Audie Murphy

Audie Murphy was an American Army soldier, actor, and songwriter whose three-year Army service across 1942–1945 produced his decoration as the most-decorated American combat soldier of World War II — receiving 33 American medals (including the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and two Silver Stars) plus five French and one Belgian decoration. He was born Audie Leon Murphy on June 20, 1925, in Kingston, Texas, into a Texas sharecropping family of 12 children. His father Emmett Berry Murphy abandoned the family in 1936 and his mother Josie Bell Killian died in 1941 when Murphy was 16.

His 1942 Army enlistment — at age 17 (with his sister Corinne falsifying his birth certificate to add a year, after his initial June 1942 rejection by the Marines and Navy paratroopers as too short and underweight) — launched his World War II service. He was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division and shipped to North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Italy across 1943–1944.

His January 26, 1945 Medal of Honor action — at the Holtzwihr, France village in eastern France's Colmar Pocket — comprised his single-handed defense of his Company B position against a six-Tiger-tank and 250-soldier German counterattack by mounting a burning M10 tank destroyer and operating its .50-caliber machine gun for an hour while wounded in the leg. The action killed or wounded approximately 50 German soldiers and halted the German counterattack. The June 2, 1945 Medal of Honor presentation — at age 19, by Lieutenant General Alexander Patch in Salzburg, Austria — produced his American military decoration.

His 1948–1969 Hollywood acting career — launched by James Cagney's 1945 LIFE-magazine-cover-photograph recognition — produced 44 feature films including the 1955 autobiographical war drama To Hell and Back (in which he played himself, and which was based on his 1949 memoir of the same name). The film grossed $9.8 million worldwide and held the Universal Pictures highest-grossing-film record for 20 years until 1975's Jaws. His later life across the 1960s was shaped by his ongoing combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder and his later financial difficulties. He died on May 28, 1971, at age 45, in a private-plane crash near Roanoke, Virginia.

His name Audie derives from the Old English root meaning "old" or "noble strength." Audie was a rare but enduring American boys' and girls' name across the 20th century.