April 8, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Audie Murphy's story is one of the quintessential American stories; yet, chances are, many Americans have never even heard of his name. Here's his story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and we're about
to tell you one of the quintessential American stories about
one of the most esteemed of our American vets. Yet
chances are many of you have never heard this man's
name before. And now let's go to the story of
Audie Murphy.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
He had over two hundred and fifty kills in World
War Two. He is America's most decorated soldier, having received
every award, citation, and decoration the Army could give, including
the Medal of Honor, all before he turned twenty, though
he looked fourteen. He became a movie star and wrote
(00:52):
seventeen songs which were recorded by guys like Dean Martin,
Eddie Fisher, Porter Wagner, Jimmy Dean, and Charlie Pride. He
wrote a best selling autobiography and starred in its film adaptation,
which became Universal Studio's highest grossing film for twenty years
until Jaws broke its record in nineteen seventy five. His
(01:14):
grave is the second most visited at Arlington National Cemetery
Jfkasus the first. Yet, this five foot five, one hundred
and ten pound babyfaced hero is practically unknown in America today,
which is astonishing considering just fifty plus years ago he
received more fan mail than any other celebrity in Hollywood.
(01:38):
To find out more about this American hero, let's take
a listen to the man who wrote the book. Doctor
David A. Smith is an American history professor at Baylor
University in Waco, Texas. He wrote The Price of Valor,
The Life of Audie Murphy, America's most decorated hero of
World War Two. I asked him, who is Murphy?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
It's interesting because nobody else in American history combines these
two sort of archetypal roles as he does. I mean,
he's the most decorated soldier from the biggest war We've
ever fought. And at the same time, or right after,
he was a movie star at a time in Hollywood
(02:22):
when movie stars had a cultural cachet that they would
never have again. And one of the things that I
find so fascinating about him is that he brings these
roles together. He brings together the role of genuine hero
and celebrity, and they don't match. They don't match at all.
I mean, a hero is a very particular thing. A
(02:45):
hero is an important cultural element within any culture. A
hero is how we learn what virtue is. I mean,
a hero is someone who, for a small amount of time,
embodies a particular virtue. I mean, a virtue is an
idea and we have trouble, you know, relating to it
(03:05):
until we see it in the flesh. And that's what
a hero is. And that's what he was. First, selflessness, determination, duty,
patriotism is that whole bit. And then gosh, then he
becomes a movie star, and he hated being a movie star.
He didn't like movie stars. His first wife, to whom
(03:28):
he was married for just a year, wanted to be
a movie star badly, and that's what she was in
Hollywood for. And that's what drove them apart. Because he
hated Hollywood. He hated the phoniness of celebrity, and he
disparaged his own talents. He refused to hang around other actors.
(03:50):
Mostly when he was on the set, he would hang
around with the horse wranglers and the stuntmen and the
props guys. And it's fascinating to me that here, in
this one person, you have extreme heroism and extreme celebrities
trying to mix. And his story is a story of
(04:11):
how we've confused them today.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
In mythology and legend, a hero is a man of
divine ancestry who was endowed with great courage and strength,
celebrated for his brave exploits, and favored by the gods.
In reality, Audie was all these things, but as to
the part of ancestry, it was far from divine. Here's
Joanne Madtern, author of Audie Murphy fact or Fiction.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Audie Murphy was born on June twentieth, nineteen twenty five,
and he was born in a little town called Kingston, Texas.
His parents were sharecroppers, and that means that they picked
cotton in fields, but they didn't own the fields. The
fields were owned by someone else, and in return for working,
(05:02):
all they got was a little shack to live in
and a tiny little bit of the money that they earned.
Everything else went to the owner of the field. The
house they lived in was no more than a little shack.
It had no running water, no bathrooms, no electricity. They
had twelve children all together, and as soon as the
kids were old enough, maybe four or five years old,
(05:25):
they went to work in the cotton fields with their parents.
Audie later said that he just worked and that it
was a full time job just existing. In fact, when
Audie was born, his mother Josie, couldn't take time off
to take care of the baby, so she put him
in a baby swing and took him out in the
cotton fields with her. Audie's father his name was Emmett
(05:47):
and Emmett's He was pretty lazy, more interested in gambling
and having a good time. And the only time they
got any meat to eat was if Audie and his
brothers went out and hunted them. A neighbor once lent
Audi his gun and it had eight bullets in it,
and Audie went hunting. It came back with four rabbits
(06:09):
and four bullets still left in the gun. That's how
good a shot he was.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Here's Audie's sister, Nadine Murphy.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
He got a little twenty two. I don't know where,
but he was really good at it. He can kill
a rabbit on a run. Well, that's how that's how
we believe him dead. That's how we ate. He would
go out and kill squirreld rabbits, and I guess we
could say we're a live day because of him. He
was my hero even then, before he ever did anything great,
(06:36):
he was great to me.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Then here again is doctor Smith.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
One of the things that defines him throughout his entire
life is his sense of duty to the people who
are depending on him. He felt his duty towards his
younger siblings in a profound way.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Times were beginning to unfold that would shape his destiny forever.
The country was in the throes of the Great Depression. Now,
at one point things got so bad for the Murphys
that they moved into a railroad box car.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
When he was thirteen years old, father left the family
and he never came back. So now Ordi had to
step up and be the man of the house, and
in order to do that, he had to quit school.
So he never got farther than the fifth grade. But
the person that was hardest hit in the family was
his mother, Josie, and in nineteen forty one she died
of pneumonia. And he said her early death was not
(07:31):
unusual in the story of the sharecropper family, particularly when
the sharecropper himself runs off, leaving his wife to take
care of their children. Anyway, so Addie was only sixteen,
he had younger sisters and a brother to take care of,
and he couldn't take care of them because he had
to work, so they were sent to an orphanage and
then everything changed.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Everything changed. Here's Murphy historian Michael West.
Speaker 6 (07:58):
Well, the time that the Japane He's bombed Pearl Harper,
December seventh. I believe Audie Murphy and Monroe Hackney were
actually on a double date at a movie theater, and
after they returned from the movie theater they learned the
course of the bombing. Well, immediately all the young men,
or a number of the young men chose to join.
Well that included Audie Murphy as well.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Well.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
At that time Audie was only about seventeen and a
half years old, plus he was plagued with that baby face,
and immediately the recruiters recognized that he's too young. He
tries Marines, they virtually laugh him out. He has visions
of joining the paratroopers. Well that never works out, so
finally he is just simply run off in essence, and
(08:44):
he he doesn't join.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
So Audie's older sister Karinn got him a false birth
certificate that showed he was a year older than he was.
So after he turned eighteen, as it said on his
birth certificate, he was actually only seventeen, he went back
and joined the army, and he was accepted into the infantry.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
And what a story so far. I'd been a fan
of the movie, but just didn't know, just didn't know
the circumstances, my goodness, losing a father and a mother
and then having kids, orphan, living out.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Of a box car.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And when we come back more on the life of
Audie Murphy, this is our American stories, and we return
(10:11):
to our American stories. We're telling the story of Audie Murphy.
And if you've never seen the movie to Helen Back,
it comes on TV all the time this time, don't
skip it. It's terrific and it should be a remake.
His life's story should be a remake too. So everybody
today knows who Audie Murphy is. Folks, if you love
(10:33):
the stories we tell about this great country, and especially
the stories of America's rich past, know that all of
our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture
and faith, are brought to us by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't cut
to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you with their free
(10:55):
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
learn more. Let's return to Greg Hangler and Audie's story.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
The Army infantry was the most accepting of recruits who
appeared to possess the least amount of skills needed for combat.
Addie Murphy attended two boot camps before seeing any action,
and in both camps, the army tried to protect the
little recruit they nicknamed baby. They tried to put him
in their post office and then their kitchen, but Audie
(11:26):
would have none of it.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Nobody pushed him around. I mean, he was impressively tough
from the very beginning, and he would literally push himself
until he collapsed. The guys he met there at boot
camp remembered that he was clearly in his element, even
though he was small stature, even though he was baby faced,
and his superiors wanted to find someplace for him that
(11:52):
he might be a better fit, because honestly, he wasn't
a good fit in the infantry until you got to
know him. And he said, absolutely not. I want to
be in the infantry. I want to march with this
pack that's as big as I am and I'm gonna
do it. And his superiors reluctantly let him stay, but
they made a good decision.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Audie was assigned to Company B, the fifteenth Infantry Regiment,
third Division. No one could know that this poor tenant
farmer's son would one day help to cause the demise
of Hitler's promised one thousand year Reich by performing such
wondrous deeds in battle that they seemed almost mythological. Here's
(12:33):
one of them.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
The first time he goes into combat with the third
Division is in the invasion of Sicily, and Laddie Tipton
is a soldier in his company, and they are extremely close.
Laddie has an estranged wife and a daughter, and Audie Murphy,
I don't know if I want to say, envies him
(12:55):
for this, but Audie Murphy realizes how special this is
to have a wife and a daughter, because he, you know,
he doesn't have much in the way of family. And
he talks to Laddie about his daughter all the time
and says, you know, you're gonna get back to see her.
You're gonna get back to her, You're gonna be a
great father. And then you know, they come ashore in
(13:17):
France together in August to forty four, and they're fighting
their way up this hill, he and Laddie. They're working
their way up this hill in the face of a
whole repeated series of German machine gun in placements, and
they they get one German foxhold to surrender to them,
and they wave a white flag and Laddie says, okay,
(13:40):
they're surrendering. We can go get him, and Audie says, no, no, no,
stay down. There are other people up there. And a
German sniper from someplace else up on the hill hits
Laddie in the head with a bullet and he collapses
right down into Audie's lap, and he sort of, I
don't want to say, goes nuts, but he grabs a
gun and just charges up this jill, in and out
(14:01):
of drag and in and out of foxhold, and then
he gets a German gun and goes after other foxholds
and he clears out that entire skill side and everybody says, oh,
that was the most courageous thing I had ever seen.
And he says, that would encourage That was just me
being mad, And you know, he goes back to Laddie
to where his body is and he cries over him.
(14:23):
It's just a heartbreaking scene, but it wins him his
Distinguished Service Cross.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
The Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military award
after the Medal of Honor, and that was one of
the only two moments in Audie's life he openly admitted
to crying, the other being the death of his mother.
Here's doctor Smith with the heroic act that would earn
Audie Murphy the Congressional Medal of Honor and the respect
(14:52):
and love of the United States of America.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
The story of his Medal of Honor is probably the
most impressive story that you may hear from World War Two.
He's in France. He's coming up to the German border wintertime.
There's snow on the ground, it's icy cold, and he's
leading a couple of tanks and a platoon of soldiers
(15:16):
southward toward a town. And from the town toward him
comes a company of German soldiers, maybe more maybe of
Italian and two tanks. What he has with him are
a couple of things that look like tanks, but they're
called tank destroyers. They're faster and they're lighter than tanks.
(15:38):
And they're meant to be able to shoot tanks and
then get away, but both of those things, both of
those tank destroyers are knocked out of commission really early
on in this firefight, and he realizes that without those
tank destroyers to give his men cover, it's going to
be incredibly hard for them to continue their push south
(15:58):
across this snowy fe and he orders his men to
start to fall back toward the forest, and he stays
out at the front point of the position because he
has a radio and he's calling in artillery from the
rear and he's telling you know where to drop the
artillery rounds, and he was always very good at this,
(16:20):
which serves him very well. And he's starting to pull back,
and both of the tanks that are with him have
been knocked out, and he realizes that if the Germans
overrun this position that he has, they will go straight
into the woods and straight to the headquarters of his
(16:40):
company and overrun their entire position. And he realizes he's
got to stay there as long as he can, and
as he's yelling into the radio, yelling coordinates, and he's
sort of backing up, and then he realizes that over
to his right the tank that's been knocked out of commission,
and that the men inside are dead. He's he realizes
(17:03):
that the fifty caliber gun up on the top of it,
up on the turret, is still operable, and he climbs
up on this tank and he trains the gun on
the Germans coming across the field toward him, and the
tank is burning, so it's producing a lot of smoke
and it masks his position. It gives him cover. It's
(17:25):
like a smoke screen, and he swivels back and forth
with this fifty caliber shooting at these German soldiers that
are coming across the field and getting really close. Later,
he said, I remember being up on there and the
thought I had was this is the first time my
feet have been warm for three months. And across the
(17:45):
radio comes the question how close are they to your position?
And his response is, if you'll just hold the line,
I'll let you talk to one of them, and he's
and it gets to the point where the shells coming
in and hitting are jarring him and kicking him around.
They're hitting so close to him, and finally, finally they
(18:10):
begin to pull back, and he realizes that the Germans
are withdrawing and he climbs down off this tank and
he's shaking, and he walks over to a tree and
he leans against a tree and he just swumps down
to the ground. And right about that time, the tank
he was standing on explodes and it blows that turret,
you know, way up into the air and off into
(18:31):
the woods. And the people who watch this, the people
who filled out the reports for him, the eyewitness reports
for him to get the Medal of Honor, said they
had never even seen anything like it. They couldn't believe it,
and they saw it.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
They couldn't believe it, and they saw it. And when
we come back more of this remarkable story, Audie Murphy's
story here are on our American Stories, the final segment
of this remarkable life, this remarkable man. And we continue
(19:38):
with our American Stories. Let's return to Greg Hangler and
the final part of the Audio Murphy Store.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
If you happen to end up in a fox hole
with Audio Murphy, he was going to talk to you,
and what you might hear is not what you'd think.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
A little a guy who's just scared to death all
the time finds himself sitting in a f hole with
Audie Murphy, and Audie says to him, you know, don't
be afraid to be scared. There's going to be times
when you're scared to death. And then Audie tells this kid,
I'm always scared when I'm at the front. And it's
(20:17):
the irony is that everybody else in the division says,
when we hear that Audie Murphy's in the front, the
rest of us in the rear can go to sleep
and sleep well. But Audie tells this kid, you know,
there will be times when you want to cry, and
it's okay to cry. I mean. Audie transforms very much
over the course of his time as a soldier, from
(20:37):
someone who has nothing but disdain, you know, sort of
like patent style for people who can't take it and
who break under combat, to somebody who understands intimately how
harrowing it is and what it can do to somebody
with attendance.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
In the thousands, Murphy received his Medal of Honor in
the Austrian city of Salzburg.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Now this is in May of forty five. It's at
an airfield just outside of Salzburg. He has this survivor's
guilt already. Yes, he's a brave soldier. But the guys
who were killed, and he's always going to say this,
those are the ones who deserve the medals. Those are
the ones who deserves the honor. When you see the
(21:21):
photographs of him standing there, you think this guy's just
a kid. Well he sort of is.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Thanks to Life Magazine putting Audi on its cover, he
returned an American hero. I asked doctor Smith to put
into context what it meant to grace the cover of
Life magazine in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
There's nothing today, and I think about this sometimes, I
can't think of anything today that is analogous to Life
Magazine in nineteen forty five. There's nothing that has the
cultural centrality. There's nothing that in one magazine, in one photograph,
(22:03):
can make you a national icon. But Life magazine was
like that. And Life Magazine had heard about him, had
heard about him coming back to Texas, had heard about
the ceremonies that he had been through, and they sent
a photographer to do a photo essay in the little
town of Farmersville in Greenville, where he lived. But if
(22:27):
you get that Life magazine, you open it up, you
look through it and you see, oh man, you see
a photograph of him getting his haircut with a bunch
of farmers looking in at him. But it's this cover,
and it shows him fresh faced, looking like a high
school football quarterback in a military uniform. He's evidently young,
(22:50):
he looks, and I think this is important. He looks
completely unscarred by his path. He looks as fresh face
as if he was fresh out of high school, and
of course he's not. Then you can't tell at all
by looking that this guy killed, you know, two hundred
fifty soldiers. This guy was shot repeatedly. This guy was
(23:14):
fifty percent disabled according to the US Army. And this
guy's carrying around already, carrying around some terrible emotional baggage
that's keeping him from sleeping at night. But there he
is on the cover of Life magazine, looking like a
Norman Rockwell figure come to live.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
One of Hollywood's biggest movie stars saw Audie Murphy on
the cover of Life magazine and picked up the phone.
Here again is Joe Anne Madden.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
There was a famous actor named Jimmy Cagney, and Jimmy
Cagney saw all the press about Audi saw his picture
and said, hey, this guy should be in the movies.
So he invited Addie to come to Hollywood and try
to be a movie star, and Addie even lived with
him for a while, but his acting career didn't really
take off, so he ended up sleeping in a gym
(24:06):
that a friend of his own and kind of bounced around.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
A little bit.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
But then in nineteen forty nine, he wrote a book
called to Helen Back and that was all about his
experiences in the war, and the book was a huge
bestseller and kind of got Hollywood's attention again. So he
ended up making a few movies, mostly westerns, and he
didn't care for westerns. He felt like every movie had
(24:30):
the same plot as the last movie he did. And
one of my favorite quotes he said that in westerns
the faces are the same and so is the dialogue,
only the horses are changed. And what happened though? After
he was doing these movies and kind of you know,
plugging along. To Helen Back was a huge bestseller and
Universal Studios decided to make it into a movie, and
(24:53):
they wanted Audi to star as himself and already said no.
He said, I don't want the public to think I'm
trying to be fam myths by saying, look, at me,
I'm a war hero. But eventually he changed his mind
because he felt that he could show how grave all
the soldiers were, who had fought and who had died,
and kind of do a tribute to them through the movie.
(25:14):
And he also wanted to make sure the movie was
as realistic as possible, and starring in it meant that
he could have some say and you know, how the
battles were staged, and the uniforms and how the actors
behaved as the soldiers. So he ended up doing it.
The movie came out in nineteen fifty five. It was
a huge hit. It was actually Universal Studios highest earning
movie until nineteen seventy five when the movie Jaws came out,
(25:37):
and it was the high point of Audie's acting career.
He went on and did some movies and some television
after that, but that was really the high point. But
while all this was going on off screen, it was
very difficult for him. Nowadays, we would understand that he
had post traumatic stress disorder from his time in battle,
but during the fifties and the sixties, that term didn't
(26:00):
don't exist yet and people weren't really aware of it.
So Audie actually in the sixties, he started to speak
out about how he felt that. You know, he had
trouble sleeping. Every time he heard a loud noise, he
would jump. He slept with a gun under his pillow
when he went out in public, when he was driving
down the road, he was constantly looking for danger, you know,
(26:20):
looking for something to jump out at him. And he
said during the sixties, when he was speaking out, he said,
to be trained to kill and then come back into
civilian life and be alone in the crowd. It takes
an awful long time to get over it. But he
tried to help others through his experiences.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Here's ADDIE's friend, film director Bud Bedecker and Audie's struggle
with PTSD.
Speaker 7 (26:45):
He called me one day and he said, I'm sitting
here with my forty five the pictures in good shape.
Don't worry about a thing. I'm gonna blow my brains out.
And I had two seconds and I said, that's really great.
He said, what do you mean, Why don't you do that?
He said, what do you mean? I said, do it
(27:07):
for every kid in the country who thinks you're the
greatest fellow who ever lived. That'll make everybody in the
United States, go ahead and pull a trigger, he said, you, son.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Of a hung up. Audi's life clearly defined who he
was and what he stood for. His death was no different.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
In nineteen seventy one, Audi Murphy was flying on a
small plane and the plane crashed and he was killed.
He was forty five years old, and because he was
a war veteran and a hero, he was buried at
Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. And generally, if
you are a Medal of Honor winner, your gravestone at Arlington,
(27:47):
the lettering is done in gold's trim. It's very sparkly,
it's very eye catching, and OUDI didn't want that. He
just has a plane gravestone and it just lifts his name.
It's very plain, very brief, doesn't really give any indication
of what a hero he was. And he's the second
most visited grave at Arlington Cemetery, the first one being
President John Kennedy's grave is the most popular in Audie's
(28:09):
number two.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
American news anchor Tom Brokaw wrote the introduction from Murphy's
autobiography to Helen Back. Here's how he concludes, I was
first aware of Murphy as a war hero. He was
on the cover of Life magazine when I was a youngster.
Not long before his untimely death in an airplane accident.
I was working in California when Otdie Murphy came back
(28:33):
into the news. A woman friend of his had sent
her dog to a trainer, and she wasn't happy with
the results. As I recall, she asked Otdie to intervene.
He visited the dog trainer, who then complained to the
police that Murphy had shot at him. The local police
brought Murphy in for questioning, and when Murphy was released
(28:55):
without charges, a large number of reporters were outside the
police station. Murphy agreed to take a few questions. One
of the reporters asked, Audie, did you shoot at the guy?
Audie Murphy, the most decorated combat veteran of World War Two,
stared at his interrogator for a moment and then said,
(29:15):
in that familiar Texas voice, if I had you think
I would have missed. I love that moment and all
that Audie Murphy stood for as a citizen, a soldier
and a hero.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Tom Brokaw, and great job on that Greg And again
two hundred and fifty confirmed kills one man, humble beginnings,
humble in birth, and humble and death. This is Lee
Habini Audie Murphy's story. Here on our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories, and we're about
to tell you one of the quintessential American stories about
one of the most esteemed of our American vets. Yet
chances are many of you have never heard this man's
name before. And now let's go to the story of
Audie Murphy.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
He had over two hundred and fifty kills in World
War Two. He is America's most decorated soldier, having received
every award, citation, and decoration the Army could give, including
the Medal of Honor, all before he turned twenty, though
he looked fourteen. He became a movie star and wrote
(00:52):
seventeen songs which were recorded by guys like Dean Martin,
Eddie Fisher, Porter Wagner, Jimmy Dean, and Charlie Pride. He
wrote a best selling autobiography and starred in its film adaptation,
which became Universal Studio's highest grossing film for twenty years
until Jaws broke its record in nineteen seventy five. His
(01:14):
grave is the second most visited at Arlington National Cemetery
Jfkasus the first. Yet, this five foot five, one hundred
and ten pound babyfaced hero is practically unknown in America today,
which is astonishing considering just fifty plus years ago he
received more fan mail than any other celebrity in Hollywood.
(01:38):
To find out more about this American hero, let's take
a listen to the man who wrote the book. Doctor
David A. Smith is an American history professor at Baylor
University in Waco, Texas. He wrote The Price of Valor,
The Life of Audie Murphy, America's most decorated hero of
World War Two. I asked him, who is Murphy?
Speaker 3 (02:02):
It's interesting because nobody else in American history combines these
two sort of archetypal roles as he does. I mean,
he's the most decorated soldier from the biggest war We've
ever fought. And at the same time, or right after,
he was a movie star at a time in Hollywood
(02:22):
when movie stars had a cultural cachet that they would
never have again. And one of the things that I
find so fascinating about him is that he brings these
roles together. He brings together the role of genuine hero
and celebrity, and they don't match. They don't match at all.
I mean, a hero is a very particular thing. A
(02:45):
hero is an important cultural element within any culture. A
hero is how we learn what virtue is. I mean,
a hero is someone who, for a small amount of time,
embodies a particular virtue. I mean, a virtue is an
idea and we have trouble, you know, relating to it
(03:05):
until we see it in the flesh. And that's what
a hero is. And that's what he was. First, selflessness, determination, duty,
patriotism is that whole bit. And then gosh, then he
becomes a movie star, and he hated being a movie star.
He didn't like movie stars. His first wife, to whom
(03:28):
he was married for just a year, wanted to be
a movie star badly, and that's what she was in
Hollywood for. And that's what drove them apart. Because he
hated Hollywood. He hated the phoniness of celebrity, and he
disparaged his own talents. He refused to hang around other actors.
(03:50):
Mostly when he was on the set, he would hang
around with the horse wranglers and the stuntmen and the
props guys. And it's fascinating to me that here, in
this one person, you have extreme heroism and extreme celebrities
trying to mix. And his story is a story of
(04:11):
how we've confused them today.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
In mythology and legend, a hero is a man of
divine ancestry who was endowed with great courage and strength,
celebrated for his brave exploits, and favored by the gods.
In reality, Audie was all these things, but as to
the part of ancestry, it was far from divine. Here's
Joanne Madtern, author of Audie Murphy fact or Fiction.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Audie Murphy was born on June twentieth, nineteen twenty five,
and he was born in a little town called Kingston, Texas.
His parents were sharecroppers, and that means that they picked
cotton in fields, but they didn't own the fields. The
fields were owned by someone else, and in return for working,
(05:02):
all they got was a little shack to live in
and a tiny little bit of the money that they earned.
Everything else went to the owner of the field. The
house they lived in was no more than a little shack.
It had no running water, no bathrooms, no electricity. They
had twelve children all together, and as soon as the
kids were old enough, maybe four or five years old,
(05:25):
they went to work in the cotton fields with their parents.
Audie later said that he just worked and that it
was a full time job just existing. In fact, when
Audie was born, his mother Josie, couldn't take time off
to take care of the baby, so she put him
in a baby swing and took him out in the
cotton fields with her. Audie's father his name was Emmett
(05:47):
and Emmett's He was pretty lazy, more interested in gambling
and having a good time. And the only time they
got any meat to eat was if Audie and his
brothers went out and hunted them. A neighbor once lent
Audi his gun and it had eight bullets in it,
and Audie went hunting. It came back with four rabbits
(06:09):
and four bullets still left in the gun. That's how
good a shot he was.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Here's Audie's sister, Nadine Murphy.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
He got a little twenty two. I don't know where,
but he was really good at it. He can kill
a rabbit on a run. Well, that's how that's how
we believe him dead. That's how we ate. He would
go out and kill squirreld rabbits, and I guess we
could say we're a live day because of him. He
was my hero even then, before he ever did anything great,
(06:36):
he was great to me.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Then here again is doctor Smith.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
One of the things that defines him throughout his entire
life is his sense of duty to the people who
are depending on him. He felt his duty towards his
younger siblings in a profound way.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Times were beginning to unfold that would shape his destiny forever.
The country was in the throes of the Great Depression. Now,
at one point things got so bad for the Murphys
that they moved into a railroad box car.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
When he was thirteen years old, father left the family
and he never came back. So now Ordi had to
step up and be the man of the house, and
in order to do that, he had to quit school.
So he never got farther than the fifth grade. But
the person that was hardest hit in the family was
his mother, Josie, and in nineteen forty one she died
of pneumonia. And he said her early death was not
(07:31):
unusual in the story of the sharecropper family, particularly when
the sharecropper himself runs off, leaving his wife to take
care of their children. Anyway, so Addie was only sixteen,
he had younger sisters and a brother to take care of,
and he couldn't take care of them because he had
to work, so they were sent to an orphanage and
then everything changed.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Everything changed. Here's Murphy historian Michael West.
Speaker 6 (07:58):
Well, the time that the Japane He's bombed Pearl Harper,
December seventh. I believe Audie Murphy and Monroe Hackney were
actually on a double date at a movie theater, and
after they returned from the movie theater they learned the
course of the bombing. Well, immediately all the young men,
or a number of the young men chose to join.
Well that included Audie Murphy as well.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Well.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
At that time Audie was only about seventeen and a
half years old, plus he was plagued with that baby face,
and immediately the recruiters recognized that he's too young. He
tries Marines, they virtually laugh him out. He has visions
of joining the paratroopers. Well that never works out, so
finally he is just simply run off in essence, and
(08:44):
he he doesn't join.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
So Audie's older sister Karinn got him a false birth
certificate that showed he was a year older than he was.
So after he turned eighteen, as it said on his
birth certificate, he was actually only seventeen, he went back
and joined the army, and he was accepted into the infantry.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
And what a story so far. I'd been a fan
of the movie, but just didn't know, just didn't know
the circumstances, my goodness, losing a father and a mother
and then having kids, orphan, living out.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Of a box car.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
And when we come back more on the life of
Audie Murphy, this is our American stories, and we return
(10:11):
to our American stories. We're telling the story of Audie Murphy.
And if you've never seen the movie to Helen Back,
it comes on TV all the time this time, don't
skip it. It's terrific and it should be a remake.
His life's story should be a remake too. So everybody
today knows who Audie Murphy is. Folks, if you love
(10:33):
the stories we tell about this great country, and especially
the stories of America's rich past, know that all of
our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture
and faith, are brought to us by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that are good in life. And if you can't cut
to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you with their free
(10:55):
and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
learn more. Let's return to Greg Hangler and Audie's story.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
The Army infantry was the most accepting of recruits who
appeared to possess the least amount of skills needed for combat.
Addie Murphy attended two boot camps before seeing any action,
and in both camps, the army tried to protect the
little recruit they nicknamed baby. They tried to put him
in their post office and then their kitchen, but Audie
(11:26):
would have none of it.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Nobody pushed him around. I mean, he was impressively tough
from the very beginning, and he would literally push himself
until he collapsed. The guys he met there at boot
camp remembered that he was clearly in his element, even
though he was small stature, even though he was baby faced,
and his superiors wanted to find someplace for him that
(11:52):
he might be a better fit, because honestly, he wasn't
a good fit in the infantry until you got to
know him. And he said, absolutely not. I want to
be in the infantry. I want to march with this
pack that's as big as I am and I'm gonna
do it. And his superiors reluctantly let him stay, but
they made a good decision.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Audie was assigned to Company B, the fifteenth Infantry Regiment,
third Division. No one could know that this poor tenant
farmer's son would one day help to cause the demise
of Hitler's promised one thousand year Reich by performing such
wondrous deeds in battle that they seemed almost mythological. Here's
(12:33):
one of them.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
The first time he goes into combat with the third
Division is in the invasion of Sicily, and Laddie Tipton
is a soldier in his company, and they are extremely close.
Laddie has an estranged wife and a daughter, and Audie Murphy,
I don't know if I want to say, envies him
(12:55):
for this, but Audie Murphy realizes how special this is
to have a wife and a daughter, because he, you know,
he doesn't have much in the way of family. And
he talks to Laddie about his daughter all the time
and says, you know, you're gonna get back to see her.
You're gonna get back to her, You're gonna be a
great father. And then you know, they come ashore in
(13:17):
France together in August to forty four, and they're fighting
their way up this hill, he and Laddie. They're working
their way up this hill in the face of a
whole repeated series of German machine gun in placements, and
they they get one German foxhold to surrender to them,
and they wave a white flag and Laddie says, okay,
(13:40):
they're surrendering. We can go get him, and Audie says, no, no, no,
stay down. There are other people up there. And a
German sniper from someplace else up on the hill hits
Laddie in the head with a bullet and he collapses
right down into Audie's lap, and he sort of, I
don't want to say, goes nuts, but he grabs a
gun and just charges up this jill, in and out
(14:01):
of drag and in and out of foxhold, and then
he gets a German gun and goes after other foxholds
and he clears out that entire skill side and everybody says, oh,
that was the most courageous thing I had ever seen.
And he says, that would encourage That was just me
being mad, And you know, he goes back to Laddie
to where his body is and he cries over him.
(14:23):
It's just a heartbreaking scene, but it wins him his
Distinguished Service Cross.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
The Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military award
after the Medal of Honor, and that was one of
the only two moments in Audie's life he openly admitted
to crying, the other being the death of his mother.
Here's doctor Smith with the heroic act that would earn
Audie Murphy the Congressional Medal of Honor and the respect
(14:52):
and love of the United States of America.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
The story of his Medal of Honor is probably the
most impressive story that you may hear from World War Two.
He's in France. He's coming up to the German border wintertime.
There's snow on the ground, it's icy cold, and he's
leading a couple of tanks and a platoon of soldiers
(15:16):
southward toward a town. And from the town toward him
comes a company of German soldiers, maybe more maybe of
Italian and two tanks. What he has with him are
a couple of things that look like tanks, but they're
called tank destroyers. They're faster and they're lighter than tanks.
(15:38):
And they're meant to be able to shoot tanks and
then get away, but both of those things, both of
those tank destroyers are knocked out of commission really early
on in this firefight, and he realizes that without those
tank destroyers to give his men cover, it's going to
be incredibly hard for them to continue their push south
(15:58):
across this snowy fe and he orders his men to
start to fall back toward the forest, and he stays
out at the front point of the position because he
has a radio and he's calling in artillery from the
rear and he's telling you know where to drop the
artillery rounds, and he was always very good at this,
(16:20):
which serves him very well. And he's starting to pull back,
and both of the tanks that are with him have
been knocked out, and he realizes that if the Germans
overrun this position that he has, they will go straight
into the woods and straight to the headquarters of his
(16:40):
company and overrun their entire position. And he realizes he's
got to stay there as long as he can, and
as he's yelling into the radio, yelling coordinates, and he's
sort of backing up, and then he realizes that over
to his right the tank that's been knocked out of commission,
and that the men inside are dead. He's he realizes
(17:03):
that the fifty caliber gun up on the top of it,
up on the turret, is still operable, and he climbs
up on this tank and he trains the gun on
the Germans coming across the field toward him, and the
tank is burning, so it's producing a lot of smoke
and it masks his position. It gives him cover. It's
(17:25):
like a smoke screen, and he swivels back and forth
with this fifty caliber shooting at these German soldiers that
are coming across the field and getting really close. Later,
he said, I remember being up on there and the
thought I had was this is the first time my
feet have been warm for three months. And across the
(17:45):
radio comes the question how close are they to your position?
And his response is, if you'll just hold the line,
I'll let you talk to one of them, and he's
and it gets to the point where the shells coming
in and hitting are jarring him and kicking him around.
They're hitting so close to him, and finally, finally they
(18:10):
begin to pull back, and he realizes that the Germans
are withdrawing and he climbs down off this tank and
he's shaking, and he walks over to a tree and
he leans against a tree and he just swumps down
to the ground. And right about that time, the tank
he was standing on explodes and it blows that turret,
you know, way up into the air and off into
(18:31):
the woods. And the people who watch this, the people
who filled out the reports for him, the eyewitness reports
for him to get the Medal of Honor, said they
had never even seen anything like it. They couldn't believe it,
and they saw it.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
They couldn't believe it, and they saw it. And when
we come back more of this remarkable story, Audie Murphy's
story here are on our American Stories, the final segment
of this remarkable life, this remarkable man. And we continue
(19:38):
with our American Stories. Let's return to Greg Hangler and
the final part of the Audio Murphy Store.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
If you happen to end up in a fox hole
with Audio Murphy, he was going to talk to you,
and what you might hear is not what you'd think.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
A little a guy who's just scared to death all
the time finds himself sitting in a f hole with
Audie Murphy, and Audie says to him, you know, don't
be afraid to be scared. There's going to be times
when you're scared to death. And then Audie tells this kid,
I'm always scared when I'm at the front. And it's
(20:17):
the irony is that everybody else in the division says,
when we hear that Audie Murphy's in the front, the
rest of us in the rear can go to sleep
and sleep well. But Audie tells this kid, you know,
there will be times when you want to cry, and
it's okay to cry. I mean. Audie transforms very much
over the course of his time as a soldier, from
(20:37):
someone who has nothing but disdain, you know, sort of
like patent style for people who can't take it and
who break under combat, to somebody who understands intimately how
harrowing it is and what it can do to somebody
with attendance.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
In the thousands, Murphy received his Medal of Honor in
the Austrian city of Salzburg.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Now this is in May of forty five. It's at
an airfield just outside of Salzburg. He has this survivor's
guilt already. Yes, he's a brave soldier. But the guys
who were killed, and he's always going to say this,
those are the ones who deserve the medals. Those are
the ones who deserves the honor. When you see the
(21:21):
photographs of him standing there, you think this guy's just
a kid. Well he sort of is.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Thanks to Life Magazine putting Audi on its cover, he
returned an American hero. I asked doctor Smith to put
into context what it meant to grace the cover of
Life magazine in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
There's nothing today, and I think about this sometimes, I
can't think of anything today that is analogous to Life
Magazine in nineteen forty five. There's nothing that has the
cultural centrality. There's nothing that in one magazine, in one photograph,
(22:03):
can make you a national icon. But Life magazine was
like that. And Life Magazine had heard about him, had
heard about him coming back to Texas, had heard about
the ceremonies that he had been through, and they sent
a photographer to do a photo essay in the little
town of Farmersville in Greenville, where he lived. But if
(22:27):
you get that Life magazine, you open it up, you
look through it and you see, oh man, you see
a photograph of him getting his haircut with a bunch
of farmers looking in at him. But it's this cover,
and it shows him fresh faced, looking like a high
school football quarterback in a military uniform. He's evidently young,
(22:50):
he looks, and I think this is important. He looks
completely unscarred by his path. He looks as fresh face
as if he was fresh out of high school, and
of course he's not. Then you can't tell at all
by looking that this guy killed, you know, two hundred
fifty soldiers. This guy was shot repeatedly. This guy was
(23:14):
fifty percent disabled according to the US Army. And this
guy's carrying around already, carrying around some terrible emotional baggage
that's keeping him from sleeping at night. But there he
is on the cover of Life magazine, looking like a
Norman Rockwell figure come to live.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
One of Hollywood's biggest movie stars saw Audie Murphy on
the cover of Life magazine and picked up the phone.
Here again is Joe Anne Madden.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
There was a famous actor named Jimmy Cagney, and Jimmy
Cagney saw all the press about Audi saw his picture
and said, hey, this guy should be in the movies.
So he invited Addie to come to Hollywood and try
to be a movie star, and Addie even lived with
him for a while, but his acting career didn't really
take off, so he ended up sleeping in a gym
(24:06):
that a friend of his own and kind of bounced around.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
A little bit.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
But then in nineteen forty nine, he wrote a book
called to Helen Back and that was all about his
experiences in the war, and the book was a huge
bestseller and kind of got Hollywood's attention again. So he
ended up making a few movies, mostly westerns, and he
didn't care for westerns. He felt like every movie had
(24:30):
the same plot as the last movie he did. And
one of my favorite quotes he said that in westerns
the faces are the same and so is the dialogue,
only the horses are changed. And what happened though? After
he was doing these movies and kind of you know,
plugging along. To Helen Back was a huge bestseller and
Universal Studios decided to make it into a movie, and
(24:53):
they wanted Audi to star as himself and already said no.
He said, I don't want the public to think I'm
trying to be fam myths by saying, look, at me,
I'm a war hero. But eventually he changed his mind
because he felt that he could show how grave all
the soldiers were, who had fought and who had died,
and kind of do a tribute to them through the movie.
(25:14):
And he also wanted to make sure the movie was
as realistic as possible, and starring in it meant that
he could have some say and you know, how the
battles were staged, and the uniforms and how the actors
behaved as the soldiers. So he ended up doing it.
The movie came out in nineteen fifty five. It was
a huge hit. It was actually Universal Studios highest earning
movie until nineteen seventy five when the movie Jaws came out,
(25:37):
and it was the high point of Audie's acting career.
He went on and did some movies and some television
after that, but that was really the high point. But
while all this was going on off screen, it was
very difficult for him. Nowadays, we would understand that he
had post traumatic stress disorder from his time in battle,
but during the fifties and the sixties, that term didn't
(26:00):
don't exist yet and people weren't really aware of it.
So Audie actually in the sixties, he started to speak
out about how he felt that. You know, he had
trouble sleeping. Every time he heard a loud noise, he
would jump. He slept with a gun under his pillow
when he went out in public, when he was driving
down the road, he was constantly looking for danger, you know,
(26:20):
looking for something to jump out at him. And he
said during the sixties, when he was speaking out, he said,
to be trained to kill and then come back into
civilian life and be alone in the crowd. It takes
an awful long time to get over it. But he
tried to help others through his experiences.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Here's ADDIE's friend, film director Bud Bedecker and Audie's struggle
with PTSD.
Speaker 7 (26:45):
He called me one day and he said, I'm sitting
here with my forty five the pictures in good shape.
Don't worry about a thing. I'm gonna blow my brains out.
And I had two seconds and I said, that's really great.
He said, what do you mean, Why don't you do that?
He said, what do you mean? I said, do it
(27:07):
for every kid in the country who thinks you're the
greatest fellow who ever lived. That'll make everybody in the
United States, go ahead and pull a trigger, he said, you, son.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Of a hung up. Audi's life clearly defined who he
was and what he stood for. His death was no different.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
In nineteen seventy one, Audi Murphy was flying on a
small plane and the plane crashed and he was killed.
He was forty five years old, and because he was
a war veteran and a hero, he was buried at
Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. And generally, if
you are a Medal of Honor winner, your gravestone at Arlington,
(27:47):
the lettering is done in gold's trim. It's very sparkly,
it's very eye catching, and OUDI didn't want that. He
just has a plane gravestone and it just lifts his name.
It's very plain, very brief, doesn't really give any indication
of what a hero he was. And he's the second
most visited grave at Arlington Cemetery, the first one being
President John Kennedy's grave is the most popular in Audie's
(28:09):
number two.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
American news anchor Tom Brokaw wrote the introduction from Murphy's
autobiography to Helen Back. Here's how he concludes, I was
first aware of Murphy as a war hero. He was
on the cover of Life magazine when I was a youngster.
Not long before his untimely death in an airplane accident.
I was working in California when Otdie Murphy came back
(28:33):
into the news. A woman friend of his had sent
her dog to a trainer, and she wasn't happy with
the results. As I recall, she asked Otdie to intervene.
He visited the dog trainer, who then complained to the
police that Murphy had shot at him. The local police
brought Murphy in for questioning, and when Murphy was released
(28:55):
without charges, a large number of reporters were outside the
police station. Murphy agreed to take a few questions. One
of the reporters asked, Audie, did you shoot at the guy?
Audie Murphy, the most decorated combat veteran of World War Two,
stared at his interrogator for a moment and then said,
(29:15):
in that familiar Texas voice, if I had you think
I would have missed. I love that moment and all
that Audie Murphy stood for as a citizen, a soldier
and a hero.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Tom Brokaw, and great job on that Greg And again
two hundred and fifty confirmed kills one man, humble beginnings,
humble in birth, and humble and death. This is Lee
Habini Audie Murphy's story. Here on our American Stories.
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