BRONZE STAR, PURPLE HEART, REAL HERO - PFC ROBERT DOYLE MEADOR

(Originally posted on Facebook, 28 Feb 2011)

Lately I have had several emails from fb friends asking me if I would tell the story of the actions that caused my Daddy to be awarded the Bronze Star and the Order of the Purple Heart, during World War II.  Since there is so little space in a post, I thought I could answer all of the requests in this manner.  Thank you to all who have shown such an interest.  Daddy would really not be happy with people knowing, because he would have never seen this as heroic or worth re-telling.  He was a very humble man who would tell you that fear of never seeing your wife, parents, siblings or Texas again is enough to just do what is necessary to survive.

Daddy wasn't on the beach on D-Day.  He landed in Normandy, France on what would be known as D-Day plus 3, or the actual day of 9 June 1944.  He had been sick on the ride over, and miserable wouldn't have even begun to explain the way he felt.  He never talked about the war too much, mainly because Mama knew it always gave him nightmares, and had a way of looking at me, when I had questions, that basically said, "Don't even start"....and if you knew my mother, that is exactly what she meant.

Less than a year before he passed away in 1989, I walked into the backdoor of their house, and Daddy looked back and pointed to the desk behind his chair and said, "Look what I got in the mail today".  I opened up the dark case he had showed me and low and behold, there was a Bronze Star, engraved on the back with the words, "Robert D. Meador, for bravery above and beyond the call of duty".  I asked what that was for,  Mama gave me "the look"....Daddy said, "there were a bunch of us that were supposed to get them, and never did, and I finally got it".  Before I could even ask for details, "the look" was glaring over at me again, and I said, "this is just too cool...wow".  Never heard from him the entire story.  However, he had told my brother-in-law, Ed Cates the story, and evidently my older siblings had heard at least bits and pieces of it, and luckily, I heard the story from Ed, before he passed away two years ago.

I had known he was shot in the hip badly by a German machine gun, I even have the bullets they took out of him, but as Paul Harvey used to say on the radio, "this is the REST of the story".

In July, 1944, during the Battle of St. Lo in the hedgerow country of France, Daddy's company had gotten pinned down by a German "pill box", a fortified machine gun nest.  These hedgerows were actually tall hedges on approximately 4 feet of earth.  The rows are mostly in squares and had to be passed thru like the rest of the country.  The Germans would set up in one corner and have an open "spray" of the entire field, and there was usually one entrance on each side.  

On this day, the company had moved into the field, unaware of what was awaiting them, and found themselves quickly retreating to the backside of a hedgerow after many of them had been mowed down by gunfire.  The sergeant was killed very early.  The lieutenant was a young "upstart" fresh out of West Point.  He was using Daddy as a sub-sarge, because he was 23 and older and more mature than most of the other "men" in the company.  (This was something that Daddy never wanted, because he preferred to be responsible for just himself...but some leaders are just born naturally, I guess).  

Everything that the Lt had tried had failed, and ended up costing men.  Daddy's best friend had been killed right next to him earlier in the day. Sometime later in the day, the Lt took a couple of men straight over the hedgerow, and were "cut in half" by the gunfire.  At some later point, it would seem that Daddy decided that he was probably going to end up dead before the day was over anyway, so he took one other man with him and tried a flanking maneuver crawling from one side to get an angle on the nest.  

He and the other soldier were both shot.  The other man was killed.  And apparently, the Germans thought Daddy was also.  Losing blood by the gallon, he kept inching his way closer to the German fortification.  He eventually made it close enough to, in his weakened state, toss a grenade into the pill box and silence the gun and the Germans along with it, and sparing the lives of the remaining 11 or so infantrymen in his unit.  The doctors said he had lost so much blood, that there was really no way that he should have survived.

He spent the next 6 months in the hospital.  His wounds were so serious that he normally would have been sent home after recovery.  Unfortunately for him, the army found out that he was a bookkeeper, and sent him to Glasgow, Scotland to work in payroll, with a secretary and a driver, for the duration of the war.  Not being able to get back home to his young wife AND staying to actually help "war brides" on the boats for the States, was to say the least, very aggravating to him, and not something he was very happy about.

Some of this story I was able to put together with the details of the actual events, because the little that he DID tell me growing up, was about the "day he was shot".  I just had never heard how it all came down until a few years ago.  He was awarded his Purple Heart in the hospital, but didn't realize until he was working thru the Veterans Administration with his health issues, that he had actually been recommended for the Bronze Star, which they finally got to him some 44 years after the fact.

Daddy was always my hero, but until I heard this story, I never knew he was a LOT of peoples hero.