Our Arklahoma Heroes: A private from Madison County was among the firt=st soldiers killed at the Battle of the Bulge
On a cold December day in 1944, Private Aubra Shrode of Madison County, fell in action somewhere along the western front. He was twenty-eight years old.
Born on August 25, 1916, he had grown up in the hills and hollows of northwest Arkansas, where the Shrode name had taken root after earlier generations migrated from Kentucky and Indiana.
Families like his worked the land, raised livestock, and built modest lives in places such as Pettigrew.
Aubra left school after grammar school and worked as a farm hand on the general farms of the county.
He was single, with no dependents.
In February 1941, months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he walked into an enlistment station and joined the United States Army. He received serial number 37060941 and the rank of private.
The Army listed his branch as immaterial at the time, the common designation for a new soldier not yet assigned to a specialized arm.
He trained, he served, and in time he went overseas. Records do not preserve the name of his unit or the precise spot where he was killed on December 17, 1944. That date falls at the opening of the German Ardennes offensive, the fighting later known as the Battle of the Bulge. Whatever the exact circumstances, the War Department classified his death as killed in action.
His remains were recovered and returned to Arkansas. He was buried in Fayetteville National Cemetery, Section 18, Site 35.
The Purple Heart was awarded for his death in combat, along with the World War II Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the other campaign and service decorations that accompanied the sacrifice of so many enlisted men of his generation.
Aubra Shrode was one of forty-nine Madison County veterans recognized as Gold Star casualties. He left no wife and no children.
The larger Shrode family history stretches back through pioneer generations, yet the particular details of his parents and siblings remain thin in the records that have been digitized.
His legacy is the clear outline of a young man from the Arkansas hills who enlisted early, served as a private, and did not come home.
In the quiet rows of the national cemetery his stone stands among thousands of others, a modest marker for a life cut short in the winter of 1944.
