Garlin Murl Conner, World War II Medal of Honor, 3rd Infantry Division. Houssen, France, January 24, 1945.
Murl Conner was born on June 2, 1919, on Indian Creek in Clinton County, Kentucky, the third of eleven children. School ended after the eighth grade; the nearest high school was 15 miles away. He worked the family farm, served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and learned to hunt the woods of southern Kentucky. He stood 5 feet 6. Four of his brothers also served in the war.
He entered the Army on March 1, 1941, and joined K Company, 7th Infantry Regiment. He went ashore at Fedala, Morocco, in November 1942, then Sicily, Italy, Anzio, southern France and the Vosges. Twenty-eight months on the front line. Ten campaigns. Four amphibious landings. At Anzio he carried a wounded private, Gordon Roberts, to an aid station. He rose to technical sergeant and earned a battlefield commission in June 1944.
He was hit by a sniper in the hip, shot through the jaw, wounded again and again. His own count was seven. Only three Purple Hearts survive on paper; his records burned in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center.
In January 1945 his commander, Lloyd Ramsey, had made him battalion intelligence officer to keep him safe, and had arranged for him to go home. Conner had just slipped out of a field hospital against orders to rejoin his unit.
On January 24, near Houssen in the Colmar Pocket, about 600 German infantry with six tanks and tank destroyers hit the battalion. Conner volunteered to go forward. He ran some 400 yards under fire, unrolling telephone wire, and dropped into a shallow ditch 30 yards in front of the American line. For three hours, in near-zero cold, he called artillery onto the attack. German infantry came within five yards. When they massed for a final assault, he ordered the guns onto his own position. The attack broke. About 50 enemy were killed and some 100 wounded.
He received the Distinguished Service Cross. Ramsey believed it should have been the Medal of Honor. For decades Conner refused to apply, even when Ramsey urged him. His wife Pauline remembered: “He said he didn’t need another medal.”
He came home in 1945. Albany held a parade, and Sgt. Alvin York came to hear him speak. Conner described the landings and the campaigns, and said nothing about his own medals. It was his last public talk about the war. The medals went into a box in the closet.
A teenage girl in that crowd, Pauline Wells, had expected “a giant of a man.” They married after a whirlwind courtship and stayed married 53 years. They farmed with mules on Indian Creek until the land went under Lake Cumberland, then raised tobacco and cattle on 36 acres. He led the Clinton County Farm Bureau for 17 years. At night he woke from nightmares and sat on the porch smoking for hours.
In 1979 a heart attack struck him on his tractor. After that, his work became the veterans around him. Many disabled veterans had never filed for the pensions they were owed. Murl and Pauline packed the paperwork into their Buick and drove Clinton County and ten more counties, to living rooms and courthouse offices. Pauline estimated they reached “possibly thousands of veterans.”
Parkinson’s disease and a stroke took his speech. He died on November 5, 1998, and is buried at Memorial Hill Cemetery in Albany.
In 1996, Richard Chilton, a retired Green Beret, wrote to Conner about his uncle Gordon Roberts and discovered his record. With Pauline, he spent two decades on the case. The Army rejected it in 1997 and 2000. Three eyewitness accounts surfaced at the National Archives. A federal court ruled it was too late. In 2015 the Army board granted full relief, and Congress waived the time limit.
On June 26, 2018, Pauline accepted the Medal of Honor at the White House. In November 2018, Kentucky added his name to its Medal of Honor recipients at the State Capitol.
He never went back for a medal. He went back for his men.
Sources: Medal of Honor citation, 1st Lt. Garlin M. Conner (U.S. Army); U.S. Army News Service, “The Silent Farmer” (2018); Army.mil Pentagon Hall of Heroes (2018); NPR (June 25, 2018); Army Times (June 27, 2018); LEX18 (Nov. 13, 2018).
Footage: U.S. Army Signal Corps / National Archives (111-ADC-3130, 111-ADC-1673, 111-ADC-9395, ADC-1577E); “The Enemy Strikes” (War Department, 1945, captured German film); Veterans Administration films (1946-47); “Southern Highlanders” (1947, public domain). Representative footage, not of Conner himself unless noted. Photos: U.S. Army / Conner family.
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Murl Conner never told his wife what he did in the war. His medals stayed in a box in the closet for decades. Did someone in your family come home and never talk about it?