Audi Murphy was a 19-year-old farm [music] boy from Texas who became the most decorated American soldier of World War II. But behind the medals was a mind full of ghosts. In this video, we go through the men Audie Murphy killed in combat, the ones he wrote about, the ones that haunted his dreams, and [music] the one battle where he stood alone on a burning tank and held off an entire company of German soldiers.
This is not a Hollywood story. This is what actually happened in his own words on the battlefields of Sicily, Italy, [music] and France. The boy who wanted to kill. Yeti Leon Murphy was born in 1925 in Kingston, Texas into a family of 12 children, poor as he later recalled. He could barely remember a time when he did not work. His father abandoned the family early and his mother died while he was still a child.
By the time World War II broke out, Murphy was a teenager with little to show for his life except a hunting rifle and an innate talent with guns. He attempted to enlist as soon as the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Marines refused him and the paratroopers turned him away, saying he was undersized and underweight for combat.
The army eventually accepted him, but an officer at boot camp almost transferred him to the cooking staff, [music] believing Murphy too weak to serve as an infantryman. Murphy fought this, insisting that he wanted to fight at the front. In early 1943, Murphy shipped out for North Africa as a replacement for the Third Infantry Division, [music] 15th Infantry Regiment, Company B.
He saw his first action during the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, [music] where he had no experience firing at another human being before the engagement. Although he had prepared for months for this moment in his life, no amount of training can ready a person for the visceral reality of killing. What distinguishes Murphy’s legend from that of any other soldier is that he wrote it all down himself.
In 1949, he published a memoir titled To [music] Hell and Back with his friend, the journalist David Spec Mccclure, in which he recounted his wartime experiences in a matter-of-act almost clinical manner. The text [music] contains no grandiose pronouncements about his deeds, only a list of the men he had killed, one by one across each campaign.
This article is a series of those moments of individuals and events recorded by Murphy himself in his official capacity as a soldier alongside citations of his military commendations and the testimony of historians who have researched his time in the war. It is not a single narrative but a confluence of specific incidents in which Audi Murphy took [music] or was forced to take a life each of which changed him in subtle ways.
By the war’s end, the undersized Texan teenager had been credited by the US Army with the killing [music] of 241 enemy soldiers. This number is almost impossible to grasp. So, let us instead examine the particular moments in which Murphy realized these kills as he recounts and reflects upon them in his memoir. Many haunted him for the rest of his life. One particular kill earning him the Medal of Honor.
And by the time the guns fell silent in 1945, Murphy would describe himself as having ceased to see killing as an act of heroism, [music] but rather as something close to routine. This transformation from a naive teenager who felt nothing during his first firefight to a stoic killer forms the [music] subject of this video, which examines the real life exploits of Audi Murphy, soldier, not the Hollywood legend he would later become. The first kill, Sicily.
Every soldier has his first kill. [music] An Audi Murphy’s he wrote about in a most unpleasant mix of matter-of-act detail and personal horror. The Allies invaded Sicily on July 10th, 1943. Murphy’s troops landed a few days later in the day, and Murphy [music] was disappointed. He had hoped to be in the Vanguard, not the cleanup crew.
His first taste of [music] combat came on the very first day when he watched helplessly as an enemy soldier was cut down by shellfire and died within minutes. But his first kill came 2 days later. Murphy was in a small group of scouts racing ahead of his company one morning when they spotted two Italian officers riding two [music] magnificent white horses.
The officers should have surrendered when ordered, but instead they leapt into [music] their steeds and galloped away. Murphy didn’t hesitate. He fired two shots from a kneeling position, [music] and the men tumbled from their horses. In his memoir, Murphy wrote of the first kill in a manner that caused many to reassess what they knew of him as a person.
He felt none of the usual mixture of pride and revulsion. Instead, he experienced [music] a dull, dispassionate weariness that marked the start of a long, dark period for him. It is this particular incident that allows us to glimpse the real unvarnished Murphy. The man was not some bloodthirsty killer who took joy in his work, nor was he some squeamish hero who wilted at the first sight of combat.
Rather, he seems to have experienced a kind of emotional detachment, a switch being thrown in his brain that changed him from a frightened novice into a hardened killer. A superior officer questioned him later about his actions in the firefight, asking if he had not considered that the enemy might have been trying to escape rather than fight.
But Murphy had no answer except that it was the job of a soldier to do his duty. For if they had not done so, he would have been killed himself. Murphy was promoted to corporal for his part in the fight. And according to some sources, he later caught malaria while in Sicily, an illness he would suffer from in fits and bursts for much of the remainder of the war. The fighting in Sicily was brief, but it set the pattern for the rest of Murphy’s combat career.
He learned quickly and kept moving forward. He fought in several battles in mainland Italy, which [music] proved bloodier and more difficult than anything he had faced in Sicily. And within months he was promoted from corporal to sergeant. A most impressive rise for any soldier at any stage in his career.
The Volterno River and the Anzio tank. After Sicily fell, the Allies pushed into mainland Italy and Murphy’s division landed at Serno in September 1943. This is where the war stopped being occasional and started being constant. One of the lesserknown incidents from this stretch [music] happened near Mñana Monte Lungo during the Allied assault on what was called the Voluro line. Murphy and his company came under attack by a group of seven German soldiers.
His company fought back and repelled the [music] attack, killing three of the Germans and capturing four others as prisoners. This kind of small, brutal skirmish rarely makes it into movies, but for the men who lived through it, [music] it was just as real as any famous battle. Days later, Murphy was formally promoted to sergeant. Then came Anio.
In January 1944, [music] the Allies launched a surprise amphibious landing south of Rome, hoping to outflank German defenses at Monte Casino. Murphy’s division was part of the second wave. The landing caught the Germans offg guard, [music] and by midnight, Allied troops had already advanced several miles in land against only light resistance, [music] but the Allied command hesitated to push forward fast enough, and the Germans used that pause to rush in reinforcements. What followed was months of brutal, [music] grinding trench warfare on the flat,
muddy plane around Anzio. [music] It was here that Murphy carried out one of the boldest single actions of his early career. On March 2nd of 1944, a formation of German tanks was rolling toward American lines. Murphy called in artillery strikes that temporarily disabled the lead tank, [music] and its crew tried to repair it after dark.
Instead of waiting, Murphy decided to finish [music] the job himself. He led a small squad close to the tank, told [music] his men to cover him, and crawled forward alone. He threw two improvised gasoline bombs at the [music] tank that failed to ignite, then pulled the pin on a grenade and dropped it through the hatch, but even that explosion did not put out a light burning inside [music] the tank.
The Germans spotted him and opened fire. Under a storm of bullets, Murphy quickly set up a rifle grenade launcher and blew the treads off one side of the tank, disabling it for good before escaping without a scratch. This kind of episode repeated itself again and again during the four months the allies were pinned at Anzio.
Murphy and his fellow soldiers also destroyed the crew of a German [music] tank while sheltering in an abandoned farmhouse. One of many small deadly encounters that rarely got written about in the newspapers back home, but added steadily to Murphy’s growing combat record.
By the time the allies finally broke out of the Anzio beach head and pushed toward Rome in the summer of 1944, Murphy had already been recommended for multiple Valor awards, [music] and his men had started to see him as something more than an ordinary sergeant. He was becoming the man officers wanted beside them in a firefight, and the man enemy soldiers were about to learn to fear even more in the campaign still ahead in southern France, the death of Latty Typton.
If there is one moment in Audi Murphy’s long psychological evolution as a soldier that historians can pinpoint as the moment when it all changed, it was August 1944 during the Allied invasion of southern France known as Operation Dragoon. Murphy’s best friend in the army was another [music] Texan by the nickname of Snuffy, whose real name was Latty Tipton.
On August 15th, [music] 1944, Murphy’s platoon was the lead unit tasked with capturing a hill near Ramatu, France, nicknamed [music] Pillbox Hill. Murphy went ahead of his men with only an M1 carbine [music] and shot two Germans heading towards him before running out of bullets and having to retreat to get a machine gun from a crew who refused to fire when given [music] the chance.
Murphy used this machine gun to take out several German foxholes before finding himself in another firefight where the gun was again emptied. Murphy went back down the hill for his carbine when his [music] best friend insisted on tagging along. Together they worked their way up the hillside until they encountered a group of Germans who appeared to be [music] surrendering. One of the Germans opened fire and instantly killed Tipton when Murphy exposed himself in an attempt to take him prisoner.
[music] Murphy’s reaction was immediate and vicious. With a vengeful fury, he single-handedly destroyed the German machine gun crew that had just killed his friend and then took out several more foxholes using the weapons he had captured from the enemy. For this display of valor, Murphy was awarded the [music] Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest honor for valor in the US military.
But the medal was [music] never what mattered, and Murphy said so himself. He later told his coowwriter that after Tipton’s death, he grew frustrated with watching men die [music] who had families waiting for them to return home and that he didn’t see the point in risking 30 men when one could do the job. So, he decided to be that one man.
He also told his coowwriters something simpler and sadder about his friend, that Tipton had done just as much as he had, and the only thing Tipton got for it was a wooden cross over his grave. Murphy dedicated his memoir to hell and back to Tipton [music] and another friend killed in the war, saying that if there was any glory to be found in it, it belonged to men like them, not to him.
This is the moment when Murphy’s story [music] stops being about survival and begins the long march towards obsession. From here on out in the war, Murphy began taking far more [music] risks and getting far more aggressive and reckless than many of his superiors would have preferred.
That same pattern of behavior would lead him all the way through the fall of 1944 and directly [music] into the coldest, bloodiest single day of his military career, taking [music] place in a frozen field just outside a small French village called Holtzier. Holtzvir, the stand on the burning tank. By January 1945, Murphy had been wounded multiple times, [music] had survived malaria, and had been promoted again and again for his conduct in combat.
He was now a second lieutenant [music] commanding company B of the 15th Infantry Regiment near the French village of Holtz in the Kulmar pocket region of [music] Alsace. On January 26th, 1945, Murphy’s company came under [music] attack by six German tanks and several hundred infantrymen. Some accounts described [music] the attacking force as six Jag Panther tank destroyers and more than 100 German soldiers.
Whatever the [music] exact count, it was an overwhelming force compared to what Murphy had left. His company had already been ground down by weeks of brutal winter fighting. And by this stage, some records describe his effective combat strength as reduced to a fraction of full company size.
Murphy ordered his men to fall back into the woods for cover [music] while he stayed behind alone to direct artillery fire onto the advancing German force by field telephone. As the attack pressed closer, German fire struck a nearby American tank [music] destroyer and set it on fire, forcing its crew to abandon it. Instead of retreating, Murphy climbed onto the burning vehicle.
He climbed onto the tank destroyer, which could have exploded at any moment, and began firing its 50 caliber machine gun directly at the advancing German troops. The Germans sent a squad crawling up a ditch trying to reach him and kill him at close range, [music] but Murphy spotted them and cut the entire squad down before they could get close.
He remained alone on that flaming open topped tank destroyer for roughly an hour as German infantry and tanks continued to advance and pour fire directly at him. By the time the attack broke, Murphy had killed more than 20 German soldiers from that single position. Despite being wounded in the leg during the fight, he only stopped firing [music] when the phone line connecting him to the artillery batteries was finally cut by enemy shell fire.
Even then, Murphy was not finished. He organized what remained of his men into a counterattack and helped drive the German force completely out of Holtz. For this single action, Murphy received the Medal of Honor on April 23rd, 1945 at the age of just 19. When reporters later asked him why he had taken on an entire company of German soldiers by himself, his answer was short. They were killing my friends.
By the time Germany surrendered a few months later, Murphy had received a staggering collection of honors, including the Distinguished Service Cross, two silver stars, two Bronze Stars for Valor, three Purple Hearts, and the Medal of Honor, along with decorations from France and Belgium, making him by any measure the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War. The weight he carried home.
The murder was not over when the war was over. It followed him to his sleep, marriages, and Hollywood career [music] as one of the most successful western movie stars. After the war, Murphy was diagnosed with battle fatigue or shell shock, which is now referred to as post-traumatic [music] stress disorder.
He battled insomnia for the years that followed, kept a loaded pistol beside his pillow, and was once even said to have had frightening flashbacks that his friends and family could barely comprehend. What Murphy did that was extraordinary for his time was that he did not keep his suffering private. In the 1960s, when the Vietkong started sending soldiers [music] back to the United States, Murphy spoke publicly and candidly about his experiences, [music] urging Congress to provide better mental health care for Vietnam War veterans.
Decades before the Pentagon acknowledged combat related mental illness as a serious problem, Murphy was one of the first to speak publicly about it and suffer from PTSD. This was an act of bravery as millions of Americans from different backgrounds have been unable to shake off the violent images from their past.
Today, many historians believe that Murphy’s most notable legacy and [music] a significant contribution to society were his efforts to destigmatize mental health issues for veterans. His memoir is his most personal expression of this as it captures the terror and uneasiness [music] he felt best. Reading to hell and back, one does not experience Murphy’s heroism.
Instead, one sees a man who lost a part of himself during [music] the war and has not yet found it. Murphy spoke of watching friends die in a way that made him lose all sense of morality. He told the story of a young girl writing to her father who died right after he was sent to war. The last thing Murphy saw before shooting was the letter. [music] And the only reason he did not die was that a grenade had bounced off the tree instead of him and his friend. [music] You must have known.
The buddy said, “I ought to have your commission when I get back next time.” Murphy went on to make a movie about his exploits in [music] which he played the leading role. He went on to lead a successful Hollywood career as a western movie star.
[music] Yet those close to him say they have never shaken off the war and that it haunted Murphy for the rest of his life. He died in an airplane accident in 1971 at the age of 45 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His grave, which is said to be the second most visited place in all of Arlington, is littered with flowers except for [music] President John F.
Kennedy’s. The number 2 F41 will forever be associated with Audi Murphy’s name in the history books. But what this account tells us is not about the bravado of a young man who lost his life in the line of duty, but rather about a teenager who had to grow up too fast and was unable to comprehend the horrors of war.
Every kill he mentioned in his book was [music] a real person, a moment, and a part of himself that he would have to live with for the rest of his life, paying a price [music] too high for valor. Audi Murphy’s story was never simply about how many men he killed or how many medals he earned. Behind the legend [music] was a young soldier who carried the weight of those experiences long after the war ended.
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