It’s a Saturday afternoon in 1955, and I am sitting with my father in the Palace Theater in Lorain, Ohio. I am 7 years old, and we are waiting for the start of a war movie called To Hell and Back. It is, my dad tells me, a true story, and the hero is a real hero playing himself. His name, I learned that day, was Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of all time.
As David A. Smith, senior lecturer in history at Baylor, writes in his introduction, Murphy’s “actions in World War II were of the sort from which chroniclers, balladeers, and poets since the days of the ancient Greeks have composed legends. He was the man charging headlong into fortified enemy positions, holding his own against an onslaught of enemy soldiers, defying the odds. Always brave, always valorous. Always alone.” And now, largely unknown to anyone under the age of 50.
Audie Murphy grew up in Hunt County, Texas, one of the many children of a feckless alcoholic father and a worn-out mother. Forced to quit school after the fifth grade, he learned to shoot partly to put food on the family table. (“If I missed,” he later said, “we didn’t eat.”) Once the United States entered World War II, Murphy tried to enlist in the Marines, but they wouldn’t have him. He was just five-feet-five-inches tall and weighed all of 112 pounds. Lying about his age—he was only 17—Murphy finally managed to join the Army, where he was soon “classified as a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) specialist and assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, of the 3rd Infantry Division.”
He killed his first man in Sicily—actually, two men. “I have shed my first blood,” he later recalled in his bestselling autobiography To Hell and Back (1949). “I feel no qualms; no pride, no remorse. There is only a weary indifference that will follow me through the war.” He will be in combat for 20 months and will ultimately kill, in face-to-face encounters, at least 240 enemy soldiers. Generally, he is cool in battle: “ ‘When I get in a situation where it’s tense and everything,’ he remarked later, ‘things seem to slow down for me. It doesn’t seem a blur. Things become very clarified.’ ” But when his closest friend, Lattie Tipton, is shot by a sniper, he goes on a rampage. As Smith writes:
He received the Distinguished Service Cross and would be wounded three times, earning a Purple Heart with two oak clusters. He once nearly died when gangrene set into his wounds, but he always survived to fight again. And after every battle, he would immediately strip his gun and clean it. The readiness is all.
On January 26, 1945, near the small village of Holtzwihr, France, Second Lieutenant Murphy and his men were attacked by six German Tiger tanks supported by around 250 infantry in white winter gear. In short order, the Americans’ two tank destroyers were hit and disabled. Murphy then ordered his men to withdraw, while he stayed on to direct an artillery barrage. The Germans, however, kept on coming, “as though nothing would stop them.” Smith then describes what was, to my young self, the most thrilling moment of the autobiographical movie:
The .50 caliber still worked.
When he squeezed the trigger “the chatter of the gun is like sweet music. Three krauts stagger and crumple in the snow.” He swept the gun across his field of fire, peering through the swirling smoke searching for more targets. He “killed them in the draws, in the meadows, in the woods—wherever he saw them,” one eyewitness said later. Murphy knew that the German tanks would break off their advance if they had no infantry to accompany them, so he tried to take out as many soldiers as he could. The artillery phone continued to ring. “How close are they to your position?” came the frantic voice. “Just hold the phone and I’ll let you talk to one of the bastards,” Murphy shouted back, a retort that would soon become famous.
Even now, 60 years later, if I close my eyes, I can see Murphy in the film, standing on that wrecked tank destroyer, blasting away, alone, indomitable. As Smith reports, “Those who were witnesses to Audie Murphy’s feat were incredulous at what had transpired. Some could barely believe what they had seen. ‘He saved our lives,’ said one soldier from Company B. ‘If he hadn’t done what he did, the Germans would have annihilated us.’ It was, said a lieutenant who was one of the forward artillery observers, ‘the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a man do in combat.’ ”
Soon afterward, Audie Murphy learned that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor. In all, he won 24 different medals—and later gave many of them away to small children.
What does a hero do when the war is over? Murphy returned to Texas, to parades and citywide celebrations. The farmboy with an angelic smile became, in Smith’s words, “the ideal of ‘everyday American’ virtue, an embodiment of Norman Rockwell America. He was how the country wanted to think of itself.” Life featured him on its cover, where he caught the attention of James Cagney, who had recently started his own film company. Cagney liked the vet’s boyish good looks and invited him to Hollywood to work in a movie.
In short order, Murphy was playing bit parts in westerns, then starring in John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and gradually establishing himself as a bankable, if somewhat wooden, actor. As Smith writes, “He made nearly fifty movies in a career that spanned twenty-three years—ten times as long as the war experiences that made him famous—and during his peak of popularity received more fan mail than almost any other actor.”
He also gambled obsessively, cheated on both his wives, and always carried a gun, which he kept under his pillow at night. He would frequently wake up screaming, reliving in his dreams the deaths of his buddies and the horrors of war. David McClure, the coauthor of To Hell and Back, knew about his friend’s demons: “It is generally assumed that Audie easily readjusted to civilian life, making a fortune as a movie star, and living relatively happily ever after. Almost the reverse is true. Let us hope that God did forgive him. His battered nervous system never did.”
It’s clear now that he suffered deeply from post-traumatic stress disorder: “There was always,” Smith says, “a profound melancholy just under his surface along with a fatalism that was completely at odds with his image.” In 1971, the then-middle-aged veteran was facing financial ruin and his best movies—To Hell and Back and the dark western No Name on the Bullet (1959)—were behind him. Still, he was hoping for a comeback when a small plane in which he was a passenger crashed in Virginia. Murphy was a month short of his 46th birthday.
When praised for his war exploits, America’s most decorated soldier would always say that the real heroes were dead. He may have meant it in more ways than one. In retelling Audie Murphy’s story, The Price of Valor reminds us that soldiers, then as now, may survive the trauma of battle but still lose their lives. “Before the war, I’d get excited and enthused about a lot of things,” Murphy once quietly told John Huston, “but not any more.”
Michael Dirda, weekly reviewer for the Washington Post, is the author of the forthcoming Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books.
