Medal of Honour

February 13, 1945. Fort William McKinley, Luzon, Philippines. A 21-year-old Army private moved alone toward the first Japanese pillbox, pulled the pin, and did not stop.

Near Fort William McKinley, Pfc. Manuel Perez Jr., a Mexican-American soldier from Chicago who had enlisted in 1943, was part of a company from the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division, assaulting a fortified Japanese strongpoint. The line was not moving. Perez moved anyway.

One pillbox. Then another. Then another. He worked his way through eleven of them across most of a day, throwing grenades into the firing ports and shooting the crews as they tried to get out. By the time the assault was done, he had cleared a key approach to the Japanese defensive line and killed approximately eighteen enemy soldiers. Alone.

He survived the battle. The next morning, February 14, 1945, he was leading a follow-up patrol when a sniper killed him. He was 21 years old.

The Medal of Honor was presented to his family at the White House in October 1945. Perez had grown up in Chicago's Mexican-American community after his family left Oklahoma during the Depression. His name is on memorials in Chicago and in the record of the Luzon campaign. Most people have never heard it.

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December 20, 1943. A B-17 over Bremen, Germany, was torn apart by anti-aircraft fire and German fighters. The radio was destroyed. The bomber was losing altitude over the North Sea. And the radio operator had just been blinded.

Sergeant Forrest Vosler was 20 years old, from Lyndonville, New York, and he was the man still at the tail gun. He had taken 20mm cannon fire in the chest and legs. Then shell fragments hit his eyes and left him largely without sight. He kept firing anyway, tracking attacking fighters by sound and feel as the aircraft descended.

When the crew needed a distress signal sent, there was no working radio. Vosler repaired it by touch, component by component, from memory alone, the way he had memorized it during training. He got the signal out. That signal brought the rescue boats. When the aircraft ditched in the North Sea and the engineer was thrown overboard, Vosler crawled out onto the wing, still blind, and held the man's body against the aircraft until other crew members could pull him into the dinghy. All of them survived.

President Roosevelt presented Vosler the Medal of Honor in August 1944. Vosler partially recovered his vision after surgery and spent the next thirty years working at the Veterans Administration in Syracuse. He died in February 1992 at age 68.

He sent the signal that saved his crew. He did it blind, by memory, in a falling aircraft over open water.

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December 16, 1944. Eastern France. A 23-year-old Army lieutenant left his men behind, crawled alone through the snow toward a German-held ridge, and got to within ten meters of the enemy line.

Near Kaysersberg, France, 1st Lt. Charles Murray Jr., from Mount Carmel, North Carolina, was leading a flanking element with the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, when he decided the only way forward was to go alone. He threw grenades into three German machine gun positions. He killed approximately twenty soldiers. Ten others surrendered to him. He moved to a fourth position and killed four more.

Then shrapnel hit him. He refused evacuation. He stayed.

In July 1945, President Truman presented Murray the Medal of Honor at the White House. Murray had commissioned through ROTC at Texas A&M in 1942, and he did not stop serving after that day in France. He completed thirty-one years in the Army, retired as a colonel in 1973, and spent decades speaking at military academies and attending Medal of Honor Society events. He died in August 2011 at age 89 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

He crawled into that German line alone. He came back out.

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January 30, 1945. The Hurtgen Forest. American soldiers had been dying in those trees for months, and the village of Kesternich was still in German hands.

Near Kesternich, Germany, Staff Sergeant Jonah Kelley, a 21-year-old Army infantryman from Kempton, West Virginia, led his squad into two days of continuous house-to-house fighting against fortified German positions. He personally destroyed three machine gun nests. He led the assault on three fortified houses. He was wounded twice on the first day and refused to leave.

He fought through that first night. On the second day, clearing the last German position in the village, he entered a building and a sniper sh*t him through the head. He died at the threshold. The village fell to the company.

Kelley had grown up in the coal country of West Virginia, one of seven children, working the mines before the Army drafted him in 1943. The Medal of Honor was presented to his family in November 1945. A memorial in Kempton was dedicated in 1955. The Battle of Kesternich is remembered as one of the costliest American engagements in the entire Hurtgen campaign.

He made it to the last building.

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February 11, 1945. Oberhoffen, northeastern France. A 23-year-old Army lieutenant stepped in front of his platoon and walked into the open, drawing German fire so his men could find the positions and clear them.

Near Oberhoffen, First Lieutenant Edward Dahlgren of Mars Hill, Maine, had been drafted into the Army in 1942 from a potato farm in Aroostook County. He earned a battlefield commission to second lieutenant in October 1944 and another to first lieutenant the following month. He was not a career soldier. He was a farmer who had become a leader faster than anyone planned.

That morning he led assaults on three separate German positions across the village center. He used a Thompson submachine gun and grenades. He personally killed eight German soldiers and captured twenty-three. He was hit by shrapnel. He continued. By evening the village had fallen to his company.

President Truman presented Dahlgren the Medal of Honor in August 1945 at the White House. After the ceremony, Dahlgren went back to Maine. He farmed potatoes. He raised five children. He worked later as a school custodian. He died in March 2006 at age 90. A memorial in Mars Hill records what he did. Most people have never heard of it.

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April 7, 1945. Near Untergriesheim, Germany. A platoon of U.S. Army infantry was pinned by German fire pouring out of a wooded slope. One soldier climbed on top of a tank and stood up.

Private First Class Mike Colalillo was 19 years old, the son of Italian immigrants who had worked the iron mines of Hibbing, Minnesota. He got onto the deck of an M4 Sherman and took hold of the exposed .50 caliber machine gun. He did not crouch. He did not take cover. He stood.

He fired that gun for approximately a hundred yards of the advance. He k*lled around a dozen German soldiers. He silenced two enemy machine gun positions before return fire hit the weapon and disabled it. Then he climbed down, found a wounded American soldier, and carried him back through contested ground to friendly lines. Still under fire. On foot.

President Truman presented Colalillo the Medal of Honor in December 1945 at the White House. After the war, Colalillo went back to Minnesota and drove trucks for a Duluth steel company for decades. He lived quietly in the Duluth Italian-American community until his death in December 2011 at age 86. A street in Duluth bears his name. Most people have never heard it.

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August 20, 1944. Near Chambois, Normandy. The German army was trying to punch through Allied lines at the Falaise Gap, and a 20-year-old machine gunner from Bremerton, Washington was the last thing standing in their way.

Near Chambois, France, Sergeant John D. Hawk of the 359th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, fired his machine gun continuously through successive waves of German tanks and infantry. When a tank shell destroyed the gun, he did not pull back. He walked into the open ground between his platoon and the German armor, stood there in full view of both sides, and used hand signals to direct American anti-tank gun fire onto the advancing tanks. He was wounded once. He refused evacuation. He was wounded again. He refused again. He stayed until the pocket closed and roughly 50,000 German troops were captured.

In April 1945, President Roosevelt presented Hawk the Medal of Honor at the White House. Hawk had been drafted in 1943 from a job at the Bremerton Navy Yard. He came home, earned a teaching degree at Western Washington University on the GI Bill, and spent the next thirty-three years teaching social studies in Washington public schools. He died in November 2013 at age 89. A highway near Bremerton was named for him in 2014.

Most people have never heard his name.

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November 2, 1944. Over Merseburg, Germany, a B-17 took a burst of anti-aircraft fire and the navigator went down. Three large shell fragments tore into his back and side. The crew offered him morphine. He said no.

Second Lieutenant Robert Femoyer was 23 years old, from Huntington, West Virginia, and it was only his second bombing mission. He knew exactly what morphine would do to his ability to read charts and calculate headings. So he refused it, and he went to work.

For the next two and a half hours, propped up by crewmen so he could see his instruments, Femoyer directed the B-17 back across Germany and over the Channel to England. He plotted around remaining anti-aircraft positions. He accounted for weather. He kept the aircraft on course while bleeding heavily the entire time. All nine men aboard survived. The plane landed safely.

Robert Femoyer died of his wounds twenty minutes after touchdown. The Medal of Honor was presented to his family at the White House in May 1945. He had graduated from West Virginia University in 1943. A scholarship in his name was established there in 1946 and still funds engineering students today.

He had two missions. He finished both of them.

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June 10, 1945. Off Okinawa. A kamikaze hit the USS Porter and she was going down, and Lieutenant Richard McCool drove his gunboat straight alongside her.

McCool was 23 years old, from Tishomingo, Oklahoma, commanding LCS-122 in the picket fleet. For approximately an hour, under continuing air attack, he held his vessel next to the sinking destroyer and pulled survivors from the water. Then he brought them aboard and kept them alive.

The next day the kamikazes came for him. Two struck his vessel in quick succession, igniting fuel and ammunition fires on the bridge and deck. McCool was severely burned and wounded by debris. He organized his crew to fight the fires. He found a sailor trapped in a burning compartment and pulled him free with his bare hands, his own uniform on fire while he did it. His ship was saved. His crew and the Porter's survivors were evacuated to a hospital ship. McCool survived, after a long recovery.

In December 1945, President Truman presented him the Medal of Honor at the White House. McCool went on to complete a full Navy career, retiring as a captain in 1974 after thirty years of service. The Navy later named a Coastal Riverine Squadron facility in his honor. He died in March 2008 at age 86.

Two days. Two ships. One man who did not stop when the fires reached him.

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July 7, 1944. Before dawn on Saipan, the largest Japanese banzai charge of the Pacific war swept through American lines. It hit a field aid station. Inside were thirty wounded men and one surgeon.

Captain Ben Salomon was 30 years old, a dentist from Milwaukee who had been drafted in 1940 and trained as a field surgeon. He was not a combat soldier. When Japanese infantry entered the tents and began bayoneting the wounded, he engaged them at close range with his pistol, then with a captured rifle, then hand-to-hand. He ordered every man who could be moved carried to the rear. He stayed.

He moved to a machine gun at the front of the tent line and held the position while the last of the wounded cleared. When American forces retook the station later that day, they found him dead at the gun. Ninety-eight Japanese soldiers were dead in front of his position. His body had seventy-six rifle and bayonet wounds, twenty-four of them recorded as received before he died.

His Medal of Honor recommendation was rejected three times. Geneva Convention rules classified medical officers as non-combatants, and the Army held to that classification for fifty-eight years. In May 2002, President Bush presented the medal at the White House to representatives of the U.S. Army Dental Corps. Salomon was the first Army dentist ever to receive it.

Thirty wounded men made it out. He did not.

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