Audie Murphy: From Texas Sharecropper to America's Most Decorated Soldier

Kingston, Texas, in the 1920s was not a place that promised much. A small rural town in the northeastern corner of the Lone Star State, it was the kind of place where families scraped by on sharecropped land, moving from rent house to rent house, working someone else's soil for a single annual payment. It was here, in 1925, that Audie Murphy was born — the seventh of twelve children — into circumstances that offered little margin for anything but survival.

His father abandoned the family when Audie was 15. His mother died a year later. What followed was not a childhood so much as an early education in self-reliance. After school, he would take a shotgun into the woods of northeast Texas and hunt for the family's dinner. That necessity sharpened a marksmanship that would, years later, define the course of a war.

When Murphy tried to enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Marines turned him away — too small, too slight at five foot six. The Army took him. By January 1945, he was at the Colmar Pocket in France, a 19-year-old soldier who, as his unit pulled back under heavy German assault, climbed atop a burning tank destroyer and held off an entire company of enemy soldiers alone for nearly an hour. The act earned him the Medal of Honor and, by the war's end, every military combat award for valor the U.S. Army offers.

He came home to parades and banquets, and in July 1945, his photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine. That image caught the eye of actor James Cagney, who invited Murphy to Hollywood. What followed was a 21-year acting career — unlikely, uneven at times, but real. Murphy himself seemed uncertain about the acclaim. He accepted his medals, but felt no thrill in receiving them. By his own account, he returned from Europe with a darkened view of the world.

On May 28, 1971, Murphy died in a plane crash in the hills of Virginia. He was 45. The arc of his life — from a Depression-era cabin in East Texas to the front lines of World War Two to the Hollywood screen — remains one of the more striking in American military history. What he did at the Colmar Pocket, outnumbered and under fire, was not the stuff of legend built after the fact. It was witnessed, documented, and recognized by the country he served.