U.S. Army Cpl. Thaddeus Pecorak, a World War II veteran who earned a Bronze Star fighting across Italy with the 1st Armored Division, received full military funeral honors at Arlington National Cemetery earlier this month on March 6.
Pecorak passed away on March 15, 2024, at age 101 at The Pines in Davidson, North Carolina.
Nearly two years later, members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard, conducted the ceremony alongside a bugler from the U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own." Arlington routinely faces extended scheduling delays because demand for funeral services outpaces available honor guard and chapel resources.
His remains were placed in a shared urn with those of his wife, Phyllis, who preceded him in death in 2013. The couple spent 64 years together.
Pecorak selected an urn carved from New Hampshire granite as a nod to the state Phyllis grew up in, according to historian Kevin Hymel, who covered the ceremony for the Army.
A Family Says Goodbye
Army Chaplain Capt. Raymond Akeriwe presided over the service for Pecorak's children and grandchildren. His son John accepted the folded flag at the ceremony.
"My dad was part of the greatest generation who defended our country and made it so that I can enjoy the freedoms that I've been able to enjoy," John said.
After the ceremony, a grandson who shares Pecorak's first name walked the urn to the columbarium, where a cemetery worker secured it in the niche. The family stood together in tears.
It was Pecorak himself who requested Arlington as his final resting place. He had told his daughter Susan years earlier that no other resting place carried the same honor.
Baptism of Fire
Ted, as everyone knew him, was born on March 3, 1923, in Manhattan. His mother and father, Tania and Bartholomew Pieciorak, had crossed the Atlantic from Poland. The family eventually Americanized the surname, according to his obituary in The Pilot of Southern Pines, North Carolina.
He lost his father at a young age but proved himself early. A scholarship took him to Pawling Prep School, and in 1942 he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire, where he suited up for the football team.
The Army put him through infantry school at Camp Croft in South Carolina, then shipped him overseas. He landed at Naples and drew an assignment as a machine gunner with the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment under the 1st Armored Division.
His first taste of combat occurred on the rocky ground near Mount Porchia, on the long road to Rome. Stone shattered by incoming rounds tore through American lines like shrapnel.
"More men were wounded by rock chips than they were by bullets," Pecorak said in a 2017 Veterans of Foreign Wars interview. "That was my baptism of fire."
The Army recognized his actions at Mount Porchia with a Bronze Star.
"You learn more in the first fifteen minutes of combat than you do in fourteen weeks of basic training," Pecorak later said.
The Italian Campaign
Allied commanders gambled on an amphibious strike at the coastal city of Anzio, hoping to get behind the German Gustav Line and open a corridor to Rome. The 1st Armored Division went ashore on Jan. 28, 1944, according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The gamble failed. German forces bottled up the landing zone, and what was supposed to be a rapid advance became a five-month standoff on a beachhead so compact that every enemy shell found a target.
"The Germans couldn't fire a round or drop a bomb and not hit something," Pecorak recalled.
He spent those months working his machine gun, tearing apart wire barriers and riding out one barrage after another. One explosion caved in a church where he had taken shelter. Men he knew were killed beside him.
"One instant he was there. Then he was gone," Pecorak said of a soldier killed by a sniper right beside him. "It could just as easily have been me."
Fatigue almost got him, too. After one stretch without rest, he gave up on digging in and instead squeezed under a parked tank for the night. The ground was soft. By sunrise the hull had dropped low enough to press against his face.
"If it was real super-wet ground I wouldn't be sitting here today," Pecorak said. "I doubt anybody would have heard me under that tank."
On May 23, 1944, Allied forces punched through the German ring around Anzio. The 1st Armored Division drove the spearhead north. Pecorak rolled into Rome on June 4, just 48 hours before the Normandy landings seized the world's attention.
He transitioned to an artillery role before the war ended and stayed on with occupation forces in Germany through 1946.
After the War
Back home, Ted picked up at UNH. He competed in football and track, earned letters in both, and left campus with a history degree. He married a fellow student named Phyllis Jacobson in 1949, and they went on to have three children.
His combat experiences followed him home. Nightmares dragged him back to Italy for years afterward, and Phyllis regularly had to shake him awake.
He made his living selling building materials. On vacations the couple toured Europe, even visiting places where Ted had fought decades earlier. When Phyllis's health deteriorated later in life, she moved into an assisted living home. Ted showed up to visit her every single day.
"He really, really tried to take care of her," John said.
Pecorak provided an interview about his experiences, which is now preserved by the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
Phyllis died in 2013. Ted lived on for another 11 years. He left behind his three children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
A year before his death, the 1st Armored Division honored his 100th birthday at Fort Bliss, Texas, by stenciling his name onto the main gun tube of an M1 Abrams tank and firing it downrange.
"It means a lot," said Staff Sgt. Dakota Roundtree, the tank's commander in the 1st Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment.
Pecorak's funeral took place against a backdrop of rapid generational loss. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimated in January 2025 that approximately 66,000 Americans who served in WWII were still alive.
That represented a steep drop from the 119,000 counted just one year earlier, according to the National WWII Museum. Projections show the figure falling below 8,000 by 2030.
By coincidence, the 1st Armored Division observed its annual Torch Week at Fort Bliss on the same date that Pecorak's urn was placed at Arlington. The event honors Operation Torch, the division's November 1942 combat debut in North Africa.
In the final months of his life, Pecorak wrestled openly with what the war had cost him across eight decades.
"I feel as if God is keeping me here as a penance," he said.
His son offered a different view.
"My dad gave up an awful lot," John said. "I think people who were never in the armed services have no idea how much is being done for them by those who serve."
