Audie Murphy

Audie Leon Murphy left a Hunt County sharecropper's childhood for the infantry and became, by the army's own count, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War. The Medal of Honor action was January 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr in France: a burning tank destroyer, a machine gun, and a company that held because one man would not give the ground. The citation is public. This page will not recast it as a film treatment. He later played himself, which is a fact of the 1950s and not a second medal.

He was born June 20, 1925, near Kingston, Texas. He died on May 28, 1971, in a private-plane crash on a Virginia mountain. He is buried at Arlington. The war page remembers the underage rifleman the army almost turned away, and the lieutenant who used a wreck as a fighting position when the line was about to go.