Tichenor, George Oscar

George Tichenor of Maplewood, N.J. was the first to die. As an Axis bullet pierced his head, he fell across the wounded in his care. His body protected them from the same deadly spray and they remained safe until they could be rescued. Quiet young George Tichenor was a little different from most of the Field Service men. He couldn't kill anybody. But he was, willing to take anything being dished out in order to help the men who did fight. He was a pacifist with guts.

The New York office of the Field Service didn't have to ask questions about him when he applied for service on Oct. 1, 1941. That spring he had been headed for the Middle East on the Zam Zam as a member of the British-American Ambulance Corps. His courage when the ship was torpedoed was a high recommendation.

The townspeople of Maplewood supplemented that. His minister said he was an unusual young man, honest and reliable. Another sponsor added the words sober and trustworthy. His employer, the fashionable photographer George Platt Lynes. said his services, character and personality were entirely satisfactory.

__ Newspaper clipping in "A Mother's Scrapbook: John Newlin Hobbs and the American Field Service, 1942-1945."

 

"I counted 35 holes in me, and that doesn't include the pinheads. . . . Bits and pieces went through my shoes and into my toes, and sprayed both legs and my hand, wrist, and forearms. But no bones and no joints were broken. . . . Later someone came limping out of the blackness, and he took hold of me and we got to the truck. . . . I landed on a pile of wounded men, who could not help but groan. I crawled over onto a pile of blankets, but thought the blankets too solid. I edged onto a toolbox, which was cold and very wet. Tichenor was lying under those blankets, but I didn't know it then. He was dead."

"Tichenor had been killed immediately. His ambulance took fire, and while he worked with the wounded he had been hit in the head and had fallen across the wounded men. His body lying across them had saved their lives. One man, blinded, told me that . . . he had been in Tich's ambulance."

Later that morning, shortly before dawn, the English buried Tichenor about 8 miles southwest of Bir Hakim, near the rendez-vous point where the French were finally met by a British column from the north.

__ George Rock. Chapter 3. "Middle East 1. Tobruk to El Alamein (November 1941 to September 1942)" History of the American Field Service, 1920-1955. New York 1956.

George Tichenor pushed his way through the tangle until his machine was hit and put out of working order. Though slightly wounded, he got out and with the help of a passing infantryman off-loaded his patients. He was working over them when a burst of machine-gun fire hit him. Instinctively, as he fell he placed his body over his wounded and caught the full force of further fire.

__ Andrew Geer. Mercy in Hell. An American Ambulance Driver with the Eighth Army. McGraw Hill, New York 1943.

George O. Tichenor belonged to a small group of those who believed they should not wait until called for, when there was something they could do to help in this mighty conflict. He was not only ready to go at a very early date, but when his effort was frustrated through enemy action, he again volunteered when the opportunity arose and left, before his country's participation, to serve where he was most needed. There is nothing finer then that for which he stood, and in giving his life he gave to others an example of one who was unafraid.

__ AFS Letters No. 4

As to Tichenor, I've been unable to definitely find out all the details of what happened after he was last seen. At any rate, his identification bracelet was turned over (and subsequently lost) to Worden by an English ambulance orderly, who said that they had buried Tichenor at a point about eight miles southwest of Bir Hacheim.

__ AFS Letters No. 6

"It was the American with the little beard", they told me to identify him. That was Tich, growing a patch of beard on his chin to amuse himself; and later on I saw the silver name bracelet we all wear, and it was Tichenor. His ambulance burned, too, for the red-head got out of it. The blind man was lying on the ground with some other wounded, and Tich must have been working with them, for when the fire of bullets went through his head and shoulders, he fell over on top at the men on the ground, and his body protected them from the grenades which came after. He was buried with the two others who were dead in the truck. I suppose they had thrown him in, too, thinking that he might be alive. Things were confused.

__ AFS News Bulletin No. 2