VALOR, AWARDS & CITATIONS

On May 11, 1898, crews from Marblehead and Nashville worked close to the Cuban shore under fire to cut submarine cables. The operation damaged communications but did not establish complete isolation of the port.

The snow was hard as concrete on the Belgian hillside, the January cold locking the ground into a sheet of ice. Staff Sergeant Curtis F. Shoup and the soldiers of his company lay sprawled on that frozen slope, their dark uniforms stark against the white as German machine guns raked the hillside. The attack had stalled almost as soon as it began. The enemy gun on the rising ground ahead had perfect fields of fire, sweeping every fold and hollow where the Americans tried to move.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire and relentless assault in the Pacific War.

The ridge ahead looked less like a battlefield and more like a shattered hillside of rock, clay, and smoke. It was early May 1945 on Okinawa, and the Marines of Company E had stalled below Hill 60. Japanese machine guns chattered from hidden bunkers. Mortar rounds crashed into the slope, showering the men with dirt and splinters of coral. Every attempt to move up the ridge drew a fresh burst of fire that pinned them flat.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire in the Pacific war.

The jungle pressed in on both sides of the Ormoc Road, a narrow ribbon of mud and broken pavement cutting through the hills near Limon on the island of Leyte. December rain had turned the ditches into brown pools. American infantrymen crouched behind a hasty roadblock of felled trees, sandbags, and wrecked vehicles, listening to the grinding approach of steel.

How a quiet engineering officer led hundreds from the dark below decks during one of World War II’s worst carrier disasters.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire in the Italian campaign of World War II.

The winter sky over the Anzio beachhead was a low, gray lid, pressing the sound of guns back down onto the men below. Along a shallow drainage ditch called the Fossa Femminamorta, muddy water slid past tufts of grass and shattered reeds. Somewhere ahead, beyond the next bend, German machine guns covered the open fields that stretched away from the ditch, anchoring a strongpoint that threatened the entire attack.

The American Civil War produced acts of courage on both sides, but the Union government sought a formal way to recognize extraordinary valor in its ranks. On March 25th, 1863, in a ceremony at the War Department in Washington, the first Medals of Honor were presented to a group of Union soldiers known as Andrews’ Raiders.

The ramps drop into waist-deep surf and chaos. It is the morning of October 20, 1944, on a stretch of shoreline the maps call Red Beach. Ahead lies a narrow band of sand, beyond it a low palm grove and flooded rice paddies. Somewhere in that green fringe, Japanese guns have the approaches bracketed. As the first waves of soldiers tried to cross, the beach turned into a killing ground.

How a 22-year-old Naval Reserve officer on USS Oklahoma chose his shipmates’ lives over his own at Pearl Harbor

A Medal of Honor story of selfless command in the skies of World War II.

High over Europe on Christmas Eve 1944, the sky is crowded with contrails. Hundreds upon hundreds of heavy bombers push east toward German airfields, the engines’ steady thunder mixing with clipped radio calls. At their head is a single Flying Fortress, the air commander’s ship, where Brigadier General Frederick Walker Castle studies the instruments and the grey cloud deck below.

The rain-soaked hills of Leyte were already torn open by days of fighting when Company A of the 306th Infantry pushed forward against a Japanese strongpoint that refused to break. Machine guns were dug into the slopes, firing down narrow approaches that funneled every American movement into sheets of bullets. A light tank inched ahead, meant to crack the defenses, but the infantry platoon walking behind it stalled under the storm of fire.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire and stubborn infantry grit in the Italian campaign of World War II.

The fields near Anzio were bare and unforgiving—flat, freshly plowed earth broken only by shallow furrows and a few low dikes. On a May morning in 1944, Staff Sergeant George John Hall lay pressed into that thin cover with the rest of his company, the dirt shaking under the hammering of German machine guns. Every time a man tried to crawl forward, grazing fire stitched the ground in front of him. Sniper rounds cracked overhead.

Night on Iwo Jima never really felt dark. The sky glowed faintly from flares and burning wreckage, and the volcanic ash underfoot seemed to swallow every step. In a shallow foxhole—a rough, shoulder-deep fighting position scraped into that ash—Private George Phillips stood watch while the rest of his squad finally slept. They had spent the night trading grenades and rifle fire with Japanese troops slipping through the lines.

A Medal of Honor story of selfless sacrifice and battlefield leadership in World War II.

The fuel gauges in Harold Bauer’s Wildcat fighter were already edging toward empty when the coastline of Guadalcanal slid beneath his wings. He had just finished leading a long, tense, overwater flight of Marine fighters up from Espiritu Santo, six hundred miles of nothing but ocean and cloud. Henderson Field, the hard-bitten airstrip the Marines called home, lay ahead as a thin strip of coral and mud, promising rest, repairs, and—most of all—gasoline.

An Ohio engineer officer who turned a rear-area camp into a last-ditch defensive line

How a Marine Corps fighter pilot sank a destroyer, then picked up a rifle to defend a tiny atoll at the dawn of World War II.

A Medal of Honor story of relentless courage under fire in the Pacific War of World War II.

The black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima offered no cover, only shallow shell holes and the hulks of stalled tanks. Late on February 23, 1945, Marines of the 21st Regiment lay pinned down, staring across a short stretch of open ground that felt a mile wide. Ahead of them, a maze of reinforced concrete pillboxes spat machine-gun fire in crossing patterns, every burst chewing fresh craters into the sand.