Murphy Audie - The price of valor : the life of Audie Murphy, Americas most decorated hero of World War II

THE PRICE OF VALOR

Copyright 2015 by David A. Smith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

Regnery History is a trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation; Regnery is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, David A., 1966-

The price of valor : the life of Audie Murphy / David A. Smith.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-62157-384-5

1. Murphy, Audie, 1924-1971. 2. United States. Army--Biography. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Western Front. 4. Medal of Honor--Biography. 5. Soldiers--United States--Biography. 6. Motion picture actors and actresses--United States--Biography. I. Title.

U53.M87S65 2015

940.541273092--dc23

[B]

2015005216

Published in the United States by

Regnery History

An imprint of Regnery Publishing

A Division of Salem Media Group

300 New Jersey Ave NW

Washington, DC 20001

www.RegneryHistory.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information on discounts and terms, please visit our website: www.Regnery.com.

Distributed to the trade by

Perseus Distribution

250 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10107

In Memory of

My Friend and Colleague

Dan Greene

CONTENTS

H is grave is marked by a standard Arlington Cemetery tombstone of white marble, just like the hundreds of thousands of others. It stands at the end of a row, shaded by the branches of a massive Willow Oak tree, beside the road that passes north of the amphitheater near the Tomb of the Unknowns. Groundskeepers built a flagstone walkway around the tree to accommodate the steady trickle of visitors. Each day, small groups of people drift over, some of them clutching a map from the visitor center, obviously searching for the grave. They pause and a few take off their hats. They speak to each other in hushed tones. Some obviously know more about the record of achievement that is abbreviated on the front of the stone than do others. The Medal of Honor, one man says softly to his companion. They dont just give those away.

Seen from afar, among the orderly ranks and files of headstones this one is indistinguishable from all the others. Approaching closer, one may notice a small American flag pushed into the soft ground beside it. Its story of honor and heroism is only hinted at by the letters inscribed on the gravestone.

Audie L. Murphy occupies a distinct place in the roster of famous Americans. During his short, troubled life, he served as an American archetype in at least two ways. First and foremost, he was a soldier and decorated war herothe most decorated American soldier of the Second World War. His 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.

Second, Audie Murphy was a movie star. He made nearly fifty movies in a career that spanned twenty-three yearsten times as long as the war experience that made him famousand during his peak of popularity received more fan mail than almost any other actor. The quality of the movies he made varied widely as he took on westerns, war movies, and serious contemporary scripts. Some directors with whom he worked coaxed stirring, praiseworthy performances from him that seemed to portend a hopeful career. In other films, critics would pointedly and acidulously note that he seemed lost, detached, or simply going through the motions: an actor distracted, a man unable to engage.

Murphy was not alone in being a movie star who served in the war. Other leading men like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart did so, although neither was as decorated as Murphy himself would be. Unlike them or, say, baseball player Ted Williams, Audie Murphy was not an established star celebrity who went off to war, but instead a poor boy from Texas who volunteered for the Army in 1942, a year before his eighteenth birthday. He endured some of the toughest sustained infantry combat in the European Theater. Few people beyond his division had heard his name when he became the most decorated soldier of the war and was suddenly hailed as a hero.

In the summer of 1945, his face, impossibly young and fresh, appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Life at the time was the supreme arbiter of all things American, the herald and billboard of the American Century, and to appear on its cover was to embody all that the country wanted to think of itself. More than anyone else, Murphy became the very incarnation of the average American who went to war, performed valorous and selfless deeds, and then came home to resume his lifeexcept that in Murphys case, he did not return to the poor, small town, rural Texas that he knew but to a life in Hollywood and of celebrity.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth, said journalist Ernie Pyle, who reported the news from the Italian front while Audie Murphy was fighting there. When the war was done, Murphy was a national hero, and to his embarrassment and obvious ill-ease he was treated like a dignitary, given parades, and made to give speeches. Hardly before the shock of being home had worn off, he found himself summoned to Hollywood by one of the biggest stars in the movie business.

There were, of course, other Congressional Medal of Honor winners and many other heroes in the war, but few became permanent celebrities, let alone of the Hollywood sort; and in Audie Murphy the tension between the real-life heroism he performed on the battlefield and the celebrity that was awarded him afterward was almost always evident.

Jack Valenti, a fellow Texan and veteran, journalist, and longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, wrote that the important fact, the significance of Audie Murphys valor, is that he was a simple, ordinary youngster, with no indications or outcroppings

Indeed, one of the complexities of Audie Murphys story is that he did seem on the surface so thoroughly simple and ordinary. It was a central ingredient, even, of his cultural image. What made him so appealing, however, was not his being average but rather his being emblematicthe ideal of everyday American virtue, an embodiment of Norman Rockwell America. He was how the country wanted to think of itself.

Yet, lurking below the Norman Rockwelllike image of Audie Murphy was what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, from which he so clearly and devastatingly suffered. During World War II it was called battle fatigue and in the war before that shell shock. Whatever the label, it plagued him for the rest of his life after the war. It was a condition which at the time was little understood, and for the treatment of which there was almost no help available. He was aware of how it affected him and sometimes gave way to bitterness about it.