2nd Lt, U.S. Army — World War II
Audie Leon Murphy was born on June 20, 1925, in Kingston, Texas, the seventh of twelve children in a sharecropping family in Hunt County. His father drifted away from the family, and his mother died in 1941, when Murphy was sixteen. He had left school in the fifth grade to pick cotton and hunt small game to help feed his brothers and sisters. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist, but the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps all turned him away for being underage and underweight. With an affidavit from his older sister that made him a year older, he finally joined the Army on June 30, 1942.
Murphy was assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, and fought through Sicily, mainland Italy, Anzio, and the invasion of southern France. He was wounded repeatedly, earned a battlefield commission to second lieutenant in October 1944, and by January 1945 commanded Company B in the bitter fighting of the Colmar Pocket.
On January 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr, France, six German tanks and waves of infantry attacked his company. Murphy ordered his men back to prepared positions in the woods and stayed forward alone, directing artillery fire by telephone. When one of the company’s tank destroyers took a direct hit and began to burn, he climbed on top of it and fired its .50-caliber machine gun at the advancing Germans for nearly an hour, killing or wounding about fifty of them despite a leg wound. When his ammunition ran out, he rejoined his men, refused medical attention, and led a counterattack that drove the Germans off. For this stand, the 19-year-old lieutenant received the Medal of Honor.
Murphy came home the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II, having received every U.S. combat award for valor. He later starred in the 1955 film To Hell and Back, based on his memoir, wrote songs, and spoke candidly about the “battle fatigue” that haunted him. He died in a plane crash near Roanoke, Virginia, on May 28, 1971, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society