Lt. David Waybur Honored
First 3rd Division Medal of Honor Recipient Killed in Action
My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 55
Flo devoted a page in her album to the first Third Division Congressional Medal of Honor award recipient, Lt. David Waybur or Piedmont, California. She noted that he was killed in action near the end of the war in March, 1945.
From the story: “The Army, chances are, will never be a great writer. Its taciturn prose travels on a punchless belly. But some of the most spectacular stories of this war are being scribbled on battlefields in the sparse, lean, GI prose of army officers writing to headquarters of the heroism of men unto them.
“Such a story is told in the recommendation for a citation for Lieutenant David C Waybur, 24… A graduate of Piedmont high school, a former grocery clerk, David Waybur enlisted in the army at the end of his second year at the University of California in 1940. Three years later, in the dead of night, young Waybur rode to army immortality at the head of a little fleet of three jeeps and fought, jeeps versus enemy tanks, a never-to-be-forgotten engagement beside a blown up bridge in Sicily.”
Audie Murphy also received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest US military decoration for valor, awarded by the President in the name of Congress.
Ch. 56: https://medium.com/@tradeswomn/arc-in-the-french-mountains-3653bae6c53a
