Our Arklahoma Heritage: President Truman appointed Webb Brigadier General of 39th Division Artillery. in 1950
- Dennis McCaslin
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
John Burl Webb left the peach orchards and red clay roads of Lamar, Arkansas, for the last time in the winter of 1941. He was thirty-six years old, a captain in the Arkansas National Guard, and the federal call-up had come on January 6.
The hills of Johnson County had shaped him from the day he was born there on January 31, 1904, the son of Miles Jackson Webb and Amanda Davis Webb.
He had finished high school in Lamar, studied at Arkansas Tech in Russellville, and earned his A.B. degree from the College of the Ozarks in nearby Clarksville.
Those classrooms and the quiet routines of small-town life prepared him for what followed in ways no one could have predicted.
After federalization, he completed the Field Artillery Reserve Officers Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then joined the 142nd Field Artillery Regiment. In 1943 the regiment reorganized. Webb’s path took him to the 936th Field Artillery Battalion, armed with 155-millimeter howitzers.
On August 9 the battalion left Camp Bowie, Texas. It staged briefly in Algiers, North Africa, and on November 11, 1943, the men stepped ashore at Naples, Italy. The campaign that followed tested every lesson Webb had learned about endurance.
The battalion moved north with Fifth Army through the Naples-Foggia sector, then into the grinding winter fighting that defined the Italian theater. In January 1944 they supported the repeated attempts to force a crossing of the Rapido River. Swift currents, minefields, and German artillery turned the operation into a slaughter for the infantry ahead of the guns; the artillery crews kept firing through the chaos.
When the line finally shifted, the 936th shifted with it to the slopes below Monte Cassino. From February through May the howitzers pounded the fortified abbey and surrounding heights in assault after assault. Muddy mountain roads, constant counter-battery fire, and supply lines stretched thin became the daily reality.
.After the breakthrough in May the guns helped open the road to Rome, which fell on June 4, 1944. The battalion continued through the North Apennines and took part in the final spring 1945 offensive that carried Allied forces across the Po River valley. By the end of the war the 936th alone had fired 139,364 rounds in combat.
Webb spent exactly one year overseas. On October 11, 1945, he received his release from active duty at Camp Chaffee. He came home to a county that had changed little in his absence.
On March 17, 1929, he had married Lucy Lorene Sharyer in Clarksville. She was the daughter of Samuel Carter Sharyer and Flora Paine Wilson Sharyer, a Henderson-Brown College graduate who had led her student body as secretary, presided over the Upsilon Phi sorority, and won the freshman speech medal.
Lucy taught kindergarten and speech in schools across Arkansas. Together they raised one son, John Burl Webb Jr., who later followed his father into the Arkansas National Guard and rose to the rank of brigadier general.
Webb himself never left the Guard. He advanced through the ranks and by 1950 had been promoted to brigadier general and placed in command of the 39th Division Artillery.
President Truman signed the formal appointment that year. The same steady habits that had carried him from Lamar classrooms to Italian mountain batteries now guided the postwar reorganization of Arkansas’s citizen-soldier force.
Lucy remained active in historical and patriotic organizations even after the couple moved to Little Rock. She outlived her husband by eight years, dying at ninety-six on October 16, 2003. A memorial service was held for her at Oakland Cemetery in Clarksville.
Webb had died in Little Rock on February 18, 1995. Their son followed in 2023. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren still trace their family story back to the same Johnson County soil.
Webb’s military record carried no personal citations for gallantry beyond the campaign credits every man in the 936th earned: the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two bronze service stars for Naples-Foggia and Rome-Arno, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.
He never spoke of the war as heroism. He spoke of it as work, the same kind of work he had known in the fields around Lamar and in the classrooms at the College of the Ozarks.
The guns fell silent decades ago, yet the continuity he represented remains visible in the county that sent him away and welcomed him home.
The peach trees still bloom each spring. The roads still wind through the same hills.
And the family line he and Lucy began continues to claim Johnson County as its first and lasting address.
