Brooks, Thomas Boggs
Navy Lieutenant commander

Thomas Boggs Brooks, age 32, from Chester, South Carolina, Chester county.

Parents: H. Phelps Brooks Sr.

Service era: Korea
Military history: Served about five years in World War II

Date of death: Sunday, March 2, 1952
Death details: On March 2, 1952, a Landing Craft Personnel, Large (LCPL) departed the USS Chittenden County (LST-561) in the Yellow Sea off the western coast of North Korea. The LCPL was carrying nine U.S. service members and three Allied service members on a reconnaissance mission to investigate a small island near the 38th Parallel. While heading toward the mission area, the surf became too rough and the LCPL turned back, but it never returned to the Chittenden County. There were no reported communications following the landing craft’s withdrawal from the mission area. Three to four days later, clothing and pieces of the LCPL were found and the discovery of this floating debris led the U.S. Navy to determine that the crew was lost in the location of the island of Yonp’yong Do, where enemy guerrillas had been active on March 2. Of the nine U.S. service members on board, the body of one U.S. Army officer washed ashore on a small island off the west coast of the Korean peninsula and was recovered; however, the eleven others on board were not found. Lieutenant Commander Thomas Boggs Brooks entered the U.S. Navy from South Carolina and served aboard the Chittenden County. He was a crew member aboard this LCPL when it went missing and was lost with the vessel. He remains unaccounted for. Today, Lieutenant Commander Brooks is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, The State (1952)