Audie Murphy: the most decorated soldier

He was too small, too young and too poor to look like a hero. Audie Murphy came out of the cotton fields of northeast Texas, lied about his age to get into the Army. By the time he turned twenty he had fought through eight campaigns and collected every American award for valor, and his face was on the cover of Life magazine. He spent the rest of his short life as a movie star, and as a man who never quite left the war behind.²

Early life

Audie Leon Murphy was born on 20 June near Kingston, Texas, one of twelve children of Emmett Berry and Josie Bell (Killian) Murphy, sharecroppers in Hunt County. The year is itself a story: Britannica and the Army give 1925, the Handbook of Texas and his Arlington headstone 1924, because he later altered his birth record to enlist.³

His father left the family, and his mother died when Audie was sixteen. He had left school after the fifth grade to pick cotton and take what work he could find, and his skill with a hunting rifle helped feed his brothers and sisters.⁴

Into the Army

After Pearl Harbor he set out to enlist, and he altered his birth record so that he would appear old enough. In June 1942 the Army took him at Greenville, Texas. He trained at Camp Wolters, Texas, and Fort Meade, Maryland, and went overseas as a private in Company B, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, in North Africa.⁵

Sicily, Italy and Anzio

Murphy first went into combat in July 1943, in the invasion of Sicily, one of the two amphibious assaults he would make. His division went on to Italy, and in 1944 it fought in the beachhead at Anzio, south of Rome. Murphy won his first decoration after the capture of Rome in June 1944.⁶ › Battle of Anzio, 1944

Southern France and the Vosges

On 15 August 1944 the 3rd Division landed on the Riviera in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France; in seven weeks of fighting it suffered 4,500 casualties. Murphy fought at Montélimar and in October led a successful assault on the L'Omet quarry near Cleurie in the Vosges. By the turn of the year he had won more than twenty awards for valor in Italy and France, among them the Distinguished Service Cross and two Silver Stars, and had received a battlefield commission as second lieutenant.⁷

Holtzwihr

In January 1945 the division was fighting to clear the Colmar Pocket in Alsace. On 26 January, near the village of Holtzwihr, Second Lieutenant Murphy was commanding Company B when six German tanks and some 250 infantry attacked. He ordered his men back to a wood behind them, stayed forward to call down artillery, and then climbed onto a burning American tank destroyer, "which was in danger of blowing up at any moment," as his citation puts it, and turned its .50-caliber machine gun on the enemy.⁸

For more than an hour he fought from the burning vehicle, alone and exposed to fire from three sides, wounded in the leg, directing the artillery fire while he shot. When his ammunition ran out he went back to his men and led them in a counterattack that drove the Germans off. The citation is blunt about the risk he ran: "He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans." It notes that he received a leg wound, "but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted," and credits him with killing or wounding about fifty Germans. The National WWII Museum's account divides the toll, with over twenty killed from the tank destroyer and some fifty more killed or wounded in the counterattack. He received the Medal of Honor on 23 April 1945, at nineteen by his true birth date.⁹ › The Most Decorated Soldiers in History

How he fought

Murphy was not a general and never commanded more than a company. His record is the record of a front-line infantryman: a fine shot, quick to read ground, and ready to put himself where the danger was greatest so his men could pull back. At Holtzwihr, as at the L'Omet quarry, he led from the front and at the decisive moment fought almost alone.¹⁰

The tallies are staggering and vary with the counting. The Handbook of Texas lists 33 awards, citations and decorations, including every US medal for valor; Arlington National Cemetery counts 28 medals, three of them French and one Belgian. He fought in eight campaigns, made two amphibious assaults, in Sicily and southern France, and was wounded three times, and he had not turned 21 when the war in Europe ended in May 1945.¹¹

Fame and Hollywood

After the Medal of Honor, Murphy was hailed as the most decorated American soldier of the war and appeared on the cover of Life. He was discharged at Fort Sam Houston on 17 August 1945. Hollywood noticed. His first part came in Beyond Glory in 1948, and in 1949 he published his memoir, To Hell and Back, written with David McClure.¹²

Critics have often called his part as the frightened young soldier Henry Fleming in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951) his best work. In 1955 he played himself in the film of To Hell and Back, and he went on to star mostly in Westerns, among them Night Passage with James Stewart and The Unforgiven with Burt Lancaster, as well as The Quiet American. The counts vary from more than 40 to 45 films. He also wrote song lyrics, two of which reached the top ten, and bred and raced horses.¹³

The war that stayed

The war did not leave him. He suffered from what was then called battle fatigue and today would be recognized as post-traumatic stress: he slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow and came to depend on sleeping pills. He married the actress Wanda Hendrix in 1949; they divorced about two years later, and in 1951 he married Pamela Archer, with whom he had two sons.¹⁴

He stayed a soldier on paper too. In 1950 he joined the 36th Division of the Texas National Guard as a captain, hoping to fight in Korea; the division was never called up. He rose to major, and from 1966 until his death he was in the Army Reserve. His last years brought money troubles and, in 1968, bankruptcy, yet he refused to appear in advertisements for alcohol and cigarettes because he did not want to set a bad example.¹⁵

Death

On 28 May 1971 Murphy was killed when the private plane carrying him crashed near Roanoke, Virginia; his body was found three days later. He was 45, or 46 by his own falsified date. After funerals in Hollywood and in Farmersville, Texas, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 7 June 1971.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

His grave in Section 46, across from the Memorial Amphitheater, draws so many visitors that the cemetery laid a special flagstone walkway for them. In 1973 a new veterans hospital in San Antonio was named for him, in 1996 the Texas Legislature declared 20 June Audie Murphy Day, and in 2013 he was awarded the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor. The Army's Sergeant Audie Murphy Club for noncommissioned officers carries his name.¹⁷

What keeps his story alive is the distance between the boy and the record. The National WWII Museum remembers a soft-spoken man who was never comfortable at the center of attention, and who carried the war with him long after Hollywood made him its face.¹⁸

Read more about other heroes in America's Greatest Military Heroes, the reluctant hero of World War I, Alvin York, the landing his division made at Anzio, or the most decorated soldiers in history.