First Lt. William E. Bell, 33, former Cochranton man who fought with the 106th Infantry Division and was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in December on 1944, died Sunday January 27, 1946 at Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver, CO. He had been ill and in army hospitals since shortly after he was returned to the States last June.
Lt. Bell was one of a dozen men well known in Crawford County to be captured in combat with the ill-fated 106th at the Bulge. Records list 22 Crawford County men who served with the outfit.
The former Cochranton man, whose parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Bell, now live at Hyattsville, MD, was an officer with the 423rd Regiment of the 106th. He was liberated from the Germans last spring and returned home in June, when he visited relatives and friends in Cochranton and Meadville.
He was hospitalized for two months last summer at Camp Reynolds. From there, he was sent to a hospital at Fort Dix, NJ and then transferred to Fitzsimmons. Until early this month, he was believed to be convalescing satisfactorily.
Lt. Bell, whose wife is a former resident of Binghampton, NY, and Oakland, CA, was a member of the Zion Evangelical and Reformed Church near Cochranton, a graduate of Cochranton High School and of Pennsylvania State College in the early 1930s. At Penn State, he was a member of Alpha Zeta honorary Fraternity of agriculture students. He did graduate work at Penn State and at the University of Maryland, at College Park, where he also was an instructor.
Later he worked for the soil conservation division of the department of agriculture in New England states and in the vicinity of Binghampton, NY.
Survivors besides his wife, who was with him at the hospital here in the States, and his parents, are two sisters, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Helen Bell, both of Chicago, and his grandmother, Mrs. Cordelia Bell of Meadville.
Services were held at Waid Funeral Home.
Interment was in Cochranton Cemetery.
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