Simon Bolivar Buckner (and Jr.)

Simon Bolivar Buckner was born in 1823. He served in the Mexican War, taught at West Point. A son of Kentucky, during the Civil War he became a Confederate general. When he was 62, he married a 28 year old, and had a son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.

At 80 years of age, Buckner memorized five of Shakespeare’s plays because cataracts threatened to blind him, but an operation saved his sight. On a visit to the White House in 1904, Buckner asked President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint his only son as a cadet at West Point, and Roosevelt quickly agreed.

His son Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. served in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant general. He was in command of the Tenth Army during the Battle of Okinawa when he was killed by hostile artillery fire on June 18, 1945, four days before the conclusion of the battle. He was the highest-ranking American to have been killed by enemy fire during World War II and was posthumously promoted to four-star general in 1954.

Buckner Jr.:

Buckner gave orders in June 1942 for the indigenous Aleut people to be evacuated and for their villages to be burned. The Aleut people were not allowed to return until 1945, after the war was over.^[8] Buckner furthermore objected to the deployment of African American troops in Alaska, writing to his superiors of his concern that they would remain after the war, “with the natural result that they would interbreed with the Indians and the Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem”.

(source)

This is the last picture of him alive (at right).

Pretty wild span of history in two lives. Douglas MacArthur’s father was in the Union Army during the Civil War, but he wasn’t a general. Patton’s grandfather was with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

It seems possible that William Claiborne Buckner is still alive, thus there’s a guy out there whose grandfather was a Confederate general.