Hebron, IL.
Date of Birth: 24 April, 1924
Date of Death: 14 July, 1945
Branch of Service: United States Army
Rank: Private
Unit: Company D, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment
Place of Death: Fabrica, Negros, Occidental, Philippine Islands
Private Ray L. Chapman
Ray Lewis Chapman was born on April 24, 1924, in Allensville, Kentucky, but it was Hebron, Illinois that he called home. Before the war, he had moved north and was working at the National Lock Company in Rockford when he registered for the draft in June 1942 at eighteen years old. He enlisted in the Army in February 1943 and, somewhere in the course of his training, volunteered for something that set him apart from most infantrymen: he became a paratrooper.
Chapman was assigned to Company D, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment — a unit that had already earned a formidable reputation in the Pacific. The 503rd had made the first combat parachute jump in the Pacific Theater in 1943, fought through New Guinea, and in February 1945 executed one of the most daring airborne assaults of the entire war: a jump onto the fortress island of Corregidor, the same island that had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. By the time Chapman joined the regiment’s operations on Negros Island in the spring of 1945, the 503rd was deep into what would be one of the final major ground campaigns of the Pacific War. Japanese forces had retreated into the island’s rugged interior, and American paratroopers spent months fighting through dense jungle terrain to root them out.
Private Ray Lewis Chapman was killed in action on Negros on July 14, 1945. He was twenty-one years old. The War Department received confirmation of his death thirteen days later. He was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge and the Purple Heart.
His remains were first buried at USAF Cemetery Leyte No. 1 in the Philippines. In the summer of 1948, they were disinterred and transported by ship to Oakland and then by rail across the country. On the morning of October 14, 1948, a Chicago and North Western Railway train carrying his casket arrived at Harvard, Illinois, accompanied by a military escort, and was received by Fenner H. Andrews of Hebron on behalf of his family.
Ray Chapman is buried at Linn-Hebron Cemetery in Hebron, Illinois.
2nd Battalion, 503rd PIR
Linn-Hebron Cemetery
Hebron Township, McHenry County, IL.
To visit the cemetery, click on his Headstone
