Medal of Honor · World War II
Audie Leon Murphy
Second Lieutenant, U.S. Army
- Date of Action
- January 26, 1945
- Location
- Near Holtzwihr, France
- Medal Presented
- June 2, 1945
Values Embodied
- Courage
- Sacrifice
- Patriotism
Official Citation
Second Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by six tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt.
Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to a prepared position in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods.
2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt.
Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver.
The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank.
Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued his single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way back to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack, which forced the Germans to withdraw.
His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy's indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy's objective.
Biography
Before the War
Audie Leon Murphy was born on June 20, 1925, the seventh of twelve children in a family of Texas sharecroppers in Kingston, Hunt County. The Great Depression shaped his childhood. His father abandoned the family; his mother died when he was sixteen. To help feed his younger siblings, Audie dropped out of school in the fifth grade and took work picking cotton for a dollar a day. He hunted small game with a .22 rifle — not for sport, but for supper. Every shot counted. It was a skill that would later save his life, and the lives of many others.
When the United States entered World War II, Murphy tried to enlist in the Marines. He was turned away for being underweight and underage. The Navy rejected him for the same reasons. Finally, with a falsified birth certificate that added a year to his age, the U.S. Army accepted him in June 1942. He was seventeen, stood five feet five inches tall, and weighed barely 110 pounds. A drill sergeant in basic training tried to have him transferred to a cook and bakers’ school. Murphy refused. He wanted the infantry.
The Action
By January 26, 1945, Murphy was a twenty-year-old second lieutenant commanding Company B, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. The company had been reduced from its full strength of more than 120 men to just 19. They were dug in along the edge of the Riedwihr Woods near Holtzwihr, France, in the bitter winter cold of the Colmar Pocket. At about 2:00 p.m., six German Panzer tanks and 250 infantry soldiers emerged from the treeline and advanced across the open snow-covered field toward their position.
Murphy ordered his men to fall back to prepared positions inside the woods. He stayed forward at his command post, directing American artillery fire by field telephone. When one of the supporting M10 tank destroyers took a direct hit and its crew abandoned the burning, smoking vehicle, Murphy climbed atop the turret and manned its .50 caliber machine gun. The tank destroyer was loaded with ammunition and fuel and could have exploded at any moment. For nearly an hour, standing alone in full view of the enemy on three sides, he raked the advancing German infantry with machine gun fire while calmly calling in artillery coordinates on the phone.
He took a leg wound from a German round and kept firing. When the artillery observer on the other end of the phone asked how close the enemy was, Murphy — famously — answered, “Just hold the phone and I’ll let you talk to one of the bastards.” Only when his ammunition was finally spent did he climb down, stagger back to his men in the woods, refuse medical treatment, and lead a counterattack that drove the Germans from the field.
After the War
Audie Murphy came home the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II. He received every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. He was twenty years old.
The homecoming was complicated. He suffered for the rest of his life from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder — insomnia, depression, nightmares. He slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow. He spoke publicly about the psychological cost of combat decades before it was socially acceptable to do so, and he lobbied Congress to expand mental-health care for returning veterans. In this he was ahead of his time.
He became an unlikely movie star. James Cagney saw his face on the cover of Life magazine and invited him to Hollywood. Murphy appeared in more than forty films over the next two decades, most famously playing himself in “To Hell and Back” (1955), the adaptation of his wartime memoir. He wrote poetry. He raised quarter horses. He tried, imperfectly, to be a husband and a father.
On May 28, 1971, Audie Murphy was killed in a private plane crash in Virginia. He was forty-five years old. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Section 46, near the Memorial Amphitheater. His headstone is one of the most visited in Arlington, second only to that of President John F. Kennedy. By his own request, it bears no gold leaf. It is plain government-issue stone, identical to those of the men he led.