Just outside downtown Dunn, N.C., a historic antebellum-style house honors Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, a hometown hero often described as the father of the U.S. Army’s airborne infantry. The World War II veteran served as the first commanding general for the 101st Airborne Division, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” and helped plan the Allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Normandy.
He’s a widely respected, if somewhat obscure, military figure — which is why, after anonymous vandals attempted to torch a statue of him last week, museum officials concluded it had been a case of mistaken identity. They suspect that the perpetrators thought they were burning a memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“This is not a Civil War museum and this is not Robert E. Lee,” Mark Johnson, the curator for the Maj. Gen. William C. Lee Airborne Museum, told WNCN on Tuesday. “This is General William C. Lee from United States Army Airborne from World War II.”
Dunn, a city of under 10,000 people, is located in the greater Raleigh-Durham area, where some of the most heated debates over removing Confederate memorials have taken place in recent years. In August 2017, protesters in Durham, N.C., took matters into their own hands by toppling a bronze statue depicting a Confederate soldier that sat in front of the city’s old courthouse. A year later, activists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used ropes to pull down the monument known as Silent Sam, which was originally erected in honor of UNC graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
While the vandals who targeted the memorial to William C. Lee last week didn’t leave anything behind that would explain their motivation, Johnson told the Daily Record that he thought they were trying to make a similar statement about racism and slavery.
“So just an alert to people who may be thinking about such things,” he said, “this is the wrong general.”
In a Facebook post, the museum said that the fire had started at around 10 p.m. last Thursday, after some “jerk punks” doused the statue with a flammable liquid. A ring of burn marks on the pedestal appeared to show where the fuel container had been set down. Fire crews responded and put out the flames, which failed to do any significant structural damage to the white marble statue but left it blackened and scorched.
Authorities are reviewing security camera footage from the area to see if they can identify the culprits, WRAL reported.
