Thompson Brooke Maury III was born on February 17, 1910, in Knoxville, Knox County, Tennessee. He was the son of Magruder Gordon Maury and Jeanette D. "Jean" West Maury. He was married to Landon Priscilla Bunker Maury. He graduated from the University of Virginia and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Class of 1934. Commissioned in the Field Artillery, he was first assigned to Fort Myer, Virginia, and later he attended the Field Artillery School (1938–1939) and was transferred to Fort Lewis, Washington. In 1941, Brooke was ordered to the Philippines.

Major Maury was a Field Artillery officer serving in the Philippines when war broke out in 1941. He fought in the defense of Bataan and Corregidor and was eventually captured by Japanese forces, enduring the brutal Bataan Death March and later imprisonment as a POW at PW Camp #1 in Cabanatuan. Despite surviving years of captivity, he was killed on December 15, 1944, when an American bomber unknowingly sank a Japanese prison ship carrying Allied prisoners from the Philippines to Japan. For more than a year, his fate remained unknown to his family.

His name is memorialized in the Tablets of the Missing in the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, Manila, Capital District, National Capital Region, Philippines. He also has a cenotaph in the Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA.

Source of information: www.findagrave.com, alumni.westpointaog.org