Author: Jessica A. Bandel
One of the more heart wrenching primary sources I came across while researching for our upcoming book, North Carolina in the Great War, was a letter from a son to his mother. Many thousands of such letters must have been written, from son to mother, from field of battle to home, but the message of this one makes it stand apart from all the others. It was a letter all mothers dreaded receiving, bearing the sad news of a son’s death.
On May 29, 1879, at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, Mrs. Nora Catherine Dixon and Benjamin Franklin Dixon, Sr. welcomed identical twin boys—Benjamin Franklin Dixon Jr. and Wright Tracy Dixon. In their late teens, the boys followed their father—a Confederate veteran and physician—into the Spanish American War and went on to graduate from Trinity College. Ben Jr. then enrolled in Columbia University to study law, from which place he graduated in 1904. At Chapel Hill in 1905, he acquired his law license and settled into his new profession in his home state.
With the outbreak of war in April 1917, the Dixon boys once again donned the uniform of a United States soldier and volunteered to defend the flag. Ben assumed the captaincy of Company K, 120th Infantry, while Wright joined a machine gun company of the same regiment as a 1st Lieutenant. The brothers deployed with their regiment to France in May 1918 and found themselves on the dreaded Hindenburg Line, alongside the rest of the 30th Division, toward late September.
On the 29th, following a fifty-six-hour-long bombardment of German lines, the men of the 120th went “over the top” in what would turn out to be North Carolina’s deadliest day of the war. By the day’s end, Company K’s casualty list held 139 names, including that of its beloved captain, Ben. He had been wounded three times on the field—in a leg, an arm, and the neck—but continued the advance on all fours, yelling to his men his final words “Go on, my boys, I am with you.” Seconds later, a bullet struck him in the head, killing him instantly. His death was most likely the result of friendly fire.
That night, Wright took pen in hand and composed the hardest letter he would ever have to write, informing his mother of Ben’s death. “It has been so terribly hard to write about Ben that I have just not had the courage,” he opened, searching for the appropriate words and the fortitude to break the horrible news. Wright shared with his mother the love Ben’s men had for him, how he rallied them in the days before the fight, and how his indomitable spirit carried them through the Hindenburg Line even after their captain had died.
Wright comforted his mother by describing Ben’s peaceful appearance in death despite all the suffering he had endured: “He looked as if he had fallen asleep and as I have seen him a thousand times. There was a most determined look on his face, caused, I guess, by his wounds…. But even with that, there was a half smile on his lips, a greeting perhaps to death, that could only stop him, but not scare him. He died like a soldier and a brave man should die.”
For his display of extraordinary heroism on the field that day, Capt. Benjamin F. Dixon was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. You can learn more about the 120th Infantry, formerly the 3rd North Carolina of the North Carolina National Guard, in the Official History of the 120th Infantry (follow the link to see a digitized version).