The Forgotten Front Military history archive
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Major Richard I. “Dick” Bong, portrait File 033Article New Guinea and the Philippines · 1942–1945 America’s Ace of Aces A Wisconsin farm boy who once looped the Golden Gate Bridge became the highest-scoring American fighter pilot in history: forty Japanese aircraft, all in a P-38 Lightning. Sent home to safety, he died testing a jet fighter on 6 August 1945, the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The Neuf-Brisach area of Alsace after American artillery fire, 8 February 1945 File 032Article Houssen, Alsace, France · 1942–1945 “Blanket My Position” In a frozen ditch in Alsace in January 1945, Lieutenant Garlin Conner called American artillery down on his own position to stop six hundred Germans and six tanks. He went home to a Kentucky farm and never talked about it. It took his widow, a stranger and a twenty-two-year campaign to get him the Medal of Honor, seventy-three years later. General John J. Pershing presents a medal to Stubby, with Robert Conroy behind them, 1921 File 028Article Western Front, France · 1917–1919 The Stray from the Yale Bowl A brindle stray wandered into an Army training camp in Connecticut in 1917, was smuggled to France, and spent eighteen months in the trenches with the 102nd Infantry. He was gassed and wounded, and came home a celebrity. General Pershing pinned a medal on him. His rank of sergeant was never official, but nobody in the regiment argued. Official portrait of Lieutenant Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington File 025Article Solomon Islands and Rabaul · 1941–1945 The Black Sheep Who Came Back Gregory “Pappy” Boyington brawled, drank and argued his way through the peacetime Marine Corps and the Flying Tigers. In the Solomons he led a squadron of misfits to fame, equalled the American record, and vanished over Rabaul. He was given the Medal of Honor as a dead man. Twenty months later he walked out of a Japanese prison camp. Private First Class Ira Hayes, aged 19, in parachute gear at the Marine Corps paratroop school, 1943 File 024Article Iwo Jima · 1942–1945 The Pima Marine on Suribachi Ira Hayes, a quiet Pima from the Gila River reservation, helped raise the flag in the most famous photograph of the war. Then his country turned him into a symbol he never wanted to be. He hitchhiked 1,300 miles to tell one grieving mother the truth. Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 bomber takes off from the deck of USS Hornet, 18 April 1942 File 023Article Tokyo and the East China Sea · 1942 Sixteen Bombers, One Way Four months after Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Doolittle led sixteen Army bombers off the deck of a Navy carrier to strike Japan, knowing they could not come back. He crash-landed in a Chinese rice paddy convinced he would be court-martialled. Instead he was given the Medal of Honor. Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller in Korea, November 1950 File 014Article Haiti · Nicaragua · Pacific · Korea · 1918–1955 Five Navy Crosses Lewis “Chesty” Puller fought in the jungles of Haiti and Nicaragua, on Guadalcanal and Peleliu, and in the frozen hills of Korea. He is the most decorated Marine in American history. Sergeant Alvin C. York, 1919 File 011Article Argonne, France · 1918 Sergeant York’s Seventeen A Tennessee blacksmith’s son who had asked not to fight led the survivors of a seventeen-man patrol in the Argonne on 8 October 1918. By the end of the morning they had more than a hundred prisoners. Sergeant Major Flora Sandes in Serbian army uniform File 007Article Serbia · Macedonia · 1914–1922 Sergeant Major Sandes A clergyman’s daughter from Yorkshire went to Serbia in 1914 as a volunteer nurse and came home a decorated infantry officer, the only British woman known to have served as a soldier in the First World War. Men of the 369th Infantry who won the Croix de Guerre, 1919 File 006Article Argonne, France · May 1918 The Sentry Post in the Argonne On sentry duty in the Argonne in May 1918, Private Henry Johnson of the Harlem Hellfighters fought off a German raiding party with grenades, a rifle butt and a knife. It took the United States ninety-seven years to give him its highest honour. Andrée de Jongh after receiving the George Medal at Buckingham Palace File 003Article Belgium · France · Spain · 1941–1943 Dédée and the Line Through the Pyrenees At twenty-four, Andrée de Jongh walked a British soldier from Brussels to Spain and then talked the British into funding her. The Comet Line she built brought more than seven hundred Allied servicemen home.