MOH Recipient Robert Maxwell Dies in 2019-- Part 4: Recovery, Honors and Postwar Life

"I draped an arm over his shoulder, bled all over him, and we left," Maxwell said.  A jeep picked them up and ferried them to an aid station, where Maxwell received medical treatments as artillery obliterated the farmhouse and courtyard.

The grenade had wounded his right foot, torn his left bicep and struck his temple near his left eye.  But although Maxwell was "permanently maimed" according to his Medal of Honor citation, his actions "saved the lives of his comrades in arms and facilitated maintenance of vital military communications during the temporary withdrawal of the battalion's forward headquarters.

Maxwell was presented with the Medal of Honor in May 1945, while convalescing at Camp Carson in Colorado.  Days earlier his former commander, Ramsey, had helped lead the 3rd Infantry into Austria, where members of the division liberated Salzburg and Berchtesgaden and pressed on toward Hitler's Eagle's Nest, his mountaintop retreat.

Robert Dale Maxwell was born in Boise, Idaho, on October 26, 1920 and raised by his grandparents in western Kansas.  He left school to work on their farm and received his high school diploma in 2011 at age 90.

Although he had a Quaker upbringing, Maxwell decided against being a conscientious objector and enlisted in the Army in 1942.  He received two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts during the war.

After the war, he taught auto mechanics at high schools and county colleges in central Oregon.

Quite the Hero.  --GreGen

Medal of Honor Recipient Robert Maxwell Dies in 2019-- Part 3: The Fight at the Farmhouse

As a hail of bullets sheared tiles from the roof, Maxwell leaped to the ground, taking shelter behind a short rock wall topped with a mesh wire fence.  The German forces had evidently outmaneuvered the American rifle companies nearby, coming within ten yards of the wall and nearly as close to Maxwell's battalion commander, Lt. Col.  Lloyd B. Ramsey, who was inside the post with other officers.

Maxwell and his three comrades marshaled a defense, armed only with their .45s.

"Maxwell's courage was what held us together, " Cyril McColl, a technician fourth grade later told Collier's Magazine.  "The machine-gun fie was just clearing his head, but he sat there taking pot shots at everything that moved.  Our wall was beginning to crumble, and I was thinking how nice it would be to get out of there, when a grenade came over the chicken wire, and hit the cement floor right at our feet."

It was about 2 a.m. when Maxwell fell on the grenade and lost consciousness.  By most accounts, when he came to, the post was deserted, his fellow soldiers apparently believing he had died, had been ordered to evacuate.

Maxwell stumbled into the house, where he found the last American left in it, a lieutenant gathering phone wire.

--GreGen

Medal of Honor Recipient Robert Maxwell Dies in 2019-- Part 2: Strung Phone Wire

Maxwell had seen action a long time before the occasion he received the Medal of Honor for.  The onetime Colorado timber worker served as a "wire man," scaling roofs or trees to hang phone lines that enabled his battalion to communicate quickly on the battlefield.  

In North Africa, he had carried an M1 rifle before being classified as a noncombatant.  With his heavy wires and tools, his load was too heavy for a rifle.  Instead he was given a .45-caliber pistol for the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy.

At Anzio, where Allies secured a beachhead for the liberation of Rome, Maxwell too shrapnel in both legs while repairing communications wires.  For several months afterwards, he was hospitalized in 1944 before rejoining his unit, the 7th Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division, for the invasion of Southern France dubbed Operation Dragoon.

By September, Maxwell's battalion had reached the city of Besancon, near the Swiss border.  He was stationed with a few GIs at an old pockmarked farmhouse on the outskirts of town, stringing wire on the observation post's when a German platoon suddenly opened fire with machine guns and 20mm antiaircraft weapons.

Next?  --GreGen

Medal of Honor Recipient Robert Maxwell Dies in 2019-- Part 1: Fell on a Grenade

From the May 16, 2019, Chicago Tribune "Medal of Honor recipient fell on grenade to save lives" by Harrison Smith, Washington Post.

He heard the hand grenade before he saw it,  And as the seconds ticked away and Robert Maxwell searched blindly through the darkness, he decided that the only thing worse than running away was picking it up and attempting to throw it back at the enemy -- an act that risked killing the three soldiers crouched alongside him.

When he finally found the grenade lying on the cement courtyard outside his battalion's embattled observation post in eastern France, he did the only thing that made sense.  Clutching a blanket to his chest, he dropped on top of the device, absorbing the full force of the explosion and saving the lives of his comrades.

"It's not the case that I was brave or a hero or anything like that," Maxwell, an Army Technician fifth grade during World War II, said years later.  "Because I just did what the only alternative was at the time.  There was nothing else to do."

For his actions early that morning on September 7, 1944, Maxwell was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration for valor.  He was 98, the oldest surviving Medal recipient when he died May 11, 2019, in Bend, Oregon, leaving only three surviving recipients from World War II.

--GreGen