STARKVILLE — When Edward Gunn landed at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, he would never make it home to see the cotton fields of Starkville stretched out in front of him.
Just 10 days later, he was declared missing in action. A year later, he was declared dead, though his body was never recovered.
Gunn was part of the 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, in the U.S. Army who stormed the beaches of Nazi-occupied France on what is known as D-Day, according to research done by a history duo from Starkville High School.
SHS junior Giles Jones and history teacher Craig Wood began their research in January on the Starkville native as part of a project for the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute that will take them this summer to the same sands on which Gunn fought nearly 80 years ago.
“I have a personal interest in attending the program because I had an uncle that landed on the beaches of Normandy six days after the invasion started,” Wood sent in an email. “… I discussed applying to the program with Giles since he had been actively involved with National History Day over the past few years. Giles also had family members that served in the European theater during World War II.”
Each year since 2011, with the exception of 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19, the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute at George Washington University sends roughly 15 teams of one student and one teacher to France to give eulogies to fallen hometown heroes buried or memorialized in the Normandy American Cemetery.
Jones and Wood will travel together at the end of June to Washington, D.C. then to France to complete their research and to deliver Gunn a long overdue eulogy where he is one of 444 memorialized in the Tablets of the Missing at Normandy American Cemetery. Gunn was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for his gallantry in action.
Wood said the two will spend about six days in Washington, D.C., to complete research at the National Archives and will visit various World War II museums and monuments.
They will then spend roughly six more days in France to visit beaches and drop zones used during the Normandy invasion, as well as one day in Paris.
“We have weekly readings which allow us to understand what we will see in Normandy,” Jones wrote in an email to The Dispatch. “… I am really looking forward to being able to go to France, experiencing the culture and continuing to learn about World War II and Normandy. I feel like this experience will allow me to connect more personally to the experience they had and have a greater appreciation of all they did. … (Wood) is helping me to revise the eulogy as well as finding documents to help write it.”
Wood said as a teacher he has attended programs like the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute and has benefited from them by gaining “a deeper understanding” of certain topics through research and collaboration. He said he’s gained friends in other teachers from across the country.
He said students who get to attend programs like this get to learn beyond photos and videos, and they learn from actually being at the place of an event, which helps them learn about the significance of it. He said both will gain memories they will never forget.
“Being able to stand where a historical event has taken place has a great impact on my teaching of the event,” Wood said. “From standing in a village in the Demilitarized Zone that has direct contact with North Korea to being in Pearl Harbor on the USS Missouri as Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam call reveille. For this program, being able to stand on the beaches the allied forces landed on to open a second front in Europe will probably be the memory of a lifetime.”
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