By JOHN HANNA
For more than a century, Fort Benning’s name honored a Confederate general who supported slavery. The military changed the name of the Army base in Georgia two years ago, but now the Trump administration is set on restoring the familiar one — this time for a different Benning.
The new namesake is Fred Benning, a Nebraska native awarded the military’s second-highest honor for his battlefield courage as an 18-year-old corporal in 1918, near the end of World War I. The military noted that he later served as mayor of the small Nebraska town of Neligh, but it did not mention that he ran a bakery, opted to have his Distinguished Service Cross mailed to him rather than presented at a military ceremony and didn’t discuss his wartime experiences once home. He died in 1974.
Federal law now bars the military from returning to honoring Confederates, but the move restores a name known by generations of soldiers.
Honoring a soldier from the Army’s lower ranks echoes President Donald Trump’s anti-elite appeals to working-class voters. Still, the circumstances of the change — and a similar one for North Carolina’s once-and-future Fort Bragg — have skeptics wondering whether their new namesakes are receiving much of an honor.
But Fred Benning deserves recognition, said Andrew Orr, a professor and director of the Institute for Military History at Kansas State University. Benning was part of American assaults on the toughest German defenses by soldiers who fought to take trenches and to hold them, often hand-to-hand and under clouds of poison gas, he said.
“If you’re the town that Benning was the mayor of, claim it,” Orr said in an interview Thursday. “What you can do is try and fight back against the stealing of his name by emphasizing this guy earned it.”
Renaming bases, again
The military renamed Forts Benning and Bragg, both established in 1918, as part of a broader effort by Congress to strip the names of Civil War rebels from military posts, roads, buildings and landmarks following protests over the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, opposed renaming the military bases.
In 2023, the base named for Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning became Fort Moore to honor the late Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife, Julia, for his storied military service and her advocacy for notifying families of war casualties in person rather than by telegram. The base named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg became Fort Liberty and is now renamed for Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II paratrooper from Maine.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month that reverting to the previous names was about “connection to the community,” and that 2023 changes eroded the bases’ legacies.
Honoring one soldier in a highly decorated regiment
Benning was among more than 150 fellow soldiers who received the Distinguished Service Cross for their service in the 16th Infantry Regiment during World War I.
Steven Clay, an Army veteran in Leavenworth, Kansas, and historian of the association dedicated to preserving the 16th Infantry’s legacy, disagreed with removing Confederate generals’ names from bases, and he questioned why Fred Benning should receive such a high honor.
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“Clearly the motivation is the name,” Clay said. “It’s not to denigrate what he accomplished. But I think the intent is that a lot of old soldiers like me like the name Benning.”
Fred Benning settled in Neligh, Nebraska, and married in 1926, records and newspaper stories showed. Neligh is about 150 miles (241 kilometers northwest) of Omaha and now has about 1,500 residents.
Benning and his wife had two children, one of whom died in infancy. Their second child, a daughter, died in California in 2013. Phone messages left for people who appeared to be surviving relatives in Colorado and Nebraska were not returned.
Until this week’s announcement, even some longtime Neligh residents didn’t know much of Benning’s story. His portrait in a City Hall display for Neligh’s mayors shows a clean-shaven, middle-aged man wearing a business suit.
“I think it’s great,” Mayor Joe Hartz, a 45-year resident, said of the honor. “There are a lot of people who come and go in our community, and sometimes you don’t know what their history is.”
A small-town Nebraska boy enlists at 17
Benning was just 17 when he enlisted in the Army in April 1917, joining a machine gun company, according to reports at the time in The Daily News in nearby Norfolk, where he grew up.
At age 18, he had been “over the top many times,” into the deadly space between opposing trenches, according to the Daily News.
Orr said American troops were advancing “over a sea of their own dead.”
The announcement of Benning’s honor said he took command of his platoon in October 1918 after its commander was killed and led its 20 survivors through heavy fire.
Later, he didn’t talk about his experiences. In 1928, The Norfolk Press caught up with him in Neligh and reported he was “so busy making good in his bakery” that he wouldn’t discuss his wartime service, adding, “Most of the fellows who did the real fighting don’t talk about it.”
Building up a bakery and serving as mayor
Benning and his bakery popped up in small news items over the years. He led the local American Legion Post and Chamber of Commerce and helped plan for a new hospital.
In 1948, Benning ran for mayor, won easily and was reelected without opposition two years later. Before he decided not to run again in 1952, the city started trash collection for $1 a month and improved its sewers, streets and water system.
At one memorable City Council meeting, the Neligh News reported Benning was examining the city night watchman’s defective .38-caliber revolver. Unaware that it was loaded, he pulled the trigger. A bullet clipped another council member’s finger and lodged in a wall.
Benning sold his bakery and retired in 1965.
While Orr believes the Trump administration is appropriating Benning’s service to score a political point, he said Neligh should respond with pride and say, “We remember him, and we’re going to make it all about him regardless of why other people have done it.”
Associated Press Writers Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, and Lolita Baldor, in Washington, D.C., contributed reporting.
