Thomas J. Forte entered the service from Mississippi.  He was part of Battery C of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, a unit that consisted of African-American enlisted men.  They were equipped with 155 mm Howitzers. The Battalion came ashore at Utah Beach on 29 June 1944.  It saw action in Normandy and Brittany, where it participated in the siege of Brest.  By October of 1944, it was located in Schonberg, Belgium, near St. Vith, where it was serving in support of the 106th Infantry Division.  On 17 Decemeber 1944, the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, the Schonberg was overrun by the Nazis.  Eleven men from the unit, including Forte, were able to escape into a woods nearby and tried to make it back to the American lines.  At about 15.00, they reached the village of Wereth in Beglium where they made contact with a local farmer named Mathias Langer.  Langer fed the men, and since Wereth was already in the hands of the Nazis, he tried to hide them in his barn.  Wereth was in a German speaking region that had been annexed to Belgium following the First World War, and some of the local inhabitants sympatsized with the Nazis.  Unforutnately, one these collaboratorts spotted Langer taking the men to his barn, and reported them to the elements of the 1st SS Division that had occupied the village.  The Nazis took the eleven to a spot just outside of the village, where they sadistically tortured them to death.  For several weeks, their bodies layed covered with snow, and were only found in mid-February.  They are now known as the “Wereth 11.”  In addittion to Turner, six other members of the Wereth 11 are also buried at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetry, Curtis Adams, George Davis, Nathaniel Moss, George W. Moten, James Aubrey Stewart, and Due W. Turner.

After the war, this massacre was largely forgotten about, except by the Langer family who erected a simple memorial on the spot where they were murdered. In 2001, this was replaced by a more permaennt monument, and a commemorative ceremony is now held at this monument each year in May. see http://www.wereth.org/en/home.  In 2011, National Geographic made a documentary film about the Wereth 11.