Corlett

Corlett is an anglicisation of the Gaelic Mac Thorliot, and the personal name inside it is not Gaelic at all. Thorliot is the Old Norse Thorljotr, from Thorr and ljotr, "bright"; a second reading takes it as "Thor-people". Either way the god's name sits at the front of it, which is what a Scandinavian century leaves behind in a Gaelic island once the ships stop coming. The name surfaces in the records as Corlett in 1504 and as MacCorleot in 1511, the older form still in use beside the one that won.

The prefix is the reason the modern spelling opens with a C. Manx speech gave Mac no stress, so its final consonant slid forward onto the father's name, and when the prefix fell out of island use the consonant stayed behind.

William Wellington Corlett was born at Concord, Ohio, on 10 April 1842, a son of William Corlett and Mary Ann Kneale. He taught school while working through the Willoughby Collegiate Institute, graduated in 1861, and enlisted in the Union Army the following year, serving in the 28th Ohio Infantry and then the 87th Ohio, which was taken whole at the surrender of Harpers Ferry on 15 September 1862. Paroled, he went back into uniform with the 25th Ohio Independent Light Artillery Battery and mustered out in 1865.

The law came next, and a degree from the Ohio State and Union Law College in Cleveland in July 1866. In 1867 he went west to Cheyenne and set up practice in a Wyoming that was still a territory. He ran for territorial Delegate in 1869 and lost; the offices came anyway, postmaster of Cheyenne in 1870, territorial senator in 1871, prosecuting attorney of Laramie County to 1876. In 1877 he took the seat he had missed, sitting as Wyoming Territory's Delegate to the Forty-fifth Congress until 3 March 1879. He then declined the appointment as chief justice of the territory, and died at Cheyenne on 22 July 1890.

Charles Harrison Corlett was born at Burchard, Nebraska, on 31 July 1889 and grew up mostly at Monte Vista, Colorado, where his father farmed and practised law. He worked cattle until he was nineteen, went to West Point the year after, and it was his handling of horses that got him the name the army called him by ever after: Cowboy Pete. He graduated on 12 June 1913 into the Signal Corps, and served with Radio Company A, a horse and mule outfit working one of the earliest radios in the United States Army.

The war put him at the centre of the Signal Corps' expansion. As Director of Signal Corps Supplies for the American Expeditionary Forces he was gassed with mustard while laying communication lines at the front, and he crossed the Rhine at Coblenz with the first American troops in. He was a lieutenant colonel in 1918 at twenty-nine, and his Distinguished Service Medal citation credits him with laying the foundation of Signal Corps work in the AEF.

Between the wars came Leavenworth, the Army War College, the War Department General Staff from 1934 to 1939 and regiments in Hawaii, California, Washington and Alaska. He was a colonel in June 1941 and a brigadier general three months later. On 6 September 1942 he was made temporary major general and given the Kiska Task Force: 35,000 men, including the 7th Infantry Division, the First Special Service Force and the 13th Canadian Infantry Brigade. Kiska and Attu were the only two places in the United States held by an enemy in that war, and Kiska was a Japanese seaplane and submarine base with a garrison estimated at 10,000.

The landing went in on the night of 15 August 1943 through heavy fog, and nobody shot at it. The rest of the force came ashore on the north of the island the next day to the same silence. At noon on 17 August Corlett accepted that the Japanese had gone, evacuated two weeks earlier under night, fog and storm, leaving their stores behind. The phantom battle still cost 313 casualties to friendly fire, mines and vehicle accidents in the fog.

Corlett then took the 7th Infantry Division to Pearl Harbor, where Admiral Chester W. Nimitz told him he would command the army forces taking Kwajalein Island, a Japanese naval and air base held by 5,000 men under orders not to surrender. Operation Flintlock ran from 31 January to 7 February 1944 and took 27 islets, twelve of them defended to the last man.

On 4 February, told that part of his command had been halted, Corlett went up towards the front line in a tank, dismounted under enemy observation and fire, and moved among his men to see the position himself; the assault went in and the island was finished. That earned him the Silver Star. Some observers have called Kwajalein the most nearly perfect American amphibious operation of the war, and the ledger is the argument: 177 American soldiers killed against 4,398 Japanese dead.

In April 1944 he reported to Eisenhower in London and was given XIX Corps in Bradley's First Army: the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions and the 29th and 30th Infantry. He trained them at Warminster in Wiltshire and brought them ashore over Omaha Beach on 10 June, four days after D-Day, where the 29th Division fought its first battle and took very heavy losses. Then the hedgerows, and St Lo. XIX Corps spearheaded the Operation Cobra breakout to Mortain and the Falaise Pocket, destroying 100 German tanks and taking three German divisions prisoner.

Ordered north-west against an army retreating hard to avoid another encirclement, the corps crossed the Somme on 2 September and were the first Allied troops into Belgium and the Netherlands, taking Tournai, Fort Eben-Emael, Maastricht and Sittard. On 14 September they crossed the Meuse into Germany. Corlett was working to close the escape route known as the Aachen Gap when illness took him out of the command on 15 October 1944. From D-Day to that morning his corps had taken 29,867 prisoners, downed 55 aircraft and built 160 bridges.

In November 1944 he took XXXVI Corps, planning the northern attack on the Japanese mainland from the Kurile Islands for Operation Downfall; on the day Japan surrendered he was writing a training course in amphibious operations for the divisions coming back from Europe. He retired in 1946, and the Secretary of Agriculture promptly sent him to Mexico City to organise the commission for eradicating foot and mouth disease, which held him there until the middle of 1947. He went home to his sheep and cattle ranch in New Mexico, chaired the State Bureau of Revenue, and died at Espanola on 13 October 1971, aged 82. His autobiography, Cowboy Pete, was published three years later.

On the island the name stayed close to the law and the chamber. Andrew Corlett served as Deputy Deemster of the Isle of Man; John Corlett, born 1950, held office as Her Majesty's Attorney General for the island and sat ex officio in the Legislative Council; Ann Corlett is a Manx politician. Across the water George Milton Corlett became the 25th Lieutenant Governor of Colorado.

Cricket took two more. Samuel Corlett (1852-1921) played as an English cricketer, and Simon Charles Corlett, born 18 January 1950, went from Oxford University to a debut for Ireland against the Netherlands in June 1974, turning out 73 times as a right-arm fast-medium bowler and serving as president of the Irish Cricket Union in 2003.

The name went into voices and print as well. Ian James Corlett, born in 1962, the youngest of three sons of a music store owner, started in 1984 and became a Canadian voice actor and author: Mega Man, Cheetor in Beast Wars, Bob in ReBoot, the first English adult Goku in the Ocean dub of Dragon Ball Z, and the creator of Being Ian and Yvon of the Yukon. His daughter Claire, born 1999, acts too. E. C. B. Corlett worked as a British naval architect and author, William Corlett (1938-2005) wrote children's books in England, Marama Corlett is a Maltese actor and dancer, and Sam Corlett an Australian actor. One Manx patronymic, first written down in 1504, now at work in a recording booth in Vancouver.