Appalachian Figures
Harlan born, Skin Fork raised
Kenneth Ray “Kenny” Shadrick entered the world in Harlan County, Kentucky, on August 4 1931. Later reference works and wartime profiles agree on that mountain birthplace.
He arrived in a coalfield family at the height of the Great Depression, one of ten children, in a county that was itself becoming shorthand for hard times and labor violence. Not long after his birth, the Shadricks joined the stream of families who left southeastern Kentucky for the mines of southern West Virginia. By the late 1930s they had settled along Skin Fork in Wyoming County, a narrow hollow of company houses, tipples, and churchyards tucked in the Guyandotte watershed.
Local tradition, later summarized by West Virginia historians, places Kenny at Pineville High School in nearby Raleigh County. He played football, worked odd jobs, and by his late teens was restlessly watching the postwar world move past the coal camp gates. In 1948, still under twenty, he left school and enlisted in the United States Army, trading Skin Fork for khaki and the uncertain security of a peacetime force scattered across the Pacific.
A young Appalachian soldier in occupied Japan
Shadrick’s enlistment sent him into the 24th Infantry Division, one of the occupation units garrisoning Japan after the Second World War. He spent roughly a year there, training and drilling with the 34th Infantry Regiment. The unit had fought its way across the Pacific only a few years earlier. By 1950 it was undermanned and under equipped, spread thin between policing duties and routine field exercises.
For Appalachian families like the Shadricks, the Army offered a steady paycheck, a chance to see the world, and sometimes an escape from coal camp economics. In Kenny’s case it also placed a Harlan born, Wyoming County raised teenager very close to the next war that would erupt in Asia.
The Korean War comes to the coalfields
On June 25 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in force, driving the Republic of Korea’s army south and capturing Seoul within days. The United Nations voted to assist South Korea. President Harry S. Truman ordered U.S. ground troops into the fight, and the understrength 24th Infantry Division in Japan suddenly became the only American infantry division close enough to slow the North Korean advance.
West Virginia would send roughly 112,000 men and women into the Korean War. Statewide, 801 never came home. Among those casualties, one young private from Skin Fork would become far more famous than he or his family ever expected.
The division’s 21st Infantry Regiment, organized as the scratch “Task Force Smith,” rushed to Korea first. On July 5 1950 that small force met North Korean tanks and infantry near Osan in the first ground clash between American and North Korean troops. By the time the smoke cleared more than fifty Americans were dead, others were missing, and a legend about “the first casualty” had begun to take shape in real time.
A bazooka team at Sojong ni
While Task Force Smith fought north of Osan, elements of the 34th Infantry Regiment, including Company C of the 1st Battalion, were ordered south of the town to block follow on forces. Shadrick was there as part of a small scouting force sent toward the village of Sojong ni.
Late in the afternoon of July 5, Lieutenant Charles E. Payne led a patrol of bazooka teams and riflemen into a graveyard overlooking the road. There they spotted a North Korean T 34 tank advancing. Sergeant Charles R. Turnbull, an Army Signal Corps photographer attached to the 24th Division, asked the young West Virginian to time one of his bazooka shots so that Turnbull could capture the flare of the rocket leaving the tube.
The famous photograph that resulted shows a nineteen year old private from the Appalachian coalfields working a two and a quarter inch bazooka beside another soldier. In versions reproduced by the Truman Presidential Library and in West Virginia’s online encyclopedia, the caption notes that he was killed only moments later.
According to official accounts and later reconstructions, Shadrick fired, then rose from cover to see whether he had knocked out the tank. A burst from the T 34’s machine gun struck him in the chest and arm. He died within minutes as the patrol pulled back with his body, unable to stop the tank but bringing word of the encounter to the regimental command post at Pyongtaek. There, in a makeshift headquarters, his story crossed paths with one of the most famous correspondents of the twentieth century.
“How America lost her first infantryman”
Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune had already covered the liberation of Dachau and the Soviet blockade of Berlin. In early July 1950 she was among a small group of reporters following the 24th Infantry Division. When Payne’s patrol brought Shadrick’s body to the command post, Higgins watched the scene and filed a dispatch that would echo through the American press.
Her story opened with a vivid line about “how America lost her first infantryman in the Korean campaign.” Editors back home seized on the phrase. Within days Time magazine had run a feature on the Shadrick family hearing of his death over an eight o clock radio broadcast, presenting him as the first reported American fatality of the war. Life magazine used the Turnbull photograph and repeated the same claim in a 1951 article titled “A Peace Move.” Other national outlets, including The New York Times and The New Yorker, picked up the story.
In those early months the press, the Army, and the public all leaned on the same narrative. Shadrick, the Harlan born West Virginian, was not only a symbol of the war’s sudden cost but the young man who supposedly stood first in its line of American dead.
What the casualty files actually say
Official record keeping for the Korean War did not stand still. In the 1950s the Army’s Office of the Adjutant General created a machine readable casualty database often referred to by its internal acronym TAGOKOR. Those records eventually became the Korean Conflict Casualty File, a Korean War extract of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, and finally a searchable public dataset in the National Archives’ Access to Archival Databases portal.
In those files, Kenneth R. Shadrick appears simply as one Army private among thousands. The record gives his service number, branch, rank, home of record in Wyoming County, West Virginia, and a date of death of July 5 1950. It marks his loss as “killed in action” in Korea. The later DCAS extract and state level lists derived from it confirm the same basic facts and place him among West Virginia’s Korean War dead.
Genealogical sites that re key those government datasets, such as FamilySearch’s index of “United States, Korean War Battle Deaths, 1950–1957” and county level lists maintained by volunteers, add little more than his birth year, branch, and county of residence. They do not label him as “first casualty,” which reminds us that the legend came from reporters and later memorials, not from the underlying data.
Archivist Jefferson Bailey’s study “TAGOKOR: Biography of an Electronic Record” traces how that casualty file moved from punch cards to modern databases. In one section he follows Shadrick’s record as it appears in the plain text file, in National Archives finding aids, and on the Korean War Project’s website. The comparison shows how a single line of data can grow layers of narrative when it leaves the archival system and enters public memory.
“One of the first”
By the early twenty first century, careful work by military historians and the Army Center of Military History had sharpened the timeline of the Battle of Osan. Eyewitness accounts suggest that an American machine gunner from the 21st Infantry Regiment was killed about eight hours before Shadrick, when a North Korean tank crewman fired on a position near the road. Several other Task Force Smith soldiers likely died before the Sojong ni patrol ever went forward, although their individual identities are harder to pin down.
The West Virginia Encyclopedia now describes Shadrick as “among the first U.S. servicemen killed in action in the Korean War” and notes that for many years he was believed to be the first fatality. The entry explicitly attributes the earlier error to the wide circulation of a correspondent’s report.
Modern popular history pieces, like a 2016 column titled “The Korean War remembered,” have taken the next step and state that the very first American battle death in Korea is unknown. They emphasize that earlier casualties almost certainly occurred at Osan before Shadrick fell at Sojong ni.
In other words, the files and the scholarship do not erase his sacrifice. They simply move him from a single, mistaken superlative into a small group of men who died within hours of one another on a hot July day in 1950.
How Harlan County and Wyoming County remember
If the national narrative has shifted from “first” to “among the first,” local memory in Kentucky and West Virginia still keeps Shadrick near the front of the story. The American Legion post at the Wyoming County courthouse raised a stone monument in his honor, inscribed with his name, unit, and date of death. The text identifies him as the “first casualty of the Korean conflict” and adds an epitaph that declares he “stands first in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live.”
Online memorials echo that language. The U.S. War Memorials Register lists him under “Shadrick, Kenneth R.” with his service number, 24th Infantry Division affiliation, and burial in an American Legion cemetery in Wyoming County. Another entry describes a separate memorial to him and the 34th Infantry Regiment.
At the statewide level, a Clio entry on the Korean War Memorial near Charleston notes that four West Virginians received the Medal of Honor and that “Kenneth Shadrick of Wyoming County, WV was the first serviceman killed in action in the conflict.” The article cites Larry Legge’s “Korean War” entry from the West Virginia Encyclopedia as its source, showing how even as scholars adjust their language to “among the first,” public history sites may continue to quote older formulations.
In Harlan County, Kentucky, the connection is quieter but no less real. The standard English and non English Wikipedia entries for Shadrick all identify his birthplace as Harlan County and his later home as Wyoming County, West Virginia, drawing on biographies produced by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and local photo histories of Wyoming County.
The result is an Appalachian life that crosses state lines. A boy born in a Harlan County hollow grew up along Skin Fork, took the oath in an Army recruiting station, and died in a Korean graveyard within sight of a rice paddy. His story belongs to both coalfields.
Why his story still matters
For many Americans, the Korean War remains the “forgotten war,” wedged between World War II and Vietnam in public memory. The case of Kenneth R. Shadrick helps explain why that forgetting never fully took hold in Appalachia.
First, his story anchors a global conflict in specific mountain places. Harlan County and Wyoming County are not abstractions in casualty tables. They are real communities that sent sons overseas and then coped with telegrams, radio reports, and reporters on the front porch. Time magazine’s 1950 profile of the Shadrick family, for instance, emphasized the shock of hearing his name announced over the radio before the War Department’s message arrived, a scene that played out in modest houses up and down the coalfields.
Second, his life shows how quickly media narratives can harden into granite. A single phrase in a correspondent’s dispatch, combined with a powerful photograph and the public desire to personalize a distant war, turned one teenager’s death into a mythologized “first.” It took decades of archival work, database building, and careful reading of battle reports to correct the record.
Finally, his story illustrates how digital records and local memory now interact. The same casualty entry that once existed as a line of holes in a punch card has become the backbone of online indexes, county genealogy pages, and Korean War memorial projects. Articles like Jefferson Bailey’s “TAGOKOR: Biography of an Electronic Record” remind us that even electronic files have histories, and that how we preserve and describe them will shape future understandings of wars, communities, and individuals.
For Appalachian historians, Shadrick offers a case study in microhistory at the intersection of global conflict, regional identity, and archival practice. More work remains to be done in local courthouses and school archives. A Kentucky birth certificate in Harlan County’s records, the 1930 and 1940 census returns for the Shadrick household, Pineville High School yearbooks, and county newspaper files in both Kentucky and West Virginia would flesh out the story behind the famous photograph. Those sources would not change what happened at Sojong ni, but they would further root one of the first Korean War casualties in the everyday life of the Appalachian coalfields that shaped him.
Sources and further reading
Records of Military Personnel Who Died as a Result of Hostilities During the Korean War, 1 January 1950 to 7 February 1957. Record Group 330, Office of the Secretary of Defense. National Archives, Access to Archival Databases (Korean Conflict Casualty File).
Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), Korean War Extract Data File. Record Group 330, National Archives. Includes West Virginia state level PDF lists.
FamilySearch, “United States, Korean War Battle Deaths, 1950–1957.” Public index derived from the Korean Conflict Casualty File (NAID 571686).
Wyoming County, West Virginia, “Korean War Casualties,” Genealogy Trails. State list citing the DCAS Korean War Extract Data File.
Korean War Project, “Korean War Casualties – West Virginia – Shadrick, Kenneth R.” State index and individual memorial entry.
“Kenneth R. Shadrick.” English and non English Wikipedia entries, with citations to Constance Baston’s biographical sketch for the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, Ed Robinson’s Images of America: Wyoming County, and standard Korean War histories. Wikipedia+1
United States War Memorials Online, “Shadrick, Kenneth R.” Short biographical entry and burial information for the American Legion cemetery in Wyoming County.
Local and regional coverage of Shadrick’s life and death in the Beckley Post Herald and other southern West Virginia newspapers, accessible via newspaper databases.
Marguerite Higgins, New York Herald Tribune dispatches from Osan and Pyongtaek, early July 1950, including the line “This is how America lost her first infantryman.”
Time, “West Virginia: The 8 O’Clock Broadcast,” Time, July 17 1950. Family reaction feature that framed Shadrick as the first reported U.S. fatality in Korea. HISTORY
Life, “A Peace Move,” Life, July 9 1951. Photo feature that continued to describe Shadrick as the first American killed in the Korean War and reproduced the Turnbull photograph.
Beckley Post Herald (Beckley, WV), front page coverage, July 1950, including “Eyewitness describes death of Kenneth Shadrick, first casualty of the Korean War.”
E. B. White, “Black and White and Red All Over,” The New Yorker, October 7 1950. Essay referencing “Private Kenneth Shadrick, of Skin Fork, West Virginia” in a broader media critique.
e WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, exhibit “Notable Military Figures: Korea and Vietnam,” Section 1: “Kenneth Shadrick (1931–1950).” Summarizes his life and explains the shift from “first casualty” to “among the first.” West Virginia Encyclopedia
Larry Legge, “Korean War,” e WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, updated 2024. State overview noting West Virginia’s 112,000 Korean War veterans and 801 deaths, with reference to Shadrick. West Virginia Encyclopedia
“This Week in West Virginia History,” syndicated columns carried by WVNews, My Buckhannon, and other outlets, which regularly note July 5 1950 as the date when “Army Private Kenneth Shadrick of Wyoming County was one of the first U.S. servicemen killed in action in the Korean War.” WV News+1
Clio, “Korean War Memorial” (South Charleston, WV), which cites Legge’s article and states that “Kenneth Shadrick of Wyoming County, WV was the first serviceman killed in action in the conflict.” Clio
Jefferson Bailey, “TAGOKOR: Biography of an Electronic Record,” Archive Journal (2014). Digital archival case study that follows the Korean War casualty database through multiple technological generations and uses the Shadrick record as an example. archivejournal.net+1
Korean War Educator, “Brief Facts – First and Last Deaths in the Korean War.” Reference page that long repeated the view that Shadrick was the first U.S. soldier killed, based on early newspaper accounts.
“The Korean War remembered,” Sidney Daily News (June 10 2016). Op ed style history column that notes earlier casualties at Osan and concludes that the first American battle death in Korea cannot be identified by name. sidneydailynews.com
Recent popular history discussions of “first to die” legends in multiple wars, such as Beaches of Normandy’s “The First to Die – Part II,” which reassess Shadrick’s story in light of Task Force Smith’s earlier losses.