Cecil "Max" Campbell, 3131 Signal Service Company

U.S. Army

Army T/4 Cecil "Max" Campbell, left, of the Army Pictorial Service receives the Legion of Merit Award from Brig. Gen. Richard B. Moran, Fifth Army Signal Officer.  (Early 1944) Photo by Donald Wiedenmayer, 3131st Signal Service Company

The Stars and Stripes (Mediterranean), Italy

Published: December 20, 1944

Army Photographer Killed at 5^th Front

By a Staff Correspondent

WITH THE 5^TH ARMY, Dec. 20, 1944 (Delayed) – One of the Mediterranean Theater’s most respected combat cameramen is dead, victim of a chance Luftwaffe bomb. T-Sgt. Cecil M. “Max” Campbell had recorded action at Kasserine Pass, El Guettar and Gafsa in Tunisia.

Campbell and his newsreel camera jumped with the 82^nd Airborne Division in Sicily. He was the only cameraman to go in with the amphibious assault behind the German lines at Santa Agata in Sicily. Again in Italy, the 23-year-old Scotsman from Mesa, Arizona saw it hot at Monte Cassino and Anzio.

With his heavy equipment, Campbell followed the 5^th Army drives to Rome and Leghorn and then covered the rupture of the Gothic Line. All in all, he had spent two years as a combat cameraman.

Wounded once, he still considered himself lucky, although like all men who go into battle on their own initiative, he was fully conscious that the law of averages was running against him. Bedded down in a house several miles behind the front, he was buried under the rubble by an almost direct hit of a German Luftwaffe night bomber’s stray missile.

A friend, Pvt. Nelson Pitts of Cleveland, Ohio was also buried but escaped serious injury. At the time of his death, Campbell was a member of the 3131^st Signal Service Company, attached to the 5^th Army.

Campbell was the sixth Army photographer to be killed in action in Italy, according to the Army Pictorial Service. Used with permission from Stars and Stripes. © 1944, 2006 Stars and Stripes