Audie Leon Murphy was not just the most-decorated U.S. combat soldier of World War II but in all American military history. Among his 33 honors and decorations was the prestigious Congressional Medal of Honor, the U.S. military's highest award for valor, three medals from France, and one from Belgium. Yet at war’s end, he was not even old enough to vote. The young dirt-poor boy from rural Texas with only five years of formal education became the face of the victorious American soldier.
Audie was born on a sharecropper's farm in North Texas on June 20, 1925. One of nine surviving siblings out of the twelve born to Emmett Berry Murphy and his wife, Josie Bell Murphy, his early life could best be described as “hard-scrabble”. Growing up poor around small towns like Farmersville and Celeste, life was tough in the Murphy household. At the young age of 5, Audie was already working in the fields, chopping corn or picking cotton alongside his father and mother. Farm labor in the 1930’s was …show more content…
He said, “I had always wanted to be a soldier” (4). And on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, he began trying. At first, he tried to enlist with the Marines, but was rejected because he was underage. After also being refused enlistment in the Paratroopers for being both too small at 5'5" and underweight at 110 lbs., he enlisted in the U.S. Army infantry. Uncertainty remains whether Audie was seventeen or eighteen when he enlisted. Many sources state he was born June 20, 1924, and some confusion was created by a falsified birth certificate Audie Murphy filed at the Hunt County, Texas, Courthouse with the help of his older sister, Corrine, so he could join the military before he was legally of age. Audie later admitted, on more than one occasion, that he lied about his age