Peninsula In Passage

Veterans The North Suffolk community has sent soldiers to war in the country’s major conflicts. Among those are two from World War I, W. Frank Odom and Hinton Albert Darden, who are remembered with a plaque in Driver Elementary School where the former gym was named for them. Glenn Hurdle, from Driver, also fought in World War I. During World War II, Grayson Blackwell Lassiter, a Navy pharmacist mate, was lost at Iwo Jima. Hinton Albert Darden

The battlefields of France were a long way from the Driver/Bennett’s Creek farming community where Hinton Albert Darden grew up in the early 1900s. He was just 23 on the evening of September 29, 1918, on the Neuse-Argonne front in France, a corporal in the 7th squad of the second platoon of 314 Machine Gun Battalion, 80th Division, Company B. The Allies had broken through the Hindenburg Line and Bulgaria, the first of the Central Powers to quit the war, signed an armistice. But at 8 p.m. word had not yet reached the front when Darden’s platoon moved from Hill 265 back into reserve, to a line of dugouts previously occupied by the Germans on the side of a hill overlooking Ravine of the Silver Adder. An eye witness, Sergeant Major Randolph Mason, wrote that the platoon had reached its destination and was standing outside when a whiz bang sent over by the enemy burst about 10 feet from the platoon, killing Corporal Darden at the same time wounding nine other men of his platoon. Corporal Darden was struck by piece of shrapnel that penetrated his steel helmet, killing him instantly. Darden, the son of Albert and Annie Ames Darden, and one other corporal from his platoon (who died a few hours later) were buried together in the Ravine of the Silver Adder. His tombstone in Cedar Hill Cemetery where his remains were reinterred reads, “He Gave His Young Life, He Paid the Great Price That a World May Know Freedom Through Great Sacrifice.”

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