Person · 1944
Paul J. Horman
Paul J. Horman
Source: Howe High School yearbook (1941)
| Died | 1944-10-25 Off Samar, Philippines (USS Hoel) |
Paul Joseph Horman (died 1944) of North Billerica was a Navy boilermaker lost with the destroyer Hoel in the Battle off Samar, the last stand of the small ships in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Paul J. Horman Square, at the junction of Rogers Street and High Street in North Billerica, is named for him, and his name is among the twenty-nine World War II dead on the World War Memorials on the Town Common, where it is cut as Paul F. Horman.
He was a son of Charles P. Horman, a loom fixer, and his wife Elizabeth, who lived on Walnut Street in Fordway Park, the street renamed Horman Road in 1988. His mother died in 1940. Reginald F. Horman, a Boston and Maine Railroad mechanic who lived in the household in 1931, joined the town police in the later 1930s and served in the Coast Guard during the war.
Paul graduated from Howe High School in 1941. His class yearbook called him "Duke," "jovial, happy-go-lucky, and witty," noted that he had played baseball, and gave his ambition as "to get in the navy." He did, and became a boilermaker third class on the destroyer USS Hoel. On the morning of October 25, 1944, off Samar in the Philippines, the Hoel and two other destroyers and four destroyer escorts were all that stood between a Japanese fleet of battleships and cruisers and the escort carriers of Taffy 3. The Hoel charged the Japanese line with torpedoes and was sunk after more than an hour under fire; most of her crew were lost. Horman was listed as missing, and his name is on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery.
In 1947 his class of 1941 gave Howe High School a plaque in memory of its two members who died in the war, Harry Newman and Paul Horman, and it was hung in the main corridor of the school the next year. At the annual town meeting of March 9, 1957, on an article submitted by Post 116 of the American Legion, the town named the square at Rogers and High Streets the Paul J. Horman Square "in memory of a veteran killed in the service of his country" and voted $150 for markers and landscaping; a bronze plaque was bought for it in 1959.