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Earl W. Meier was born on October 13, 1921, in Wisconsin to Alfred W. and Loraine Meier. By 1930, the Meier family was living in the town of West Allis in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, where Alfred Meier was working as a brakeman on a railroad. Earl Meier was inducted into military service for World War II in the U.S. Army on August 11, 1942, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Meier was involved at Camp Butner in assisting with filling supply orders, cleaning the barracks and other buildings, and hand-painting signs used around the camp. In mid-February 1943, Meier’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Moore, had him paint a large number of signs used for various purposes, which included such slogans or notices as: “Give Me A Man Who Can Shoot And Salute”; “Please Use Ash Trays”; “Pool 5¢ per game”; and other miscellaneous signs used around Camp Butner.Between February 27 and 28, 1943, Earl Meier was transferred to Camp Shenango (later renamed Camp Reynolds) near Greenville, Pennsylvania. At his new camp, Meier was assigned to Battery C, 10th Battalion. Camp Shenango was a U.S. Army Military Personnel Replacement Depot, used as a central camp to assign replacement U.S. Army soldiers heading for service in the European Theater. It is unknown when exactly Meier was sent overseas, but he was first sent to North Africa during the summer of 1943. By mid-March 1943 during a weekend pass, Earl Meier married Ruth Possin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
By the end of July 1943, Early Meier was serving in North Africa in Company C, 17th Armored Engineer Battalion, 2nd Armored Division, U.S. Army. The 2nd Armored Division served during WWII in North Africa, Sicily, England, France, Belgium and Germany, under the command of the U.S. First Army. It is unknown what happened to Meier throughout the remainder of the war. Meier was discharged from active military service on October 19, 1945, with the rank of Private First Class.
Little is known about Earl Meier’s life after WWII. By the mid-1980s, he was living in Phoenix, Arizona. Prior to his death, he had moved to New Berlin, Wisconsin. Earl W. Meier died on July 6, 2010, and was buried in Southern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Union Grove, Wisconsin.
There are 42 letters written with great detail from Camp Butner by Earl Meier available online, housed in the WWII collection of the North Carolina Digital Collections, a joint effort of the State Archives of North Carolina and State Library of North Carolina. The letters are available to view here. The State Archives does not hold all of Meier’s WWII correspondence, as it was broken up prior to the Camp Butner correspondence coming to the State Archives’ Military Collection. You can learn more about Meier’s life just before shipping out to the European Theater in WWII while in North Carolina and Pennsylvania by checking out the Earl W. Meier Papers (WWII 69) in the World War II Papers of the Military Collection at the State Archives of North Carolina.
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