Audie Murphy(1925–1971)

Audie Leon Murphy was born on 20 June 1925 near Kingston in Hunt County, Texas, one of twelve children of a poor sharecropping family of Irish descent. His father left, his mother died when he was a teenager, and Audie grew up picking cotton and hunting small game to feed his younger brothers and sisters, becoming a dead shot with a rifle out of plain necessity. He was small, slight and boyish-looking, and when the United States entered the war he was turned away by the Marines and the paratroops as too young and too light. He persuaded a recruiter to take him into the Army in 1942 by overstating his age, and was sent as an infantryman to the Mediterranean.

He fought through the invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland in 1943, then through the landings in southern France in 1944 and the long advance up the Rhone valley toward Germany. Again and again he showed the same cool, instinctive steadiness under fire that marked the best combat soldiers, and he rose from private to staff sergeant and then, by battlefield commission, to lieutenant, leading the same company in which he had begun as a rifleman. By the end of the war, still only nineteen and twenty, he had taken part in some of the hardest fighting of the western campaign and had been wounded more than once.

On 26 January 1945, near the village of Holtzwihr in the cold of an Alsatian winter, his company was attacked by German infantry supported by tanks. With his men depleted and falling back to cover, Murphy sent them to the rear and stayed forward alone, directing artillery fire by field telephone. When a nearby tank destroyer was hit and set ablaze, he climbed onto it and used its heavy machine gun to hold off the German infantry single-handed for the better part of an hour, surrounded, the vehicle burning beneath him and liable to explode, until the attack broke and his company could counter-attack and retake the ground. For this action he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration the United States can give.

He came home in 1945 the most decorated American combat soldier of the war, the holder of every decoration for valour the Army offered, several of them more than once, together with French and Belgian awards. His boyish face on the cover of Life magazine made him a national figure overnight. He wrote a plain, unsparing memoir of the war, To Hell and Back, which became a bestseller and then a film in which he played himself, and he went on to a long career as an actor, chiefly in Westerns, the genre that suited the quiet Texan he had always been.

He died in a light-aircraft crash in Virginia on 28 May 1971 and was buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery, where his grave is among the most visited in the country. In his later years he spoke openly about the lasting toll the war took on the men who fought it, and pressed the government to do more for returning soldiers, an early and honest public voice on a subject most of his generation kept silent. The Murphy name carries his memory as the cotton-picking boy from Hunt County who was turned away as too small and came back as the most decorated soldier his country had.