Who was Roland L. Bragg?
Records tell the story of a junior enlisted hero & new namesake of Ft. Bragg
“Ft. Bragg is back, but it’s a different Bragg.”
When my friends and I heard the news, we were both excited and a little confused. For one thing, there was scant information on Roland L. Bragg out there.
To give you some background, Ft. Bragg is North Carolina was originally named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg. He was not, to put it mildly, a popular figure even within the Confederacy.
Naming military bases in the South after Confederates may be seen as a kind of conciliatory gesture from long ago, but I would argue that such conciliation has no place in the 21st century.
If anything, it hearkens back to the bitter division of the Civil War days, and does a disservice to our Black military personnel.
However, when Ft. Bragg was renamed Ft. Liberty, few people were happy.
Liberty is a milquetoast name that came about as the result of friction between USASOC and the 82nd Airborne, as anyone in the know will tell you (Army officialdom itself prefers to avoid the topic), as they couldn’t agree on a new namesake for the base.
You can see some more background on the naming process from Kori Schake here:
For what it’s worth, I’ve never spoken to a single soldier or veteran who liked the name Ft. Liberty. Most people insisted on calling it Bragg, at least in private.
So now Ft. Liberty is Ft. Bragg again, except it’s named after a junior enlisted WWII hero Roland L. Bragg, of Maine.
When we first heard the news, Ronald L. Bragg didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. As I type this, I can see that a new one has sprung up, and has been edited as of a few hours ago:
There weren’t any pictures of Roland Bragg readily available, though a friend helping me was able to yank some info from newspapers.com (note to fellow researchers: Newspapers.com blocks itself from any archival requests, which is a curious business tactic):
Yep, that’s our Roland Bragg up there on the left. A paratrooper with the Army’s 17th Airborne Division, who displayed insane heroics during the Battle of the Bulge when he stole a German ambulance to save his wounded friends’ lives and bring them to an Allied hospital.
One of those friends was John Martz, with whom Bragg was reunited many years later, a reunion covered in this newspaper article.
There’s a twist here too: Bragg appears to have thought that all of the wounded from that day had died. He didn’t know that Martz had lived until Martz contacted him.
The article continues here:
This account, however, doesn’t give us the story of how Bragg was able to steal that ambulance.
This is where records from a local Masonic Lodge came to the rescue:
As recounted by Bragg’s daughter, Linda French, Bragg had been captured by a fellow Mason, who allowed him to get away with the aforementioned ambulance.
It seems like a completely crazy story, but WWII had a lot of crazy stories.
The scrap of paper preserved above notes that Bragg was initiated in 1946, and I am not sure how that squares with Linda French’s account, though I imagine that if Bragg’s father was a Mason, the connection was already established.
Here’s a clearer picture of the obituary text above, if you’d like to read it without giving yourself a headache:
According to Linda French, it was a phone call and not a letter that re-connected John Martz and Roland Bragg (the reunion article said it was a letter), and that her father had been simply uncertain as to his friends’ fate (as a reminder, Bragg himself had stated in the previous article that he thought they were dead), but those are minor details that only the most hardheaded OSINT freaks would care about.
Many of us in this field like to latch on to minor discrepancies, forgetting that human memory itself is defined by such discrepancies.
I really liked Linda French’s word choice above, in which she spoke of how being contacted by his friend and fellow soldier “opened up a dam” for Bragg. This is consistent for many of our WWII veterans. They did what they did, then went on to live their lives, and rarely spoke about what they saw and how it impacted them. The past, however, has a way of coming back.
According to public records, Roland Bragg’s father’s full name was Calvin Leroy Bragg (one of his sons was named Calvin Leroy Bragg Junior; he passed away in 2009), and I was interested in finding a Masonic connection there, but have been unsuccessful so far, in spite of some promising leads.
I will note here that Roland Bragg’s daughter, Linda French, still resides in Maine, and I hope that she gets to speak about her father to press, if she is able.
It would seem that her mother, the widowed Barbara Bragg, is still around, resides in Nobleboro, and is around 99 years old (I have not located an obituary at this time).
I’m saying all of this because I hope we will get more pictures from the family archive.
I’ve seen some concern that the WWII memorial registry did not list Bragg’s branch of service, and the record submitted was added by one person, Barbara:
However, a Facebook page dedicated to the 17th Airborne has provided a picture of Roland Bragg’s grave since the news broke, and has mentioned his involvement with the 17th Airborne Division Association:
Facebook link is here (I tried to archive this post for future use, but Archive told me to kick rocks)
Some people are deeply upset that Ft. Bragg is, well, Ft. Bragg again, and are certain that the new administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth simply found a loophole to continue honoring the Confederacy.
However, as public records show, Roland L. Bragg was his own man, one who served this country heroically, and left a legacy.
It’s not every day that a junior enlisted paratrooper gets this kind of recognition decades after his death, and maybe there’s a lesson here for us.
I’m glad that Ft. Bragg gets to be Ft. Bragg without a toxic and divisive legacy attached.
I am also glad to see a forgotten WWII story resurrected on the national stage.
As we grow more and more removed from WWII, we can forget what it was the Allies fought for. “Contrarian” accounts of what Hitler stood for are clouding our historic memory and memefying a genocidal maniac and his henchmen. Social media has created an environment where popular rappers *cough* are going off their meds and gleefully praising Hitler. As a diehard normie, I am appalled by this, and you should be appalled too.
This name change is a good reminder that good people kicked the shit out of the Nazis and deserve to be honored and remembered.
As I keep telling you, the past has a way of coming back. Sometimes, that can be a good thing.
Big thanks to the friends who helped me research this as I’m running a horrible fever, though they prefer to stay anonymous. I blame any typos on this fever. Thank you for reading, as always. Fuck Nazis.
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