The field telephone was the only thread connecting Second Lieutenant Audie Murphy to anyone who could help him. On the afternoon of January 26, 1945, in a strip of forest north of the Alsatian village of Holtzwihr, Murphy was directing artillery fire at six advancing German tanks and roughly 250 infantry while his eighteen-man company had already withdrawn to the tree line behind him. The two M10 tank destroyers that had arrived at dawn to support his position were gone — one knocked out by an 88mm shell, one mired in a drainage ditch. The Germans had come in white snow camouflage suits from the direction of Holtzwihr, and they were within fifty yards of his command post in a ditch. Murphy picked up the telephone, called in fire on the German advance, and kept firing his carbine at the infantry. Then the M10 that had been hit caught fire, and something changed in what he was going to do next.
He climbed onto the burning tank destroyer.
## The Farm in Hunt County
Audie Leon Murphy was born on June 20, 1925, in Kingston, in Hunt County, Texas, the seventh of twelve children of Emmett Berry Murphy and Josie Bell Murphy. The family worked as sharecroppers, moving from one arrangement to another across the Texas cotton country, never accumulating the security that the work’s difficulty might have seemed to warrant.
His birth year is a matter of some complexity. His enlistment papers list 1924, and his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery also shows 1924. The discrepancy arose from the circumstances of his enlistment: when Murphy tried to enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor, every branch he approached — the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps — rejected him. He was underweight and underage. His sister helped him by signing an affidavit falsifying his birth year, changing 1925 to 1924. When he enlisted in the Army on June 30, 1942, the official record said he was 18. He was approximately 17.