A short life of the author
Audie Leon Murphy (20 June 1925 – 28 May 1971) was the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II — he received every military combat award for valour available from the U.S. Army, including the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, three Purple Hearts, and the French Croix de Guerre — and the author of To Hell and Back (1949), a war memoir that is one of the most widely read and most emotionally honest accounts of combat ever written by an American soldier. Murphy was five feet five inches tall, weighed 110 pounds when he enlisted at seventeen by lying about his age, and looked, by all accounts, like a boy playing soldier. He fought across North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, was wounded three times, killed or captured approximately 240 enemy soldiers, and performed the single-handed action against a German counterattack — climbing atop a burning tank destroyer and holding off an entire company of German infantry — that earned him the Medal of Honor.
Life
Murphy was born into dire poverty in Kingston, Texas, the seventh of twelve children in a family of sharecroppers. His father abandoned the family; his mother died when he was sixteen. He had a fifth-grade education. He tried to enlist in the Marines and the Army paratroopers and was rejected by both for being too small and too young. The infantry took him in 1942.
He was sent to North Africa with the 3rd Infantry Division and saw his first combat in Sicily in 1943. Over the next two years, he fought through the Italian campaign (Anzio, the drive to Rome) and the invasion of southern France (Operation Dragoon), advancing through France and into Germany. He was promoted from private to first lieutenant through battlefield performance — a career trajectory almost unheard of in the rigidly hierarchical Army.
The Medal of Honor action occurred near Holtzwihr, France, on 26 January 1945. Murphy’s company was attacked by six German tanks and waves of infantry. Murphy ordered his men to fall back, then climbed onto a burning M10 tank destroyer — which was in danger of exploding — and used its .50 calibre machine gun to hold off the German advance for nearly an hour, killing or wounding approximately fifty enemy soldiers. He then led a counterattack that drove the Germans from their positions. He was twenty years old.
To Hell and Back (1949)
Murphy’s memoir — written with the uncredited assistance of his friend David “Spec” McClure — covers his combat experience from North Africa through the end of the war. The book is remarkable for what it is not: it is not boastful, not sentimental, and not heroic in the conventional memoir sense. Murphy writes about combat with a dry, understated clarity that recalls Hemingway — the killing, the fear, the boredom, the loss of friends, the gradual erosion of everything except the instinct to survive. He describes his own famous actions with an almost embarrassed brevity.
The book’s emotional honesty extends to Murphy’s acknowledgment that combat damaged him. He writes about his own growing numbness, his inability to feel normal emotions, and his awareness that something essential has been destroyed in him. The memoir ends not with triumph but with exhaustion and a quiet, unresolved grief.
To Hell and Back was a major bestseller. The 1955 film adaptation, in which Murphy played himself, was Universal’s highest-grossing film until Jaws (1975).
Postwar Life
Murphy became a Hollywood actor after the war, appearing in over forty films — mostly Westerns — between 1948 and 1969. He was a competent but limited actor whose screen presence derived from his authentic toughness rather than from dramatic skill.
He suffered severely from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, violent outbursts, and an addiction to sleeping pills. He was open about his struggles at a time when discussion of combat trauma was taboo, and his willingness to speak publicly about PTSD is now recognised as a significant contribution to the eventual acknowledgment of the condition by the military and medical establishment.
He died in a plane crash near Roanoke, Virginia, on 28 May 1971, at age forty-five.
Collecting Murphy
To Hell and Back (1949, Henry Holt) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. Signed copies are very scarce and bring $500–$1,500. The book has been continuously in print and is widely available in later editions. Military memorabilia associated with Murphy — signed photographs, documents, personal items — is highly collected and commands significant prices.