Family donates
$1 million for infantry museum
World War II hero honored in new museum
By Bridgett Siter/The Bayonet
FORT BENNING, Ga. (TRADOC News Service, Nov. 5, 2004) – “He ran a hell of a mess.”
That’s how Ben Hardaway remembered Lt. Gen. Manton Eddy during a ceremony Oct. 29 at the National Infantry Museum in which the Hardaway family donated $1 million in Eddy’s honor to the National Infantry Foundation for the construction of a new museum complex.
Hardaway, a name synonymous locally with construction, industry and education (think Hardaway High School), is the nephew of the late Manton Sprague Eddy, for whom Fort Benning’s Eddy Bridge and Muscogee County’s Eddy Middle School are named.
Eddy served in World War I and led 9th Infantry Division through North Africa, Sicily and France during World War II.
Eddy married Hardaway’s aunt, a Columbus native, but the two men barely knew each other when they met in France during the second world war.
“I ran into him – I mean literally. I almost ran him over with my jeep,” Hardaway, 85, told his audience. “He said, ‘Hardaway, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘Gen. Eddy, I’m just trying to stay alive.’”
“He chuckled and invited me to dine at his mess hall that night,” Hardaway said. “He ran a hell of a mess.”
Shortly thereafter, Hardaway became Eddy’s aide-de-camp, and he learned to love the man who “never, ever, lost sight of the plight of the Soldiers.”
Eddy, who died in 1962, was remembered as a “Soldiers’ Soldier,” a forward-thinking leader who believed every Soldier should be a warrior long before the Army adopted such a policy. He told his cooks and medics to take up the fight when American troops encountered a mass of German forces on France’s Cherbourg Peninsula.
It worked, and Eddy earned a spot in history as “one of the greatest warfighters of the second world war,” said Fort Benning’s commander, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley.
It was entirely fitting, Freakley said, that the ceremony took place on the National Infantry Museum’s third floor before a display case filled with photographs, uniforms and articles from Eddy’s career. It was here, when the building was the new post hospital, that Eddy’s daughter, Martha, was born – one of the first babies delivered there. Martha slept in a dresser drawer because cribs had not arrived yet.
Eddy’s story is the story of the military family, the story of the “marriage” of Fort Benning and Columbus, and the story of many, many brave infantrymen, Freakley said.
“All these stories will be told in the new museum. That’s what this project is all about,” he said.
The museum complex is scheduled to open in 2006 with a gallery devoted to the European Theater of World War II. That gallery will likely bear Eddy’s name.
“This is the perfect way to honor those who’ve gone before us,” said Hardaway. “I can’t think of a more deserving person than Gen. Eddy.”
The foundation reached one-third of its $70 million goal with the Hardaway donation, said Cyndy Cerbin, the foundation’s director of communications.
The new museum and Heritage Park will be built on 200 acres between South Lumpkin Road and Benning Boulevard.