Memorial

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Pfc Lawrence L. Ordway enlisted in Erie, Pennsylvania on 20 February 1943.

He was taken prisoner on 3 December 1944 in France.

On 19 April 1945, the German guards at Stalag IV-B near Muhlberg, Germany, left the camp to transport a group of thirty prisoners to Pirna, Czechoslovakia. They reached the city on 6 May, but advancing Russian troops prompted the guards to abandoned the prisoners. The group of former prisoners headed for American lines. On 8 May they were walking on a highway leading into the city of Teplice, Czechoslovakia when they were strafed by several Soviet fighters. Two men were killed and their bodies were left beside the road. American Graves Registration personnel were unable to search for the bodies after the war because they were left in Soviet controlled territory. It is however not certain that one of these victims was Pfc Ordway.

In 1947, an exhumation was conducted at the cemetery of Ďáblice, Prague with the participation of the Army Graves Registration Services to identify Pfc Ordway's remains. However, due to the change of the political regime in former Czechoslovakia in February 1948, planned move of his remains to the West did not take place and the communist goverment even forbid it officially in 1954. Unfortunately, during a fire in the administrative part of the Ďáblice Cemetery in 1968, the plans of the grave sites were destroyed, and the exact location of his grave is unknown. This fact made it impossible to complete the process of repatriating the body after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.