Lewis Spencer Kirkpatrick is honored on the following 1 monument(s) in our database:
Lewis ''Buffalo'' Spencer Kirkpatrick was born on May 15, 1901, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. He was the son of Elmer Ellsworth Kirkpatrick and Claudia Spencer Kirkpatrick. He was married to Elizabeth Boyer Cacy Kirkpatrick. In 1920, he entered West Point, graduating in 1924 as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry with the “Thundering Herd” class. He served in multiple branches, from Infantry, Military Police, and Air Corps to Border Patrol duty, before transferring to the Coast Artillery in 1930. There, he held posts at Fort MacArthur, Fort Monroe, Fort Kamehameha, and Fort Preble, excelling in leadership and coastal defense.
In 1939, Spencer sailed with his family to the Philippines, where he commanded Battery D of the 59th Coast Artillery at Corregidor before being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. After a brief visit to Shanghai in 1940, his family was evacuated in early 1941, while repeated reassignment orders kept him stationed in the islands as war approached. By February 1942, he commanded Fort Drum, the “Concrete Battleship,” which endured daily bombardment, sometimes taking 100 rounds in a single day. Despite the fall of Bataan and the Japanese advance, he and his 200 men held out until May 5, 1942, when he was ordered to surrender, only after destroying the fort’s equipment to deny it to the enemy.
LTC Kirkpatrick was captured following the surrender of Corregidor and imprisoned at POW Camp #7, where he endured brutal conditions. As the senior American prisoner, he suffered from malnutrition and pneumonia, leading to his death on April 27, 1943. In a final act of honor, his men carried him to the beach, draped in an American flag hidden beneath cloth to avoid detection, before he was cremated and buried there. He is now buried in the Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA. He also has a cenotaph in the Fairlawn Cemetery, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, USA.
Source of information: kirkpatrickfamilyarchive.com, Robert E. Glasgow, West Point Association of Graduates