With celebrations and ceremonies canceled, a quieter Memorial Day to reflect on Connecticut’s fallen fighters

Memorial Day will be muted in the time of coronavirus.

Parades, cemetery tributes and big family gatherings marking the start of summer will have to wait.

But the break from traditional ceremony and celebration also offers a chance for deeper reflection on the meaning of the holiday, and particularly for thoughts of Connecticut’s own fighters who paid the highest price on the nation’s battlefields.

Following are thumbnail sketches of service and sacrifice from the Revolutionary War to the present:

Lt. Col. Thomas Knowlton: Spymaster and Bunker Hill hero

Knowlton (1740-76) was among the first Connecticut men who rushed to Boston after the alarms at Lexington and Concord.

At the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, the combat-hardened veteran of the French and Indian War led a company in Gen. Israel Putnam’s Third Connecticut Regiment. From behind a rail fence at the foot of Breed’s Hill, Knowlton and his Connecticut farmers poured devastating musket fire into advancing Redcoats trying to turn the Americans’ left flank.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Knowlton became one of Gen. George Washington’s most trusted officers, leading a scouting unit known as Knowlton’s Rangers. Their mission was to probe enemy lines for intelligence, and among their ranks was Connecticut’s most famous hero, Nathan Hale.

On Sept. 16, 1776, at Harlem Heights in New York, Knowlton and his men were on reconnaissance when British troops, including the famed Black Watch, confronted them. Knowlton was shot in the small of his back. Joshua Sheperd described the patriot’s final moments in an article in The Journal of the American Revolution.

“A nearby officer, Captain Stephen Brown, rushed to his side and asked the colonel if he was badly wounded. ‘Yes,’ Knowlton replied, ‘but I do not value my life if we do but get the day.’ … ‘When gasping in the agonies of death,’ remembered (fellow officer Joseph) Reed, Knowlton could think of little more than victory, and ‘all his inquiry was if we had driven in the enemy.’ He was dead in an hour.’ “

In his general orders the next day, Washington praised “the gallant and brave Colonel Knowlton, who would have been an honor to any country.”

Known as a father of American military intelligence, Knowlton also is remembered with a statue on the grounds of the state Capitol.

Gen. Nathaniel Lyon: ‘Born and bred among rocks’

Hot-tempered Nathaniel Lyon (1818-61) was a West Point graduate and decorated veteran of the Mexican-American War. Knowlton was his grand uncle on his mother’s side, and Lyon grew up in the same area of northeastern Connecticut.

A vehement abolitionist, Lyon’s views of the nation’s slaveholding society hardened during his service in “Bleeding Kansas” during the 1850s, former Courant reporter and editor David Drury wrote in an article for the newspaper in 2011. As the Civil War started in April 1861, Lyon leapt into the hot fight for control of Missouri, a border state where secessionist and pro-Union forces would slaughter each other over the next four years.

Lyon was elected brigadier general of the Missouri state volunteers and promoted by the War Department to command its Western Military Department. Throughout June and July 1861, his forces won a series of small victories and succeeded in pushing pro-secession militia to the west and southwest, Drury wrote.

In August, on the night before the battle of Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, Missouri, Lyon bedded down in a rocky hollow. A subordinate asked him how he was feeling. “I’m quite all right,” Lyon said. “Back in Connecticut, where I come from, I was born and bred among rocks.”

Although his force was outnumbered, Lyon attacked and the battle went back and forth with heavy casualties on both sides.

“Late in the morning,” Drury wrote, “already wounded in the leg and the side of his head, Lyon saw a gap forming in the enemy’s line and ordered another advance. Climbing upon an orderly’s horse, waving his hat in his right hand, he turned to yell to his men: ‘Come on, my brave boys. I will lead you! Forward!’ “

Shot through the chest, Lyon died moments later. As the first Union general to be killed, he became a heroic martyr. Memorialized in Stephen Foster’s song, “Better Times are Coming,” Lyon was mourned by thousands of citizens as the train carrying his coffin headed back to his home in Eastford.

“At the moment when the Union’s expectations had been crushed — this romantic notion of taking Richmond in 30 days — the death of Lyon provided an antidote for the shame, a ready-made hero who took the sting out of Bull Run,” Connecticut State Historian Walter Woodward said.

Lyon is buried beneath the obelisk that dominates the small General Lyon Cemetery on General Lyon Road in his hometown.

World War I: A son of privilege and a country boy

2nd Lt. Caldwell Colt Robinson, born in 1897, was the grand nephew of famed gunmaker Samuel Colt and son of Charles L.F. Robinson, president of Colt Firearms.

He also was a courageous U.S. Marine. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross and the Navy Cross, Robinson was killed at Belleau Wood on June 6, 1918, cut down while charging a German machine gun, a Colt .45-caliber pistol in each hand. He is buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France.

Perhaps Connecticut’s saddest story of the war was U.S. Army Sgt. Paul Maynard of the 102nd Infantry Regiment. Weary from months of combat, the Torrington man, 21, wrote to his brother from a cratered battlefield in France on Nov. 4, 1918.

“I have thought a good many times lately that I never would be able to write home again,” Maynard wrote. “We have had a hard time at this front and will be glad when it is over with. Don’t forget your old chum.”

Maynard was killed seven days later, on Nov. 11, the last day of the war. Unaware, his parents waited for him at a train station as thousands of soldiers arrived home. Buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, Maynard is the focus of a short film by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

World War II: Babe’s letters home

Corado “Babe” Ciarlo of Waterbury was a central figure in Ken Burns’ 2007 PBS series, “The War.”

The U.S. Army soldier saw some of the toughest combat of the war during the campaign launched at Anzio on the Italian coast in January 1944. But in letters home to his worried mother, Ciarlo told only of his good health and boring duties, how he would fatten “like a barrel” because he was eating and sleeping so much.

In May, as Allied losses mounted, Ciarlo wrote, “Nothing ever happens here. I guess it’s like Waterbury: dead.” His brother, Tom Ciarlo, says in the film that the letters convinced his widowed mother and the rest of the family that he was safe.

“You read in the paper about different battles,” Tom Ciarlo said, “but you don’t actually put Babe in that position because he’s always telling you how everything is fine; everything is no problem.”

Just eight days shy of his 21st birthday, Ciarlo was killed in the Battle of Cisterna in June. His mother refused to believe he was dead and accepted the fact only when her boy’s body was returned to Connecticut.

“I think the worst day was when they brought his body back,” his sister, Olga, said in the documentary. “And we went down to the railroad station and when they took his body off the train and we were all there, we all went to the cemetery, when they handed my mother the flag.”

Vietnam: An indelible day; a mother’s anger

On an unforgettable winter’s day, Ann Marie Grottke rushed to answer the doorbell at her Manchester home with all the innocent enthusiasm of a 5-year-old.

Uniformed men stood outside, and her parents told her to go play, she recalled in an interview with the Courant five years ago.

“I could hear my father burst out crying,” Grottke said. “I never heard my father cry before.”

U.S. Army Spec. 4 Donald Joseph Krajewski, Ann Marie’s 19-year-old brother, was killed in Vietnam on Feb. 28, 1969. His remains were returned home on what would have been his 20th birthday, March 13.

In an interview with a Courant reporter in 1998, Josephine Ryder of Bristol said she could not bear to hear war opponents blame and shame the fighting men, especially after the death of her oldest child, Aldo Eugene Ryder. The U.S. Marine Corps private first class was killed on June 4, 1968, in Quang Tri Province, one of more than 600 Connecticut men who died in the war.

“The hardest thing for me was hearing the slurs made against the soldiers who were in Vietnam. When I heard people saying these things, I wanted to slap their faces,” Josephine Ryder recalled. “These people never understood what our boys did.”

Iraq: A last visit

U.S. Army Pfc. Andre Craig Jr. of New Haven was killed when a bomb exploded near his convoy in Baghdad in 2007. He was 24 years old and left an infant daughter.

“At least he talked to everybody before he died,” Craig’s former girlfriend, Rhea Knight, told a Courant reporter shortly after his death. Knight’s eyes welled when she noted that she still had a record of Craig’s last call to her in her cellphone.

Only weeks before his death, Craig returned home on leave to meet his baby daughter, Taylor, for the first time. “Dre,” as Craig was known, had long dreamed of joining the Army and also hoped to become a state trooper, relatives and friends said at the time.

Afghanistan: Fighting on

In August 2018, 16 years after his death in a fierce firefight in Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. John Chapman was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Donald Trump.

The Windsor Locks native, 36, was killed after trying to rescue a wounded Navy SEAL on a snowy mountaintop on March 4, 2002. The elite fighter, a combat controller, was Connecticut’s first casualty in the war.

The Medal of Honor citation says, in part:

“He fearlessly charged an enemy bunker, up a steep incline in thigh-deep snow and into hostile fire, directly engaging the enemy. Upon reaching the bunker, Sergeant Chapman assaulted and cleared the position, killing all enemy occupants.

“With complete disregard for his own life, Sergeant Chapman deliberately moved from cover only 12 meters from the enemy, and exposed himself once again to attack a second bunker, from which an emplaced machine gun was firing on his team. During this assault from an exposed position directly in the line of intense fire, Sergeant Chapman was struck and injured by enemy fire. Despite severe, mortal wounds, he continued to fight relentlessly, sustaining a violent engagement with multiple enemy personnel before making the ultimate sacrifice.”

Jesse Leavenworth can be reached at jleavenworth@courant.com