The military rationale for the counterattack was straightforward: the positions the company had been ordered to hold were the positions the company should hold. A defensive stand that ended with the company fifty yards further back than its assigned position had not fully accomplished the mission. The counterattack restored the position.
The personal rationale, to whatever extent it can be inferred from the documented pattern of Murphy’s behavior, was consistent with everything else he had done: the mission was not complete, so it was not time to stop.
The men spent the night of January 26-27 among the dead near the Colmar Canal — a specific detail from the HistoryNet account that places the aftermath of the action in the physical reality of what a defensive position looks like after it has been fought over. The dead were there. Murphy and his seventeen surviving men were among them.
The next day, January 27, the reinforcements that had not come on January 26 arrived. The 3rd Battalion of the 30th Infantry, with replacements, retook Holtzwihr. The tactical objective was achieved. The ground that Company B had been holding was no longer at the extreme edge of the American position.
## Why the Story Persists
Audie Murphy’s story has persisted in American culture for more than eighty years because it contains elements that are specific rather than generic.
The specificity of his background — the sharecropper family, the fifth-grade education, the military’s initial rejection — gives the wartime story a context that generic hero narratives do not have. He was not supposed to be there. The military had tried to keep him out. The country that he went to war for was the same country that had given his family so little. The specific irony of that — the country that offered a sharecropper’s son so little in peace asking him for so much in war — is embedded in the story without requiring emphasis.