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May 25-31
Sunday, 25 May 2008
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SSG Rudy Davila Earns MOH
Sixty-four years ago this week, on 28 May 1944, Staff Sergeant Rudolph B. (Rudy) Davila of the 7th Infantry performed actions for which he was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor.
SSG Davila was born in El Paso, Texas, the son of a Spanish father and a Filipino mother. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted and was assigned to Company H, 2d Battalion, 7th Infantry, Third Infantry Division. By May 1944, like other members of the division he had endured three months of German attempts at the Anzio beachhead to push the 3ID back into the sea. However, the breakout from the beachhead on 23 May did not mean the hard fighting was over. Several mountain towns had to be taken before the 3ID reached Highway 6 and the way to Rome.
The last town was Artena, which supposedly was in friendly hands.
The 7th Infantry came toward Artena on the morning of 27 May; in the afternoon it took up a position southwest of the town. The next morning it received orders to drive out the Germans from their positions along the railroad tracks north of the town. The first and third battalions spearheaded the attack and ran into extremely heavy fire from the Hermann Goering Panzer Division, the elite armored unit created by Hitler’s Number 2. Then the second battalion came up.
SSG Davila was leading a machine-gun platoon that went over a hilltop and saw German machine-gunners preparing to ambush a rifle company. That’s when Davila went into action crawling fifty yards to the nearest machine gun, which he set up by himself and opened fire on the enemy. In order to see the effect of his weapon, he fired from a kneeling position, ignoring the enemy fire that hit the tripod and passed between his legs. Then he crawled forward and directed the firefight until two German machine guns were silenced and the Germans were driven 200 yards to the rear. Davila was then wounded in the leg, but did not stop fighting. He dashed to a burned tank and, despite bullets crashing around him, engaged a second enemy force from the tank’s turret. Dismounting, he advanced 130 yards in short rushes and charged into an enemy-held house to eliminate the five-man force there with a hand grenade and rifle fire. Climbing to the attic, he straddled a large shell hole in the wall and opened fire on the enemy, destroying two more machine guns.
Davila received a battlefield commission as second lieutenant and the rifle company commander promised that he would recommend Davila for the MOH. But he was awarded the DSC instead. Finally, in 1996 Congress ordered the Armed Services to review the records of Asian-Americans who had earned the DSC in WWII to determine if they had been unfairly denied the MOH. As a result, on 20 June 2000 President Clinton presented Rudolph Davila the MOH he was promised 56 years earlier for his selfless act of heroism.
