LTG Roberts Funeral

MG William F. Dean Chapter
P.O. Box 2484
Danville California 94526
(925) 736-4738

ROBERTS, Elvy B., Lt. Gen. (U.S.A., Ret.) - Gen. Roberts passed away peacefully at home in Alameda, CA, Oct. 11, 2005, seven weeks after his 88th birthday. A Kentuckian by birth, he was known not only for his accomplishments in the U.S. Army, but also for his positive energy, warm personality, and attentive, caring demeanor that brightened the lives of so many. Tall, graceful, and poised, his imposing bearing was immediately recognized in every crowd - until a few weeks before his death. During WWII, Gen. Roberts served with the 501st and 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiments, 101st Airborne Division as a company commander, regimental operations officer and battalion commander. He made combat jumps into Normandy and Holland and participated in the five major campaigns of the 101st Airborne Division, including the Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne. Besides the US Military Academy at West Point, he also attended the Command and General Staff College, Armed Forces Staff College, and the Army War College. After serving two years in Iran as a military advisor to the Shah, he assumed command of the 1st Airborne Battle Group, 506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division in 1961. He subsequently became chief of staff, 11th Air Assault Division. In Vietnam, he was assistant division commander, 9th Infantry Division, and commanding general, 1st Calvary Division. in May 1969. He led combined U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in the assault against the Cambodian strongholds on 1 May 1970. After Vietnam, Gen. Roberts was assigned to posts in Japan, China, Korea, Mexico, Spain, Yugoslavia, before being named the head of the U.S. Delegation for Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction in Vienna. In 1975, he retired from his last post as the commanding general of the Sixth U.S. Army at the SF Presidio. For more than two decades after his retirement, Gen. Roberts was in the insurance business with Johnson and Anton, Inc. and in food services with Guckenheimer Enterprises, Inc. He served on several boards and maintained membership in the Bohemian Club, the St. Francis Yacht Club, the Rotary Club, the Guide Dogs for the Blind, and the Meyer Friedman Institute for Cardiac Research, to name but a few. Gen. Roberts is survived by his wife, Kim; and his children, William of Fairfield, Catharine Repine of Miami Beach, FL, Sandra Halford of Cedar Rapids, Iowa in addition to five grandsons, four great grandchildren; and a brother, Charles, of Virginia.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle from 10/30/2005 - 11/6/2005.

click on the photos to enlarge

Eulogy
Elvy Benton Roberts Lt. Gen., USA (Ret.)
Grace Cathedral
10 November 2005
By Kevin Starr

We are gathered together this morning in this great cathedral to remember and to celebrate the long and productive life of Elvy Benton Roberts, Lt. Gen., United States Army (Retired). We each knew this noble and engaging American gentleman from a number of perspectives.
First of all, those of us who were privileged to associate socially with Elvy and Kim Roberts knew the General from the perspective of the loving and courtly regard with which he related to his wife and the deep love and admiration with which she responded to him: the two of them doing this as a matter of unspoken statement, as a matter of gesture and regard communicated at some deep and powerful level that went beyond words. Here for the General was the love of his life, fulfilled for him in high middle life and bringing to his last years immeasurable sources of joy and solace; and here for her was the love of her youth, fulfilled in the final phases of her youth and taking her into a glorious middle age, in which she became the General's wife, friend, and loving companion.
Those of us who were privileged to know Elvy Benton Roberts from the Bohemian Club of San Francisco knew him as the quintessential gentleman clubman - affable, polished, giving pleasure to others, and never deliberately causing others pain, a trait that the great John Henry Cardinal Newman discerned as being of the essence of the gentlemanly condition: never deliberately to cause another person pain.
It was perhaps in song, in singing, that Elvy Benton Roberts and the Bohemian Club came together most gloriously. He had a rich and pleasing voice, and as a Lieutenant General, Commander of the Sixth Army, a man who had parachuted into France on D Day minus 1, he later confessed his nervousness on the day that he auditioned for the chorus. He wanted it intensely, for music and the act of singing released something in Elvy Benton Roberts: released an inner music, a poetry of soul, a flight of transcendence, that was the other side, the complementary side, of his chosen profession - the profession of arms that demanded so much discipline and resolve and was hence requiring release into new realms of being, by music.
This great soldier, tested in battle after battle, had a strongly developed aesthetic sense, evident in his regard for music and his love for the American classics, especially his most beloved Henry David Thoreau. Again: a paradox. The great General, the warrior par excellence, finding something powerfully sympathetic in the writings of a Concord, Massachusetts, isolato, a man who went his own way, marching, as he once said, to the beat of a different drummer.
And that brings us to another dimension of Elvy Benton Roberts - soldier, general, diplomat - that we who knew him also understood and appreciated. He was a gentleman, a Kentucky gentleman, entering the Club alongside another gentleman, a Tennessee gentleman, his friend and fellow West Point graduate and fellow Lieutenant General, Eugene Forrester. The culture of Kentucky that nurtured Elvy Benton Roberts in his youth and young manhood comprises a distinctive blend, like the fine Kentucky bourbon Elvy would enjoy in the Cartoon Room, of frontier strengths and abilities, a sense of heritage, and an abiding civility. In the Kentucky frontier side of his nature, we encounter Elvy Benton Roberts the skilled outdoorsman, the crack shot, the avid hunter respectful of the sacredness of nature and the balance of life, the ardent angler, the hiker and camper, ever eager to initiate his son William into the challenges, pleasures, and rituals of the outdoor life. Kentucky was a frontier state, explored and settled under the leadership of Daniel Boone in the years prior to and following American independence, and no matter how civil and sophisticated Kentucky became it never lost contact with that frontier spirit, nor did Elvy Benton Roberts.
Yet Kentucky was also an early American state, the fifteenth to be admitted to the Union, and it soon developed an abiding sense of heritage and civility, as did General Roberts. Kentuckians created institutions that have lasted across 235 years, and they are proud of them. Elvy Benton Roberts was a man of heritage. This goes without saying. A man soaked through with a sense of history and tradition.
And when it came to another Kentucky trait - gentlemanliness, verging on the courtly - there can have been no greater gentleman than this tall, strong, and kindly man who never said anything harsh about anyone, who never criticized others gratuitously, who seemed to be able to see the best in everyone, even people dramatically different from himself.
Of course, West Point and the Army polished these traits and made them professional. Elvy Benton Roberts was a born soldier, enlisting in the Kentucky National Guard while an under-age teenager, rising to NCO rank, entering West Point for his second degree after graduating from Eastern Kentucky University, receiving his commission after an accelerated course in January 1943, when for the armed forces of the United States the bulk of the fighting and the dying still lie ahead.
Those of us who encountered General Roberts, as I did, while he was in command of the Sixth Army, can perhaps be forgiven for being dazzled by the sheer presence of the man in uniform: the three stars of a Lieutenant General (the rank held by George Washington), the Combat Infantryman's badge with star, the badge of a master parachutist, the wings of a helicopter pilot, the silver star with oak leaf cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster, the other combat awards from the Second World War and Vietnam, the general staff badge, the foreign orders, the Vietnam Honor Medal first class, the Vietnam National Order, Knight of fifth class, the Vietnam Cross of gallantry with three palms and gold stars, the Dutch Order of Wilhelm, the Order of Military Merit, Chung Mu, from the Republic of Korea, the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the other medals and decorations. Here, in short, was a splendid embodiment of military achievement and acknowledged success.
But one cannot relate to such a distinguished officer as a mere catalog of medals and achievements, however impressive. To do that is to forget the realities behind the uniform: the fearful jump into Normandy at midnight before D Day; the terrible combat that followed, both in Normandy and in the other five major campaigns against Germany in which Elvy Benton Roberts fought as a company commander in 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division: the horrible suffering of the jump into Holland, the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes (in which his later good friend Dr. Andrew Jameson was also fighting, winning a Purple Heart with cluster), the race across the Rhine and the months of fighting before meeting up with Russian troops in Austria.
Elvy Benton Roberts wore his medals from the Second World War and, later, from Vietnam, because he had earned them; but he had earned them - and he would be the first to tell you this - in the company of hundreds, thousands, of equally fine young men who never returned.
To encounter Elvy Benton Roberts, then, a surviving member of the Greatest Generation, was to encounter an echo, a reflection, a representative, of legions of the American dead: of young men who would never have the life, the wonderful life, that fate and divinity had allocated to Elvy Benton Roberts. Thus to know Elvy Benton Roberts, to be his friend, was to encounter a living representative, an envoy from time past, of all those who made the final sacrifice in the Second World War, in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, and of those who are even now making that final sacrifice in Iraq.
Elvy Benton Roberts went on to become an Army thinker and strategist of great importance, a pioneer in the theory and practice of air assault. He commanded a distinguished division, the First Cavalry, in Vietnam, where his men remember his willingness to fly forward to the most isolated and dangerous outposts to be with them in their hour challenge and peril.
He was also a military diplomat, fulfilling complex assignments in negotiations with the governments of Japan, Korea, the Republic of China, the Republic of Mexico, the Kingdom of Spain, and, finally, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense in the disarmament negotiations in Vienna. These diplomatic assignments drew upon his subtly of mind, his patience, his willingness to listen, his respect for the person to whom he was speaking.
In retirement form the Army, Elvy Benton Roberts translated these administrative and diplomatic skills into success in the insurance business with Johnson and Anton Inc., and food services with the Guckenheimer Enterprises while throwing himself into charitable work with Guide Dogs for the Blind, Boy Scouts of America, cardiac and cancer research, the retired military.
He also became a member of the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which is to say, a Knight of Malta. Membership in this order, headquartered in its Anglican mode in this great cathedral for this region, traces itself back across 900 hundred years of military, hospitaller, and charitable service. Yet Elvy Benton Roberts had become a Knight of another kind, an American kind, long before he was invested in the Venerable Order of St. John. He had long since become an American knight - which is to say, an American gentleman of accomplishment and charity, of high formation and democratic loyalties, of physical courage and modesty, of the profession of arms in the service of the more enduring values of peace.
He was an American gentleman: the embodiment of what we take to best about our national experience as it extends across more than two centuries. This highly achieved yet fundamentally modest and gracious man has now joined all those others - the generals and the privates, the colonels and the sergeants, Army and Marine, the seamen apprentice and the admirals, navy and Coast Guard, the airmen and infantrymen, the submariners and merchant mariners, all those who served in any capacity in whatever rank or level of danger - in that great crusade.
He loved music, Elvy Benton Roberts; and if we listen to ourselves this morning, in our inner ear, in our souls, we can still hear the music that greeted him as his spirit passed from this world to that eternity that awaits us all. I hear some banjo music from Kentucky. I hear a song by Stephen Foster, perhaps, "My Old Kentucky Home." I hear the Sixth Army Band playing "Stars and Stripes Forever." I hear the great organ music, by Bach and Widor, that befits a believer, as Elvy Benton Roberts was a believer. I hear the voices of a red-robed Bohemian Chorus raised in joyous song at the Christmas Jinks; and there, to one side, tall and commanding, a look of radiant joy on his face, I see and I hear, Elvy singing: this warrior diplomat with the inner heart of a poet, this natural knight errant, this Kentuckian turned Californian, this American, this husband and father and grandfather, this friend to each of us. And each of us now, whatever our relationship to Elvy Benton Roberts might be, can now say together, can now pray together: "Sing out, Elvy! Sing for eternity! Sing in praise of the Creator in the company of the Centurion of the Gospel who welcomed Christ into his home, saying, 'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof; say but the word and my soul shall be healed.' Sing in gratitude for the life you have had here with us over these many, many years and the better world you have left behind by your brave and loving witness!"

END