HEROES: Medals for Americans

The U.S. had many heroes last week. Some of them would never grow older than their framed photographs back home on the mantel, or the piano. Many of them were still alive: they jolted on east and north out of France, bewhiskered and dirty, hardly aware of fame, but sighing with fatigue. Some were in hospitals. A few were whole and at home.

Last week the President awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for heroism, to six of them. Two of the heroes, both marines, were dead. Their mothers came to the White House in their place. From El Paso came Mrs. C. Jane Hawkins, whose son, Lieut. William D. Hawkins, after being wounded on Betio Island, had fought on for hours—to die from Jap gunfire. From Worcester, Mass, came Mrs. George F. Power, whose son, Lieut. John V. Power, died outside a Jap pillbox on Namur Island, holding his left hand to a stomach wound, firing a carbine with his right.

Death and Jungle Stench. After the mothers, four living soldiers stepped up to Franklin Roosevelt’s desk. Their citations, like the first two, were full of jungle stench, death and the slam of explosives.

But now they stood at attention, freshly shaved, in clean uniforms, stepping for ward precisely as their names were called: Staff Sergeant Jessie R. Drowley, of Luzerne, Mich., Pfc. William J. Johnston of Colchester, Conn., Technical Sergeant Forrest L. Vosler, of Livonia, N.Y., Lieut. Arnold L. Bjorklund of Seattle, Wash.

Not all the heroes went to the White House. Big, blond Lieut. Alexander Vraciu Jr., currently the Navy’s top-ranking fighter pilot, collected $1,900 (for 19 Jap planes) from an admiring uncle. He married Kathryn Horn, his slim and pretty sweetheart, and hurried her off to New York to visit the Grumman aircraft plant.

There, with his bride, he admired rows of his favorite Hellcat fighter planes (see BUSINESS), like a man staring at Niagara Falls. But he was cagey when a newsman asked what he had named his own plane: “I refuse to say for purposes of security.” Then, beaming: “Marital security.” And in France a 24-year-old lieutenant named Clarence E. Coggins became a hero in an unorthodox way: he got captured.

But his captors hemmed & hawed and finally surrendered to him in a body. His bag, which made Sergeant York’s World War I record of 132 seem small: 946 German soldiers, their arms and vehicles.