Our Arklahoma Heritage: WWI Purple Heart recipient from Muskogee County displayed extraordinary valor in Manilla

John Noah Reese Jr.

John Noah Reese Jr. carried family lines that reached back through the final years of Indian Territory on his father’s side and through Oklahoma settlement families on his mother’s.

His father John Noah Reese Sr. entered the world on January 24 1900 in the Cherokee Nation. John Sr. held one half Cherokee blood and received enrollment on the Dawes Rolls as Cherokee by Blood under census card 9757 and roll number 21925. His own parents Tuxie Oceola Reese and Mary Manda Hall raised him and four siblings in the territory that became Oklahoma. Tuxie lived until 1941 and Mary until 1908.

The household moved through Cherokee Nation townships and later Muskogee County after statehood. John Sr. worked as a lineman and later at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works in Pryor. He married Cleathel Frances Barnes on June 2 1920 in Wagoner County.

On his mother's side, Noah Barnes, born around 1868, and Carrie Belle Fusselman, born around 1869, had settled in the region by the early 1900s. Their daughter, Cleathel Frances Barnes, was born in 1904. The Barnes family carried Midwestern and possible German-American influences through the Fusselman name, blending into Oklahoma's expanding communities of farmers and laborers.

John Noah Reese Sr., born January 24, 1900, still in Indian Territory, grew up supporting the household in the new state. He worked as a lineman and later at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works in Pryor. On June 2, 1920, in Wagoner County, he married Cleathel Frances Barnes.The couple began their family as Oklahoma was still young. T

heir daughter, Lorene Frances Reese, arrived in 1921. Then, on June 13, 1923, in Muskogee, T

Muskogee County, John Noah Reese Jr. was born.

The family moved several times in those early years. By the 1930 census they were roomers in Sulphur, Murray County, with six-year-old John listed among them. They later settled in Tulsa, where John attended Woodrow Wilson Junior High School and graduated from Central High School in 1941.

School records describe him as a quiet, sensible boy who ran on the track team without winning events and belonged to no clubs. After graduation he worked briefly at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works, following his father's path.

On December 18, 1942, from Pryor in nearby Mayes County, nineteen-year-old John enlisted in the U.S. Army. He stood five feet eight inches tall, weighed 140 pounds, had completed four years of high school, and listed unskilled utility work as his occupation.

He trained with the 37th Infantry Division and rose to Private First Class in Company B, 148th Infantry Regiment.

By early 1945 the division was fighting to liberate Manila in the Philippines. On February 9, Reese's platoon assaulted the heavily defended Paco Railroad Station, held by about three hundred Japanese soldiers equipped with machine guns, rifles, pillboxes, three 20-mm guns, one 37-mm gun, and heavy mortars.

When the frontal attack across open ground stalled 100 yards short under withering fire, Reese and Private Cleto L. Rodriguez advanced alone to a house only sixty yards from the objective. Under constant enemy observation they held that position for an hour, firing at targets of opportunity and killing more than thirty-five Japanese soldiers while wounding many others.

They pressed closer and intercepted Japanese replacements attempting to reinforce the pillboxes. Their concentrated fire killed more than forty of the enemy and stopped all further reinforcement. At twenty yards from the station, Reese drew enemy attention to himself with covering fire while Rodriguez destroyed a 20-mm gun and a heavy machine gun with hand grenades, killing seven more Japanese in the process.

With ammunition nearly gone, the two withdrew, alternately covering each other. During the movement Reese was killed by enemy fire as he reloaded his rifle. In two-and-a-half hours of intense combat the pair killed more than eighty-two Japanese soldiers, disorganized the defense, and opened the way for the American advance.

He was twenty-one years old.

For his gallant determination, aggressive fighting spirit, and extreme heroism at the cost of his life, John Noah Reese Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The citation was approved on October 19, 1945; his parents received the medal in a ceremony in Pryor on November 11, 1945.

He also earned the Purple Heart, Bronze Star Medal (retroactively awarded in 1947), Combat Infantryman Badge, and campaign medals for the Asiatic-Pacific and Philippine theaters.

His remains were returned to Oklahoma and interred at Fort Gibson National Cemetery in Fort Gibson, Muskogee County, Section 2, Site 1259-E. The Cherokee Nation later placed a memorial in his honor, acknowledging the family's deep ties to Oklahoma's Native heritage.

leathel Frances Reese lived until 1970; John Noah Reese Sr. until October 21, 1962; and sister Lorene Frances until 2002.

From the allotment-era resilience of his grandparents in the Cherokee Nation townships and Barnes households of early Oklahoma came a son whose brief life ended one February morning in Manila, yet whose courage remains recorded on the nation's highest roll of valor and etched on the marker at Fort Gibson, an ordinary Oklahoma boy who, when the moment demanded, proved anything but ordinary.