Bernard 'Ace' Parker is pictured with his military service medals. The Legion of Honor medal can be seen hanging from a red ribbon above his American medals, which include a Purple Heart.

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — A longtime Milledgeville resident has received the French Republic’s highest military honor.

At a small ceremony in the Georgia State Capitol last Monday, French Consul General of the Southeast region Louis de Corail stood in front of assorted American World War II veterans and their families with seven medals bearing the face of Marianne, the female symbol of the French Republic. The medals represented the veterans’ admission into the National Order of the Legion of Honor, the highest award for service to the French Republic, given by de Corail by order of French President Emmanuel Macron. Among the five veterans and two relatives representing deceased veterans was Bernard “Ace” Parker, the former Baldwin County commissioner and U.S. Army Private 1st Class.

“I was real surprised, and I’m very appreciative of the French government for even recognizing the fact that I was there,” said Parker from his Lake Sinclair home Wednesday. “The fact that they would give me a medal of such high honor really was exciting.”

Bernard “Ace” Parker was born in Millen in 1925. When he was 5 or 6 years old, Parker’s parents moved the family to Macon, where he and his brother eventually attended Lanier High School (now a part of the city’s Central High). As the two brothers finished their junior year, the U.S. was fighting in the thick of the Second Great War, and upon turning 18, Parker, like so many other young men his age, was called to serve his country in an unprecedented global conflict.

“I had turned 18 in January of my junior year, and of course everybody had to register at 18 … I had to go into service two weeks after I finished my junior year,” he said. “I went to basic training at Camp Harahan in New Orleans. I had one other stop at Fort Wayne, Ind., and that was about six months, but I was in New Orleans for close to a year because I had had ROTC training at Lanier High School. I knew the basic drills and so forth, and we were extremely short of Non-Commissioned Officers, so at 18 I was teaching guys that were 25 and 30.”

After completing basic training at Camp Harahan, Parker was sent to England to await deployment into the European continent, where he was eventually attached to the 94th Infantry Division as a “replacement” in December 1944. Three months before, the 94th had landed in Normandy as part of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army and begun a campaign through the French countryside, fighting its way through the front lines of a fierce German resistance.

“You didn’t last long if you were a line rifleman,” said Cecile Parker, Ace’s wife of 51 years. “It was fierce fighting, and so many of them got either killed or wounded, they had to replace them fast.”

For three months from the end of 1944 and into 1945, Parker and his unit fought their way through German-occupied France, liberating French towns and clearing the way for Allied forces to come in behind them. Although he and his comrades received joyous welcomes from the people they freed, in February 1945, Parker stepped on a very dangerous piece of ground.

“We had started our drive to Luxembourg, and at was getting close to the end of the war,” he recalled. “When I left the line of departure to head out, I stepped on a mine.”

Even as Parker laid injured from the blast, a German bullet entered and exited his forearm. By the time medics carried him to a field hospital, Parker required more than 200 stitches to his arm and a complete amputation of his left leg below the knee. For 16 months, Parker recovered in an Army Hospital near Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where he belatedly earned his high school diploma. After graduating from Mercer in his hometown of Macon, Parker began a life as a real estate agent and appraiser, eventually being elected to the Macon City Council and, after his retirement to Milledgeville, the Baldwin County Commission. More than 70 years after that February day in the east of France, Parker said he is simply happy that a German mine did not deny him a chance to experience life after the war.

“Really and truthfully, at the time [the ceremony] was going on, I thanked the good Lord that I was still here to accept the honor.”