an Arbon, Idaho, man being treated at the Army hospital in that city, and its news was a Silver Star. The Pocatello Tribune printed it on page 2 on Monday, June 4. He was Staff Sergeant Boyd Van Horn, a farm boy from Arbon Valley who had turned 26 less than two weeks before.

A South Arbon family

Lee E. and Nola D. (Johnson) Van Horn were his parents, and his obituary puts his birth in Arbon Valley on May 23, 1919. Arbon's schools taught him, and when he was through with them he went to work on the family farm with his father. Lee Van Horn was in the valley by April 1914, when his name appeared among the Arbon signers of a resolution printed in the American Falls Press. In October 1915 the paper's South Arbon column, the same column that reported the building of the Highland school at Summit that year, announced the birth of a daughter to him and his wife. The same column added that Hugh Van Horn had gone to Malad to see his new granddaughter.

Hugh was probably Boyd's grandfather. In June 1917 the Press reported his death after an operation in Salt Lake. His body was shipped to the family's old home at Dayton, Washington, and Lee and Mrs. Van Horn went with it for the burial. Hugh's brother Merl had been killed in December 1915, crushed by a tree he was felling, as the Stories entry Merl Van Horn crushed by a falling tree tells.

The war

His Army service began on February 20, 1941, ten months ahead of Pearl Harbor. His obituary lists the Italian, Southern France and Germany campaigns. The Silver Star came from Anzio, the Allied beachhead south of Rome that held out against German counterattacks through the first months of 1944. The dispatch tells what he did there in a single sentence, given in the report below. It does not name his unit or give the date, and the citation itself has not been found.

His name had already appeared in the Tribune on January 14, 1945. The War Department had released another dozen names of wounded Idaho men, whose families had been informed before the list went out, and among the European-area cases was an Arbon staff sergeant, Boyd Van Horn, with his mother, Mrs. Nola Van Horn, named as next of kin. The June dispatch said his wounds had come in both Italy and France.

After the war

The Army let him go in June 1946, and on the 20th of that month Betty Ward became his wife in a wedding at American Falls. She was a daughter of Merl Ward and a granddaughter of Jesse and Julia Ward, of the Ward family of Arbon and Malad. He farmed again for a time. Construction came next, at Promontory Point for the Morrison-Knudsen company, followed by a job at Mack Boiler. His last twelve years of work were at Kent Brothers Trucking in American Falls, where he was both mechanic and foreman.

The obituary also praised his work as a gunsmith and at the controls of a bulldozer. Fishing, it said, was his passion, and he had hunted as well when he was younger. In February 1949, when a seriously ill man was brought out by weasel, a tracked snow vehicle, from Mercer Creek in the Crystal country, the paper reporting it noted that a Boyd Van Horn brought the weasel to American Falls, as Skis and a weasel tells. He was probably the same man, though no paper links the two directly.

Death came on April 3, 1978, at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, California; he was 58. Plans called for a funeral at the LDS church in American Falls and a burial at Falls View cemetery with a military ceremony at the grave. His mother Nola outlived him, as did Betty, his son and two daughters, and seven grandchildren; so did his brother Hubert, who lived in Pocatello, and his sister Fern, Mrs. George England, of American Falls.

What is not known

The two reports do not agree on his Purple Heart. The 1945 dispatch gives it two clusters, which would ordinarily mean three awards in all, and the 1978 obituary gives one. The obituary also credits him with seven Bronze Stars and the French Croix de Guerre. It does not say whether the seven were Bronze Star Medals or the small bronze stars worn for campaigns. When he was wounded, exactly where in Italy and France, and in what outfit he served, the papers found so far do not say.

On this site: the Stories entry on Merl Van Horn, the Ward family, and other valley servicemen in Arbon Valley men in uniform, 1941–1946.

The story as reported

Pocatello Tribune, June 4, 1945, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

The Associated Press story came out of Tacoma, Washington, where Madigan General Hospital was treating an Arbon, Idaho, staff sergeant named Boyd Van Horn. The news it carried was that he now held the Silver Star.

Wounds taken in two countries, Italy and France, had earned him a second decoration as well. That one was the Purple Heart, and it carried two clusters.

The Silver Star came out of an enemy counterattack at Anzio, in Italy. With fire heavy all around, the dispatch said, Van Horn charged a position held by the enemy. He killed four of the men working its guns, and in doing so threw off the plan behind the counterattack.

The dispatch did not name his unit or say when the action took place. It ran under a short headline in the third column of the page, below a report on the University of Idaho commencement. Elsewhere on the page were a report on a Pocatello infantryman cited for bravery in Germany and one on a Pocatello aerial gunner who had flown thirteen combat missions.