LANCASTER—Marshall Orr was born a year after World War II began. Although he had a father and uncle who served in Europe, he didn’t know what they did there.
He later found out about their fascinating roles and invites Rappahannock Westminster-Canterbury (RWC) residents and the local community to find out the “rest of the story” at 1 p.m. April 8 in the RWC Auditorium, 132 Lancaster Drive, Irvington. Orr will give the same talk he did during RWC’s Viewpoints series in 2020.
“Everybody kept their wartime work a secret because they were sworn to keep what they did under wraps, but many people wrote it all down,” said Orr. “Twenty years after the Japanese surrendered, Ronald Lewin wrote the book, Ultra Goes To War: The First Account of World War II’s Greatest Secret Based on Official Documents.
“My father, Sam Orr, was an engineer,” Orr said. “So, I gave him the book and said, ‘You’re going to enjoy this.’ Next time I saw him, he said, ‘I took the liberty of making a few comments.’ He had written 80 notations in the book about events that he witnessed with [U.S. General George] Patton, [Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower and [French President Charles] de Gaulle.”
Orr’s father was on the team involved in further developments in the secret history of the Enigma code machine, which was the single most important intelligence advantage the Allies had over the Axis. Ultra was the British code word for messages relating to Enigma and meant “ultra top secret.”
“He was very involved in code breaking,” Orr said. “He was on a team that intercepted telecommunications coming over these machines. He reported on where the Germans were directly to (General) Omar Bradley who led the 12th U.S. Army all the way to Paris and the Rhine River.”
His father went to Clemson University and was valedictorian, which led to an appointment as White House aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His uncle, Bill Orr, went to West Point and was shipped out to the Philippines. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese started bombing all the islands and his uncle was captured on the Bataan peninsula. There, he was forced to walk the 60+ mile notoriously brutal Bataan Death March. He was a P.O.W. for three-and-a-half years.
“I’ll be telling the story of two brothers who did their duty, their reconciliation and what happened after that,” Orr said.
RSVP by April 6, call 438-4024 or emailing Amy Hinson, alewis@rw-c.org.
