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Excellence in diversity seems best to describe the lasting impression left by Merrow. Raised in the Army, he was born at Fort Porter, New York. He won a Presidential appointment and came to West Point with the Class of 1924 a year after graduating from San Francisco’s Lowell High School. Too young to enter at that time, he had attended business school and gone to work in Washington, actions which typified his intense determination to make productive use of every opportunity. He was proud of his military background, being the son of Col. Lewis Stone Sorley, USMA 1891, and the brother of Col. Lewis Stone Sorley Jr., USMA 1919. A “star” man as a cadet, he was remembered in the <em>Howitzer</em> by his G Company classmates as “our one and only Engineer” and graduated 12th in the Thundering Herd, the largest class to that time.</p>
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After early service with topographical engineers and after earning a civil engineering degree at Cornell, Merrow went to Panama where he was engaged in surveying duty in the interior. Later peacetime service included a tour in Hawaii with the 3d Engineers, and River and Harbor duty in the Rock Island district. During the latter tour he was responsible for rescue and resupply operations along a 400-mile stretch of the Ohio River during the 1937 floods.</p>
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Merrow participated fully in World War II, to say the least. Before the United States’ entry he served with the 1st and 2d Engineers, then activated and briefly commanded the 46th Engineer GS Regiment at Camp Bowie, Texas. Recalled for a brief period of temporary duty to reorganize the G1 Section, Third Army, during the initial stages of full mobilization, he then took command of the 2d Engineers. Late in 1942 he activated and assumed command of the 354th Engineer GS Regiment which he took to England the following summer. After completion of an extensive construction program in support of the growing invasion force, he requested and was given command of a combat unit, the 1109th Engineer Combat Group. He led this command—some 4,000 troops—in the Normandy invasion and throughout the remainder of the fighting in Europe.</p>
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With characteristic humor, a listing he once made of places he had lived shows for the period 1944-45: “travel in France, Germany, and Austria."</p>
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The invasion code name of his group was Makeshift, and it proved to he an appropriate one, for much of the bridging done by his unit was extemporized to overcome shortages of equipment and to maintain the momentum of the attack. Most notable of these achievements occurred when, in support of XV Corps, his unit put the first three Allied bridges across the Seine below Paris during late August 1944, including the improvised Class-70 Bailey bridges on barges at Mantes, using expedient means for the most part. Merrow was decorated with the Bronze Star for this accomplishment.</p>
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Shortly after V-E Day he assumed command of the 1325th Engineer GS Regiment in France and with them set sail directly for the Pacific. Before his departure he was decorated by the French with the Croix de Guerre with Palm.</p>
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He established his new regiment on Guam, and his troops were soon engaged in construction activities in support of operations against the Japanese. On V-J Day he flew over the U.S.S. Missouri as the surrender was being signed in Tokyo Bay.</p>
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Peacetime service found him assigned successively as Engineer of the Seventh and Third Armies, student at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and Chief of the Priorities and Allocations Division of the Munitions Board. He held the latter post during the early days of the Korean War when that office obtained and distributed among the armed services procurement authority for contracts totalling $64 billion within a period of four months. By 1952, following a period as Engineer of the reactivated XV Corps, he was in Korea, serving briefly as commanding officer of the 36th Engineer Combat Group and then as Engineer, I Corps. In that assignment he commanded 8,000 Engineer troops, American and Korean, and grappled with rivers that rose as much as 40 feel in ten hours and 12 feet in ten minutes, and with 900 miles of road net and their innumerable bridges. This challenge was the culmination of a lifetime of professional training and preparation, and he met it with distinction and immense success. His achievement was recognized by the award of the Legion of Merit. The Republic of Korea noted especially, in awarding him the Ulchi Distinguished Service Medal with Gold Star, his concern for the training and employment of the ROK (Republic of Korea) engineer troops.</p>
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Retirement shortly after his return from Korea brought to a close a brilliant military career capped by eight years of command since the beginning of World War II, thirty months of active combat with front-line corps in western Europe and Korea, entitlement to nine campaign stars, and service as Engineer of a division, two corps, and two armies, and in positions authorized a general officer almost continuously for the final eight years.</p>
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If engineering was his first love, teaching was a close second. Even as early as cadet days he was known for his unselfish and successful coaching of other cadets. While on duty with the 3d Engineers he was named commandant of the West Point Preparatory School, Schofield Barracks. Later he served a tour of duty in the Department of Civil and Military Engineering at West Point. He was twice assigned to training duties at Fort Belvoir, first as commanding officer of the Training Group of the Engineer Replacement Training Center, and then as management officcr of The Engineer School. It was natural, then, that he should turn to teaching for a second career after retirement.</p>
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Following stints as project director of the State of Illinois Survival Planning Project, a civil defense post, and as consulting engineer on defense construction sites in Turkey, he accepted a position as professor of physics at Valley Forge Military Academy Junior College. His years there were happy and productive ones. He quickly became known to the cadets for his ability to move through the study hall, providing assistance wherever it was needed, whether the subject be physics or French, Latin or statistics. They privately dubbed him “Colonel Univac.” He was never too busy to give a cadet extra instruction, and a steady stream of them came to him for help. He was himself never content to stop learning, working, and studying, and, in addition to a full program of independent research, he won a fellowship to a National Science Foundation summer institute in computer sciences, then devised and offered a course in the field for cadets. Upgrading the content and equipment of the physics and general science courses at Valley Forge, he also designed a new laboratory and classroom building which was nearing completion at the time of his death.</p>
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Throughout his career as soldier and teacher, genealogy provided an absorbing lifetime avocation for him. He was well-known to historians and genealogists for his exhaustive <em>Lewis of Warner Hall</em>, a work of nearly 900 pages written while he was teaching at West Point. The review of the book in <em>William and Mary Quarterly</em> called it “a monumental achievement in the field of genealogy, the accuracy of which is guaranteed by the professional training and peculiar fitness of the one who has undertaken and accomplished the task.”</p>
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A second major genealogy book, the product of the last ten years of his research, was providentially completed a single day before his death. His articles in the field, distinguished by his superb breadth of historical knowledge, have appeared in scholarly magazines in the United States and England. He was himself a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, the Sons of the Revolution, and the Society of Colonial Wars.</p>
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Shortly after his death the cadets at Valley Forge Military Academy conducted a magnificently impressive memorial service in their Chapel of St. Cornelius the Centurion. The choir sang “O Vulianl lleail." It was a perfect choice, for he was truly possessed of an unflagging spirit. I never knew him to give less than his best effort, or to cease trying to improve himself and his capabilities. He prized professional competence, and his diverse and demanding career gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his own superlatively. He was a warm and generous father, a skillful and courageous soldier, an imaginative and persuasive teacher, a searching and perceptive scholar. He left us the best thing he could to temper the sadness of losing him—the inspiration of his example.</p>
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<em>—LSS III</em></p>