Woodstock, IL.
Date of Birth: 9 September, 1916
Date of Death: 3 January, 1944
Branch of Service: United States Naval Reserve
Rank: RDM 3/c (Radarman Third Class)
Ship: USS Turner (DD-648) Gleaves-class Destroyer
Place of Death: Ambrose Channel, New York Harbor, N.Y.
RDM 3/c George D. Behler
George Durling Behler was born on September 9, 1916, in Carmi, Illinois, and grew up at 402 Vine Street in Woodstock, where he lived with his mother, Elizabeth Behler. Before the war, he worked at the Alemite Die Casting and Manufacturing Company in Woodstock. He was twenty-seven years old when he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve and was trained as a radarman — a specialty that placed him at the technological edge of naval warfare, tracking enemy vessels and aircraft from aboard ship.
By the fall of 1943, Radarman Third Class Behler was serving aboard the USS Turner (DD-648), a destroyer under the command of Lieutenant Commander Henry S. Wygant Jr. The Turner had spent the latter months of 1943 on convoy duty, escorting ships safely across the Atlantic and back. She completed her third and final transatlantic convoy run in late November, saw the ships safely across, and turned for home. On January 1, 1944, as the return voyage neared its end, the convoy split according to destination. The Turner joined the New York-bound group and shaped a course for port. She arrived off Ambrose Light late on January 2 and anchored.
She never made it to shore. In the early morning hours of January 3, the Turner was shaken by a series of violent internal explosions. By 6:50 a.m. she had taken on a sixteen-degree starboard list, with explosions continuing to wrack the ship, most of them concentrated in the ammunition stowage areas. At approximately 7:50 a.m., a final catastrophic blast caused her to capsize and sink. The tip of her bow remained above water until 8:27, when she disappeared entirely. Of the 276 officers and enlisted men aboard, 138 were lost — among them Radarman Third Class George Behler.
The disaster prompted one of the most unusual rescue efforts of the war. A United States Coast Guard helicopter — among the first ever used in a life-saving role — flew two cases of blood plasma lashed to its floats from New York to the hospital at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where the Turner’s survivors had been taken. The plasma saved the lives of many of the wounded. For those already lost to the sea, it came too late.
George Behler’s body was never recovered. He is memorialized at the Tablets of the Missing at the East Coast Memorial in New York City, and a cenotaph in his memory stands at Oakland Cemetery in Woodstock.
USS Turner (DD-648)
Oakland Cemetery
Woodstock, McHenry County, IL
and
East Coast Memorial
Tablets of the Missing
Manhattan, New York County, New York
To visit the cemetery, click on his Headstone
