On this Memorial Day, we remember the lives of the brave men and women of the Armed Forces who died in every war our great nation has fought in. Here at The Texas Horn, our university has a unique way of remembering the fallen war heroes of our country, and this comes by way of our very own football stadium and football team, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, home of the Texas Longhorns. Therefore, it is important that every student at the university pause and reflect that nothing on the Forty Acres should be taken for granted, for it was the brave Texans who gave their lives for our country, our country that gave us this great university, and hence, our athletic teams; a constant, daily reminder that freedom is never free. It was paid with their blood.
When you walk into DKR, the first thing you will notice when you are on the corner of San Jacinto St. and DeLoss Dodds Way is the Frank Denius Veterans Memorial Plaza with its “Doughboy” statue (named after the nickname of American soldiers in World War I) in the foreground, and the original memorial plaque that was once placed inside the stadium bearing the names of all the Texans who died in the Great War in the background. The plaque is adorned with the American flag on the far left, the Texas flag on the far right, and the six flags of the uniformed branches of service adorning the front and placed atop of the plaque. It was this plaque where the stadium originally got its name from, and across the North End Zone of the stadium, smaller individual plaques grace the façade of the stadium featuring the names of the same fallen heroes from each of the old Southwest Conference’s original six-member institutions: University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Rice University, Baylor University, Texas Christian University, and Southern Methodist University.
The original layout of Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium had the North End Zone with only one level of spectator seating which allowed for the presence of American flags to fly above the top of the seating area as a reminder of the stadium’s original purpose, similar in nature to American flags placed on the graves of fallen soldiers’ graves at every military cemetery across the country and around the world. After stadium expansion was completed in 2008, twelve flagpoles were placed atop the East Side of the stadium (one for each member of the Big 12 Conference), and at one point, American flags flew on each pole instead of the twelve member institutions of the Big 12, once again serving as a reminder of why the stadium is named “Texas Memorial Stadium.” The stadium was rededicated on November 12, 1977, to commemorate the lives of fallen Texans who died in every foreign conflict since World War I. Once you enter the stadium, one thing you will notice when you go through the walkways and into the seating areas of the stadium is that the walkways themselves are adorned with individual memorial plaques chronicling a soldier, his branch of service, the unit he served in, and the conflict where he died, as a continuation of the stadium’s original purpose to honor the fallen Texans who gave their lives for our country. The Stadium Veterans’ Committee, which operates wholly independent from the university’s Athletic Department and is charged with overseeing the Frank Denius Veterans’ Memorial, annually receives word of every Texan soldier who died in action from the past year and continues to add more plaques as needed bearing the names of the recent brave American Heroes who were killed in action in our nation’s most recent conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Texas Longhorns football team has a proud annual tradition of its own when it comes to honoring our nation’s veterans during the football season. The special teams unit is often referred to within the coaching staff as the “Special Forces” unit as a way of commemorating our veterans. During the 2018 season, the previous coaching staff at Texas during that time came up with a very creative way to honor our veterans for Veterans’ Day weekend, which runs through the football season since Veterans’ Day is held every year on November 14th. Then-special teams coordinator Craig Naivar, who himself was an avid military historian, developed distinctive military-style patching to identify each component of the special teams unit inspired by the brave Longhorns who over the course of history served our country in the United States Armed Forces. The most prominent one being the standard “Texas Special Forces” whose design was inspired by the U.S. Army Special Forces logo and is a tribute to Frank Denius, who served in World War II and landed with the unit, the U.S. Army 30th Infantry Division, on Omaha Beach during the D-Day Invasion in Normandy, France. The other five patches are worn by the special teams unit also memorialize other war veterans with ties to the University of Texas at Austin, including “Cobra Strike” (which also commemorates Denius and his artillery platoon, the 230th Field Artillery Battalion), the “A-Team” (commemorating UT grad and current NFL player Nate Boyer, who served in the U.S. Army Green Beret Special Operations division as part of Operation Detachment Alpha, codenamed “A-Team”), “Posse” (which honors UT alum Maj. Gen. Kearie Lee Berry, who served in the Battle of Bataan and survived the Bataan Death March in the Pacific Theater of World War II), “Six” (after SEAL Team Six), and “Sniper” (after the late Chris Kyle, who as a U.S. Navy SEAL earned the nickname “American Sniper,” and was the most lethal sniper in American military history along with being a devoted Texas Longhorns football fan).
The University of Texas campus itself has plenty of history commemorating the war effort during World War I. In fact, Littlefield Fountain, which sits in front of South Mall about a few steps from the feet of the iconic Main Building (the UT Tower), is itself a World War I monument to the students and alumni of the University of Texas who gave their lives during the war. The design of the fountain is an allegorical representation of the national war effort, charged with mermen mounted on hippocamps at the base, with an Army soldier and a Navy sailor on either side of the boat flanking both sides of a winged Lady Columbia, the female personification of the United States, holding torches in both of her hands (one representing freedom, the other representing peace), and a bald eagle at the tip of the boat that comes out of the wall of the monument. The idea behind the allegory was to convey the message that the United States was going across the Atlantic Ocean to fight in World War I, ready to lay down their lives for the homeland. The back of the monument holds a plaque with the names of the UT students and alumni who died in the war, with the inscription that reads:
“THESE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS GAVE THEIR LIVES TO THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WORLD WAR.” Across the back of the fountain, the Latin quote by Cicero reads: “BREVIS A NATVRA NOBIS VITA DATA EST A MEMORIA BENE REDDITAE VITAE SEPITERNA.” (“A short life hath been given by nature unto man, but the remembrance of a life laith down in a good cause endureth forever.”)
The Littlefield Fountain serves as a war memorial to the students and alumni of the University of Texas at Austin who died in World War I (Photo Credit: sustainability.utexas.edu).
The University of Texas’ role in World War I is a critical one. By the time the U.S. formally entered into World War I in 1917, the U.S. Department of Defense designated eight institutions of higher education to establish “Schools of Military Aeronautics” (SMAs) to instruct cadets in the “Student Army Training Corps.” Among these eight institutions was the University of Texas. The largest of the designated institutions by both campus size and in SMA enrollment, it quickly earned the nickname, “the West Point of the Air,” and soon, the overall concept of the SMA would serve as the basis for the future establishment of the United States Air Force Academy. Cadets enrolled in the SMA were housed in Hargis Hall and the Nowotny Building, just a few steps north of where the Frank Erwin Center now stands, and which was commonly referred to as the “Little Campus.” The structure of SMAs was to provide basic aerospace science and flight education to potential Army Air Corps fighter pilots before moving on to advanced aerial combat training on base at a military installation. Common sights for many civilian students on campus at the Forty Acres included seeing cadets in the School of Military Aeronautics in formation getting ready to parade across campus before receiving aerospace science instruction in the classroom.
To help aid in the war effort, the female students of the university along with the wives of many faculty members came together and hand-sewed a service flag to honor the sacrifice of both the regular UT Students who dropped out of college to enlist in the military and the cadets of the SMA who were preparing to do the same upon completion of their basic training. The flag was inspired by the standard service flag of that time (red outline on a white background with a blue star at the center), but with some major exceptions: the flag contained a total of more than 1,500 stars — sixteen white and the rest blue — only weighed about thirteen pounds, and measured 10 ½ x 16 ft in both length and width. The flag was officially presented to the university community on Texas Independence Day — March 2nd — of 1918, towards war’s end. The flag would then normally hang on the rotunda of the Victorian Collegiate Gothic Old Main Building until a year after the Treaty of Versailles was signed on Armistice Day (now Veterans’ Day), November 14, 1918. One year to the day later, the university held a Patriotism Day ceremony, in which the service flag flew on campus for the only time in its history, and before thousands of students and faculty assembled in front of Old Main in a military-style formation, the flag was solemnly lowered to the tune of “Taps” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” our national anthem. Since then, the flag has been stored at the University Archives now housed in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
To conclude, it is imperative for every student at every college, but most especially at our own, the University of Texas at Austin, on this Memorial Day, to recognize the sacrifices of past generations of Longhorns that allowed us to have our athletic programs, our great university, our great state, and our great nation, just as this quote by Frank Denius himself is inscribed on the base of the Doughboy statue:
“IN GLORY AND WITH ETERNAL GRATITUDE TO ALL VETERANS WHOSE LEGACY IS OUR FREEDOM.”
Without them, we would not have any of the above, because our university’s Texas heritage and its proud history of service to the nation are at the very crux, the very foundation of our university, and it deserves to be learned from and passed down to future generations of Longhorns to cherish and appreciate. Calling into mind the wise words of General George S. Patton:
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
