Area WWII veteran earned 3 Bronze Stars, Purple Heart

From front-line soldier to preacher, Thomas Adams has lived an eventful life.

Now 90 years old, retired comfortably in McKinney, few know of his three Bronze Stars and Purple Heart. They don't know he went toe-to-toe with Nazis deep into Europe.

And that's just fine with him.

"It's in the past for me," says Adams, who preached for five decades after World War II. "I don't brag about it."

Such humility exudes from Adams even as he unveils his decorated service. Captured in an unassuming leather case, the war medals are aged and authentic, the uniform upon which they once shined buried in his daily wardrobe.

Adams joined the U.S. Army in 1944, leaving Baylor University at age 20 to serve his country. "Everybody has a desire to do things, and that was one of my desires," says Adams, who had decided on ministry just a year prior.

He went to boot camp in New York before deploying and landing in Scotland. His outfit rode by train to just outside London, where they "got more foxhole training," Adams said. They'd need it shortly after riding three days in a cattle car to France.

They were in Gen. George Patton's historic Third Army.

"About 25 men were in the company when I joined," Adams recalls. "There were supposed to be about 125 - they'd lost that many."

The Third Army arrived in France in July 1944, right before the Battle of the Bulge, and Patton set up his advance south of the Germans. His forces fought eastward across 24 major rivers, liberating and conquering more than 82,000 square miles of territory, according to pattonthirdarmy.com, a site dedicated to its WWII feats.

The Third Army spent 281 days capturing about 956,000 enemy soldiers and killing or wounding another half million, according to the site. Adams was on the front line for nearly two months of it before his six-soldier crew struck a land mine.

"One of us didn't come back. It messed up two vertebrae in my neck," he said. "I thought when they sent me home they were going to graft it in, but now I've got arthritis in my neck."

Adams returned to duty, though, this time as chaplain's assistant. His preacher's license but limited education put him in that position.

His Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit stayed 10 miles behind the troops, and Adams spent time at the evacuation hospital.

"I was government property, so they could use me any way they wanted to," he said.

The Third Army moved through Axis territory into Czechoslovakia by the time Adams was honorably discharged as corporal in 1946.

He returned to his wife, Mildred, and their 1-year-old daughter in Texas.

He finished at Baylor and came out of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth an ordained preacher. Over the next 50-plus years, Adams pastored churches around Texas and Oklahoma, including 11 years at Shiloh Church in Denton County.

His most recent pulpit was in a 150-member church in the Farmersville area. He moved to McKinney about three years ago to be near his daughter and son, with whom he talks about his war times "quite often," he says.

Just not with many others. Herbert Becker, a fellow WWII veteran, stays a few rooms down from Adams at Colonial Lodge Assisted Living in McKinney, though few knew. After all, Adams said he takes out his medals only every once in a while "just to see that it's all there."

But the valor they represent is inside him, and he's constantly reminded of more eventful times.

"Whenever the weather changes, my neck bothers me," he says. "It all shows I was in the service, I was behind enemy lines."

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