James Aubrey Stewart was born on 6 September 1906 in Mineral County, West Virginia.  He was the son of James H. and Emma B. Stewart. He had two brothers (Harry and Leslie) and three sisters (Mary Magnolia, Fanchion and Isabel.)  It was a Stewart family tradition to call the children by their middle names and so James was also known as Aubrey as he was growing up.  He attended Howard High School in Piedmont, West Virginia and attended the Waldon M.E. Church.  He achieved some noteriety as the pitcher for the Piedmont Giants Negro baseball team. After he graduated from high school, James/Aubrey went to work for the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company in Luke, Marlynand.  He was the first black employee at their Westvaco Paper Mill.

James/Aubrey volunteered for the Army and was inducted at Clarksburg, West Virginia on 7 December 1942. He trained at Camp Gruber and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and was sent overseas in January 1944.  He became a membr 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.  In his last letter, written to his father on 7 December, Aubrey talked about the weather being cold and the mail being slow. He also said that he “saw a good USO show the other day feautreing Marlene Dietrich it was very good.” He said that he send the family a box, which they probably won’t get in time for Christmas, but “better late than never.”

On 17 Decemeber 1944, the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, the village of Schonberg was overrun by the Nazis.  Aubrey and eleven other men from his unit 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 Belgium 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.  However, 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 after Wereth was liberated 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, Thomas J. Forte, Nathaniel Moss, George W. Moten, and Due 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.

The story above is based upon information from the West Virginia Veterans Memorial (http://www.wvculture.org/history/wvmemory/vets/stewartjames/stewartjames...) and the US Memorial Wereth (http://www.wereth.org/en/home.)