Audie Murphy Biography

Audie Murphy won the Congressional Medal of Honor and was the most decorated American Army soldier of World War II.

The orphaned son of Texas sharecroppers, Audie Murphy enlisted in the Army on his birthday in 1942, landed at Casablanca in February of 1943, and spent the next two years fighting his way across North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. He won two dozen military medals for valor, including the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in a French forest on January 26, 1945, when he climbed aboard a burning tank destroyer and used its 50-caliber machine gun to kill dozens of attacking Germans.

Famously baby-faced, Audie Murphy was promoted from private to lieutenant during the war, and still he was not yet 21 when the war ended. Invited to visit Hollywood in 1945 by James Cagney, Murphy stayed and parlayed his wartime fame into an up-and-down career as a movie actor, songwriter, and businessman.

He published his war memoirs, To Hell And Back, in 1949 and played himself in the 1955 movie of the same name. He appeared in more than 40 movies, many of them westernes like Ride Clear of Diablo (1954) and No Name on the Bullet (1959). He was killed along with five other people in a private plane crash in Virginia in 1971.