The battlefield commission came on October 14, 1944: Second Lieutenant, United States Army. The Army had rejected him as too small and too young in 1941 and 1942. By October 1944 he was an officer.
On October 26, after capturing two German snipers, Murphy was shot in the hip by a third. He killed that sniper. Gangrene developed in the wound. He was hospitalized at Aix-en-Provence until December 28, 1944, and was awarded a first Oak Leaf Cluster to his Purple Heart.
## The Colmar Pocket: Context
The Colmar Pocket was the last German-held territory on the west bank of the Rhine River in France, a substantial bridgehead that the Germans had maintained through the autumn of 1944 despite Allied pressure. By January 1945, reducing the Colmar Pocket had become an operational priority: it threatened the flanks of the Allied advance and kept German forces on French soil.
Alsace — the region of the pocket — had a complicated history. It was German territory before 1918, became French under the Versailles settlement, was annexed by Germany again in 1940, and was about to be liberated. The villages of this landscape — Holtzwihr, Riedwihr, Biesheim, Colmar — were Alsatian: French in legal status, German in architecture and in many cases in language. The fighting in January 1945 was going through places that looked like the Germany just across the Rhine, in winter, through frozen ground and snow.
The 3rd Infantry Division’s role in reducing the Colmar Pocket was part of a combined French-American operation. The French First Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny and the American Seventh Army under General Alexander Patch were working to close the pocket from both sides.