July 26, 1926 - February 19, 1945

Peter V. Cornell

When Peter Cornell walked down to the Pelham Train Station in 1944, throngs of Pelham residents were there to say goodbye, just as they had for the many other young men leaving town for service in World War II. The crowd must have been especially large for Peter. One of five boys who grew up at 240 Monterey Avenue, his father, Dr. Nelson Warren Cornell, was a devoted physician, a surgeon at New York Hospital, and the head of surgery at Mount Vernon Hospital, who went to the hospitals 365 days a year to check on patients. Peter’s mother, Natalie, a nurse, served as the wartime head of recruitment for the Red Cross in Pelham.

Before graduating in 1944, Peter ran track, played basketball, served on the Student Council, and, in his senior year, was quarterback of the varsity football team. At a younger age while attending Colonial Elementary School, he took second place in the 60-yard dash and in the running high jump in an intra-school competition against Siwanoy and Prospect.

Raising the topic of boys who served in World War II has invariably elicited, even recently among some of Pelham’s senior citizens, memories of Peter as kind, compassionate, and beloved by all of Pelham. The late Joan Schuler (PMHS 1948) called him an “adorable boy.” Joan Cornell, widow of Peter’s brother Richard, recalls that “all eyes were always on Peter.” When she first moved to Pelham at the mere mention of her married last name, “people would back me against a wall to tell me how wonderful Peter was.” His brothers were always on the watch, she said, “because Peter could steal any one of their girlfriends.”

Peter had been admitted to Cornell University for the fall of 1944. But the US army had other ideas. At the end of a summer spent working in the 7-Up Bottling plant in New Rochelle and playing in a Pelham twilight softball league (where he was his team’s captain), he was drafted. A local news article reported that he had been assigned to the army, but was quick to add that he “volunteered for immediate induction.” The Cornells were about to have two sons in the war; their oldest son George was already a Second Lieutenant P-40 fighter pilot.

After a few months at Camp Croft in South Carolina, Peter was shipped off to Europe to join the 94th Division, 302nd Infantry of General George Patton’s Third Army, which was then engaged in the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote to his parents in a letter of February 17, 1945 that his brigade was moving fast but he had not yet seen actual combat. More likely than not, this was a fabrication intended to put his mother at ease. Because on that day, Peter’s infantry was just east of Luxembourg in a triangle-shaped area between the Saar and Moselle Rivers, trying to break through German defenses to reach the Siegfried Line and invade Germany. From February 9 to 14, his infantry was holding onto a territory known as Campholz Woods while enemy artillery and mortar fire reigned down from the nearby town of Orscholz. On February 16, Field Order No. 11 was issued: an all-out attack from every regiment of the division would ensue at 0400 hours on February 19. Peter Cornell’s regiment was assigned to push through Campholz Woods and take out the heavily-armed German bunkers (known as “pillboxes”) that had held them back from advancing.

For the next month, Dr. and Mrs. Cornell heard nothing from their son. On March 13, they were notified that Peter had been slightly wounded in February. This was followed by another three months of silence. On June 19, they received notice from the War Department that Peter had been missing in action since February 19.

Peter Cornell remained missing in July and in August and at the start of the school year and through the Cornell Family holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas and into the new year of 1946. And then on Saturday, February 23, 1946, the doorbell rang at 240 Monterey Avenue. A delivery boy handed the family a telegram. Peter’s body had been found. He had perished in Campholz Woods a full year before, likely on February 19 when he first was missing. 

The late Dr. Jim McElhinney went to PMHS with Pete Cornell. They ran the one-mile relay together in track and played softball on the same team in that summer league before Pete went off to war. Before Dr. McElhinney’s passing last year, he told the Town Historian the story as he had heard it: Peter Cornell had in fact been injured and was recovering in a field hospital when an officer walked in and told everyone who could walk and hold a rifle that they were being sent back into battle.