Baton Rouge, La. (WFB) – You are an infantryman in World War II. Your commander comes to you with a secret mission behind enemy lines. You’ll have to go it alone, and if you get caught, the United States will deny any information about you. You are the first as far as the army is concerned. If you die, your family will not receive any life insurance.
It sounds like a movie plot. But this exact question was put to Major Philip Larimore in April 1945. Some famous names were saved from the secret mission he accepted. After Philip’s death in 2003, his strange-to-fiction military career was put together by his son, Walt.
Like most of the men who survived the battlefield of WWII, Philip left his war stories behind.
“We knew he had a bunch of medals in his office,” Walt said. “And he had a bunch of pictures of generals like, ‘To a fighting man,’ ‘With the best soldier I ever fought,’ but he never talked about it.”
It wasn’t until Philip had been married for 50 years and his children had grown up, that he began to speak about what had happened there.
“The stories are, quite frankly, unbelievable. Stories of jumping behind a tank to save the squad. Stories of shooting snipers out of a tree at 100 yards with a .50-caliber machine gun,” Walt said.
Walt had to find out, so he entered his father’s life.
“He was a scoundrel, a punk, and a criminal, so his mom and dad sent him to military school,” Walt joked.
Philip graduated from the Gulf Coast Military Academy and proceeded to the Officer Candidate School. He was appointed second lieutenant on his 18th birthday – the youngest ever commissioned officer in the US Army.
From there, it moved to Angio’s trenches with the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Battalion.
“There he was, he said, ‘to take out Hitler’s heel.’ For freedom, and freedom, and war, and warrior, and hero. On that first night, he felt he was there for his men,” Walt explained.
Philip’s job was to supply the frontline men. A conversation with a farmer changed the way Philip moved the entire army’s gunpowder for the rest of the war.
The farmer said that these mules are smarter than horses. They know where the mines are, and they will avoid them. When someone flares up, they’ll lie down and protect your men, and take more than any of your men can,” Walt said.
The 30th Infantry liberated Rome, Sicily and drove the Nazis from the Vosges Mountains.
“He fought for 513 days without stopping. Dad kept fighting till 413 in those days. Psychiatrists tell us that it is only when a frontline soldier reaches day 200 that they begin to lose their sense of reality. These guys didn’t break for hundreds of days,” Walt said.
Philip was wounded seven separate times in the fighting.
“He was awarded seven Purple Hearts. He turned down three of them because he said the wounds were not significant enough,” Walt said.
Philip was not finished. Conversations with that Italian farmer set him on the path of a secret mission behind enemy lines.
“This crazy little boy who wanted to develop the right race also wanted to develop the right horse for the right race,” Walt said.
Turns out, the correct horse was the Lipizzan stallion. Rumor had it, Hitler’s veterinarians were breeding them in Czechoslovakia. The army asked Philip to confirm the existence of the horses and the farm. A pilot flew Philip to a small clearing carved out of the Czech Forest.
“He had set up a steeple chase course. So, the vet made a bet that he couldn’t beat him on the steeple chase course. Dad’s story was that he won the steeple chase,” Walt said.
Shortly after Philip returned, General George Patton authorized Operation Cowboy to rescue the last remaining Lipizzans in the world.
Philip returned to his platoon where he was shot from behind a tank as he attempted to save his squad from an ambush. That final wound paid the price for his right leg. The army released him after his rehab.
By that time, he had received every medal of gallantry in the Army awards except the Medal of Honour.
“He never talked about those medals. He never talked about those battles and a lot of men were like that. They fought for freedom. He fought for freedom but when he came home, he wanted to live the life he wanted,” Walt explained.
That’s what Philippe did until 2003. He and his wife raised four sons. He put the LSU cartography department on the map and gained a reputation for producing high quality maps and graphics.
You can read all about his stranger-to-fiction service in his son Walt’s book, At First Light: A True World War II Story of a Hero, His Brewery and an Amazing Horse,
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