US Army Pilot Marcus Gatewood Milligan was born in Heflin, Alabama on March 18, 1896, the son of William Gatewood Milligan (1858-1936) and Mary Lou Pinson (1863-1943). His family had relocated to Pensacola in 1916 where his father became president of the Milligan Wholesale Grocery Company at 308 South Tarragona Street. They obtained a house at 510 North 17th Avenue and Marcus became his father's secretary. Marcus was a graduate of Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) where he was a star athlete.
That same year of 1916 Marcus was signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and he was sent to Portsmouth to the Virginia League for experience as a pitcher. He was brought back on June 3, 1917 to pitch for the Pirates before being sent again to Scranton with the New York League. His next stop was the Birmingham Barons with the Southern League, his last successful stop to the major leagues! Everywhere he went, he won!
But as America entered the war in 1917, Marcus gave up a promising baseball career to answer his nation's call to arms. And this war was different with the advent of the newly invented airplane. But airplanes needed pilots and we needed them quickly. Europe was already far ahead of us in the sophistication of their aircraft and the experience of their pilots. So Marcus enlisted in the Army Air Corp on December 14, 1917 and was sent to Camp Sheridan, Illinois for basic training in March 1918. His next stop was flight training at Camp Taliaferro in Ft. Worth, Tarrant County, Texas in September 1917. But the Air Corps had never trained such a large number of pilots, especially in the art of aerial combat. Luckily, the operation of the aircraft was much simpler then than it would be in WWII. The program was broken down into two phases, eight weeks of ground school and then fifty hours of preliminary flying. Upon completion he was sent to the "holding pool" at Camp John Dick in Dallas where he waited for orders to his next duty station. Orders finally sent him to Taliaferro where he began flying the Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane. The air flights were conducted with an instructor for ten hours followed by soloing for 24 hours. Upon completion, they were ready for 16 hours of cross country flying before receiving their wings. They were then shipped off to the war front where their officers would supply them with 90 hours of go-as-you-go training in combat maneuvers.
Sadly, Milligan did not make it that far! Of the more than 44 students who were killed at Taliaferro, he was one of the unlucky ones! On Tuesday, September 3, 1918, Marcus took off from Barron Field with his instructor 2Lt. Sidney Chester Greene. Not long into the flight something went wrong, and the engine stalled near the town of Everman, about twelve miles from Barron Field. Unable to regain control of the plane, they crashed killing Lt. Greene instantly and critically injuring Milligan. His right femur, tibia, and fibula were fractured as well as rupture of the internal organs. He was rushed to the base hospital where the doctors felt he would recover. His father in Pensacola was notified that his son was alive but no further information was sent. Then came the telegram they dreaded the most, their son Cadet Milligan had died the next day at 2:00 PM.
His body was shipped home to be buried with full military honors in the Edgemont Cemetery in Anniston, Alabama. There, he was joined by his father in 1936, mother in 1943 and his sister Nellie Mae Leyden in 1958.
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