Most Recent Living Medal of Honor Recipient
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tom Kelly
Tom Kelly Medal of Honor recipient WWII
Tom Kelly – Medal of Honor Hero
[Originally published in the Ocean City SandPaper, May, 1987]
Shore War Hero Talks About Life and Time After Winning The Nation’s Highest Medal for Valor
By William Kelly (billkelly3@gmail.com)
As a member of one of America’s most exclusive groups – war veterans, Tom Kelly is proud. Yet, he’s also bitter about the treatment he and other veterans receive from a society that declares heroes, then quickly forgets those who have died to preserve their liberty.
According to Kelly, war heroes are not popular in this day and age.
“They think that because you’re a war hero, you’ve got to be a killer,” he reflects. “They can’t imagine that you could have saved a life.”
A stranger may buy Kelly a drink in a restaurant and ask him to tell how, as a medic, he single-handedly saved the lives of 17 soldiers, took out an enemy machine guy nest, made it to his platoon’s objective, then captured and treated 35 wounded German soldiers, all without firing a shot. It’s what Kelly calls “the incident,” but he is usually reluctant to talk unless he has a truly interested audience.
“If I’m going to tell the story I don’t want any distractions,” he said. “If I am going to get serious, break down and make a fool of myself, I want people to hear me.”
Even after more than four decades in which he’s told the story hundreds of times, Kelly still gets choked up thinking about it and cries when he recalls the deaths of his friends and comrades.
“I know I make people uneasy,” he said, “but I also know that some people learn something from it, and I often set off a chain reaction, because people are touched, knowing a relative or friend who may have died under similar circumstances.”
When the talks, Thomas J. Kelly wears his heart on his shoulder, wide open and ready to be broken.
Often asked to speak at dinners and ceremonies around patriotic holidays like Memorial Day, July 4th and Veterans Day, Kelly tried to put everything in its proper perspective, mixing historical facts with his unique personal experiences.
Sitting in the Longport Inn (which is no longer there), not far from his Down beach home, Tom Kelly explained, “The idea of Memorial Day began after the Civil War in 1868 when General John Logan, of Upstate New York, named May 30th Decoration Day, to decorate the graves of the soldiers who had died for their country. Originally begun to honor Union soldiers, it was later taken up by the Southern states as well, and renamed Memorial Day to honor all veterans who served their country and died.”
“Then the government, because of unions and employee benefits, changed it to a Monday for the three day weekend,” said Kelly. And it is now more popular as the beginning of summer. But to others, particularly the families and widows of veterans, “it brings back the memory of wars, and the realization that we’ve lost a lot of close family and friends.”
While every combat veteran has a story to tell, Kelly is considered special because he has been recognized for his bravery by being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The English have the Victorian Cross, molded out of the Crimean war canons heralded by Kipling in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the Germans have the Iron Cross, and the French have the Medal Militare and Napoleon’s Legion of Honor.
To be nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor you have to do something that “is above and beyond the cal of duty,” or as Kelly puts it, “doing something you wouldn’t be criticized for not doing.”
As one of the original founders of the Medal of Honor Society, and the organization’s past president (1964-1969), Kelly knows a lot of statistics and is personal friends with many of the living Medal of Honor recipients. “There’s five World War II fellows still alive,” Kelly says, “”there’s been five sets of brothers, one father and son (Arthur and Douglas MacArthur) who received the medal. Of the 239 Medals of Honor given out to Vietnam vets, 75% of them were awarded posthumously, and I now of seven Vietnam vets who won the award and died after coming home.”
Of the 3,412 Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers in all wars, only 236 are still alive (as of May 1987), compared to the 30,000,000 living veterans. Meeting every other year, the last time in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and the next time in November in California, there numbers are constantly depleting.
“It’s attrition, and without a war, no one is getting the medal, so we’re becoming a last-man type of society,” reflects Kelly, “though of course we hope there will never be another Medal of Honor man because we hope there will never be another war. If you even have the opportunity to get another medal that means a lot of other kids are going to die.”
Besides Kelly, who now lives at the Jersey Shore in Longport, just south of Atlantic City, there are other local heroes who have won the cherished medal, including Joseph Hill, who died on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor, and is recognized by a memorial on the Washington Street Mall in Cape May, and Oscar Schmidt, from World War I, who lived in Somers Point.
Others from New Jersey who received the Medal of Honor and survived include Nick Oresko from Bayone, Francis Berke of Jersey City and John Meagher who lives in Toms River, all World War II vets.
Two medals were given out 30 years after the fact, and others continue to promote their friends and relatives who they think are deserving of the honor, but when Kelly is asked to recommend someone for the medal he replies that only witnesses to the action can testify, and Kelly himself was never even asked to recount his own experience in combat. They awarded him the medal solely on the basis of the testimony of others who were there.
Some men can go through months of steady combat, then put it behind them and go on with their lives, but not a Medal of Honor recipient. People recognize him, talk about him, and strangers come up to him and want to know what you have to do to win the nation’s highest honor. In essence, you have to do something that makes hard men cry.
Kelly, a corporal medic attached to the 48th Armored Infantry battalion of the 7th Armored Division, participated in the encirclement of 120,000 German troops in the Ruhr valley. Having crossed the Rhine river at Remagen, Kelly had been in combat for some time, but it all came down to three hours on the afternoon of April 5, 1945.
According to his commanding officer, Captain Harrison Forrester, “My Company was attacking a small German village, and I had held back the first platoon before sending them up toward some woods to clear out some snipers who were holding up the other boys. Kelly was with the first platoon.”
“Just before the men reached the woods two tanks spotted them and cut loose…while they were still in the open. Machine guns opened up on them, seventeen men were hit and went down, the rest of the group, Kelly among them, got back to the gully. But after a minute, Kelly said he was gong back.”
“I didn’t know what he was up to, but I saw him go out. I watched him go along the wide open field that had no more cover than a marble topped table. Little puffs of machine gun fire danced around his feet.”
After leading seven blinded men out of the line of fire Kelly returned ten times, each time bringing a wounded soldier down the hill, all the while under constant fire.
When President Harry Truman presented him with his medal he read the citation, which read in part, “After he had completed this heroic, self-imposed task and was near collapse from fatigue, he refused to leave his platoon until the attack had been resumed and the objective taken. Cpl. Kelly’s gallantry and intrepidity in the face of seemingly certain death saved the lives of many of his fellow soldiers and was an example of bravery under fire.”
“When I was going up that hill I knew I was going to die,” Kelly recalled. “I thought of my mother and father, and my name was Kelly and I would rather be dead than called yellow, and I couldn’t stop because every time I picked up one man I knew I had to go back for another one.” Twice he was placed unconscious on a medic jeep to go back to an aide station, but woke up and jumped off and went back up the hill.
Fatigued, he yelled at some other soldiers who were safe under cover, and convinced two to help him, both of whom were killed, and provided inspiration for him to continue. Another inspiration was his fifth grade teacher, Sister Theresa Joseph. “She used to smack me on the back of the head with a ruler,” Kelly recalled, “and there I was dodging the tracer bullets as they chased me all over the place with some guy on my back, and I’m thinking of her whacking me on the back of my head with a ruler and saying, ‘Go on Tom, go on, you’ve got to do this.’”
When they finally moved into the small town of Alemert, their objective, Kelly says that he followed the tracer bullets of the machine gun to a particular cottage, and went berserk. “They thought I went crazy or something, but I just can into that building, ran right through the door, without even trying the handle, and started wrestling with the German machine gunner, with the intent on killing him.”
When he didn’t receive much resistance however, Kelly let loose, and realized the soldier was already wounded. “He wasn’t a kid, but a really good soldier. I mean he was wounded, wouldn’t leave his post, and held off our platoon single handed.” Taking him over his shoulder like he had his own men, Kelly was about to take him out when two GIs came in and wanted to kill the machine gunner who had killed so many of their comrades, but Kelly told them, “If I can’t kill him, nobody is.”
Kelly believes that because he spared the life of the German soldier his own life was spared twice later that week.
While aiding another wounded German soldier, a German tank suddenly approached, but instead of shooting him, the tank hatch opened and the tank commander came out and saluted him.
Shortly thereafter, while administering to some wounded in the front lines on the outskirts of a town, he was captured by a German officer who took him to a building where there were 35 wounded German soldiers. While he was treating their wounds American tanks came down the road and the German officer saluted him before retreating. Since the Americans believed the Germans were still occupying the town and would be shelling it, Kelly went outside and flagged down the tanks so they wouldn’t fire.
When they arrived he told them he took the town two hours ago, and when they asked how he did it without a weapon he said truthfully, “I shot them with morphine.”
One combat historian noted that Kelly’s heroics were particularly noteworthy because his deeds of valor “were performed very close to VE day. Everyone could sense that the war was fast drawing to a close, and would soon be over. A great number of men were simply not sticking their necks out under those conditions.”
After receiving his medal from President Truman, Tom Kelly attended Fordham University, graduated, attended Fordham Law School, passed the New York bar, and worked for the Federal government for 36 years. He says that two of the benefits of receiving the Medal of Honor are free standby travel on military aircraft, when available, and having a building, a ship or a street named after you, after you die.
Two years ago (1985) he was invited back to the small town of Alemert where the action occurred. Almert officials will eventually name a community field house after him, but only after he dies.
“They wait until after you’re dead because as long as you are alive you can still disgrace the medal,” said Kelly, who explained that, “you know, they’ll say that they named that after the guy who robbed the bank, or was part of a mob, or threw his wife out the window, something that will take away from the deed. But I still have the opportunity to pull a boner someday, and that will go down in history more than if another ordinary guy did it.”
Today, the sleepy German town of Almert is rebuilt, and there’s no one left who was even there in 1945.
Now at the age of 62, Tom Kelly thought he could still so some good work after raking an early retirement from the government. Offered a job at one of the Atlantic City’s first casinos, he moved to the Jersey Shore from New York, but he got lost in the bureaucratic maze, and is now bitter about not working on a regular basis. “I’m an over-aged, over educated war hero who wants a real job,” he says, “but equal opportunity and affirmative action laws don’t apply to an Irish Catholic with two degrees and a Medal of Honor.”
KELLY, THOMAS J.
Rank and organization: Corporal, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 48th Armored Infantry Battalion, 7th Armored Division. Place and date: Alemert, Germany, 5 August 1945. Entered service at: Brooklyn, N.Y. Birth: Brooklyn, N.Y., G.O. No. 97, 1 November 1945.
Citation: He was an aid man with the 1st Platoon of Company C during an attack on the town of Alemert, Germany. The platoon, committed in a flanking maneuver, had advanced down a small, open valley overlooked by wooded slopes hiding enemy machine guns and tanks, when the attack was stopped by murderous fire that inflicted heavy casualties in the American ranks. Ordered to withdraw, Cpl. Kelly reached safety with uninjured remnants of the unit, but, on realizing the extent of casualties suffered by the platoon, voluntarily retraced his steps and forced to craw, dragging the injured behind him for most of the 300 yards separating the exposed area form a place of comparative safety. Two other volunteers who attempted to negotiate the hazardous route with him were mortally wounded, but he kept on with his Herculean task after dressing their wounds and carrying them to friendly hands. In all, he made 10 separate trips through the brutal fire, each time bringing out a man from the death trap. Seven more casualties who were able to crawl by themselves he guided and encouraged in escaping from the hail of fire. After he had completed his heroic, self-imposed task and was near collapse from fatigue, he refused to leave his platoon until the attack had been resumed and the objective taken. Cpl. Kelly’s gallantry and intrepidity in the face of seemingly certain death saved the lives of many of his fellow soldiers and was an example of bravery under fire.
Tom Kelly (Photo by John Shields)
Obituaries
Medal of Honor recipient Thomas Kelly dies at 65
MARGATE – Thomas J. Kelly, Sr. of Margate, whose World War II heroics as an Army medic won him the Congressional Medal of Honor, died Sunday after suffering an apparent heart attack at a fund-raising dinner.
Kelly, 65, was awarded the medal by President Harry Truman for his actions on April 5, 1945, when he made 10 trips up an exposed German hillside to carry wounded men to safety while under “murderous” machine gun and tank fire. That incident was spectacular, but people who knew Kelly said he exhibited a reserved, gentle heroism all his life.
“There was a fire in Manhattan when we lived there,” says his daughter Kathy Benini. “He jumped in before the fireman came and saved a women’s life. No one else wanted to endanger themselves.”
“He would help anybody, whether they asked for it or not,” she said.
Kelly was born in Brooklyn and lived most of his life in Manhattan. He moved to Margate about nine years ago, following his retirement from his government job.
He was one of only about 230 living recipients of the nation’s highest honor. He was the founder of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and served as that organization’s president from 1964-1969. He also set up a fund for widows and orphans of medal winners.
Kelly was a medic assigned to the 7th Armored Division of the Army’s 48th Armored Infantry Battalion. His platoon was in action near the town of Almert when he pulled the men to safety, making 10 separate trips while the rifle fire kicked up dirt at his feet.
His Army buddy and lifelong friend William Dassinger remembers other instances of heroism.
In one battle near Cologne, Kelly went out to an exposed field being shelled by a German tank, pulled a wounded man out and started carrying him back. The tank bore down on him all the way, and Kelly finally turned around to take the fire face-on.
“In the tank was this big blonde guy, and he pulls up and gives Tom a salute, and waves him off the field,” Dassinger said.
Following the war, Kelly spent 36 years working for the Veterans Administration, the last dozen years as liaison helping to get jobs for veterans in private industry. He spent 10 difficult years putting himself through college and then law school at Fordham University.
Kelly met five presidents and has a gymnasium in German named in his honor. He loved to play golf and also was a masterful ballroom dancer, remembers his friend JoAnn Bowers of Margate. “He was 6 foot 2 and 225 pounds and soft as a kitten,” she said. Bowers said his most violent curse was “Sugar!”
Kelly organized many dinners and golf tournaments, most of them for the benefit of veterans. He died after attending a dinner at Trump Plaza, part of a weekend golf event benefiting the Marine Scholarship Fund (at the Atlantic City Country Club).
He is survived by his wife, Wilma; two daughters, Kathy Benini of Wayne, and Patricia A. Kelly of North Oxford, Mass.; a son Thomas J. Jr. of Manhattan, and brother, William of Forrest Hills, NY.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be said at 11 a.m. Thursday at Epiphany Church on Second Avenue between 21st and 22nd streets, NY Burial will be in Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.
Friends may call the Gannon Funeral Home, on 28th Street between Third and Lexington avenues in NY today from 2 to 5 pm and from 7 to 9 pm.
Tom Kelly's Medal of Honor (Photo by John Shields)
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