The American rifle company and machine gun platoon were trying to break through the Nazi strongholds around Anzio during World War II. When a group of Nazis ambushed the Americans, Staff Sergeant Rudolph B. Davila turned into an army of one.
Davila died in January 2002, but on May 28, 1944, many of his comrades must have assumed he would not live the day. The U.S. Army staff sergeant spotted the German ambush just as he crested a hill. “[T]his hill was just covered with grass, tall grass. There was no cover for the rifle company that was lying there on the forward slope,” Davila later recalled, according to historian Tara Ross. The machine gunners didn’t want to advance into the ambush to back up the rifle company as they were supposed to do, given the withering fire raining down. Davila wasn’t deterred. “I had no time to think of anything but how all those Americans were about to be killed,” he described the crisis.
Therefore, Davila crawled some fifty yards to a machine gun, set it up by himself, and began to fire on the Nazis from a kneeling position so he could see his targets better, even though bullets whizzed around his legs. He managed to silence multiple Nazi guns.
The Congressional Medal of Honor Society (CMOHS) states that Davila then crawled to a better vantage point and directed his gunners’ fire using hand and arm signals. CMOHS continues:
Bringing his three remaining machine guns into action, he drove the enemy to a reserve position two hundreds [sic] yards to the rear. When he received a painful wound in the leg, he dashed to a burned tank and, despite the crash of bullets on the hull, engaged a second enemy force from the tank’s turret. Dismounting, he advanced 130 yards in short rushes, crawled 20 yards and charged into an enemy-held house to eliminate the defending force of five with a hand grenade and rifle fire. Climbing to the attic, he straddled a large shell hole in the wall and opened fire on the enemy. Although the walls of the house were crumbling, he continued to fire until he had destroyed two more machine guns.
Altogether, Davila was responsible for taking out four Nazi machine guns and relieving the beleaguered rifle company, not to mention advancing his own machine gunners. Understandably, the rifle company’s commanding officer was very grateful to Davila. “If you hadn’t done that, we’d have all been slaughtered. When this is over, I’m going to write you up for the Medal of Honor.” Davila saved 130 men’s lives with his courageous actions.
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Davila’s superiors gave him a battlefield promotion and then a Distinguished Service Cross in recognition of his heroism. He was badly injured and ended up with one arm paralyzed, but it was at the military hospital that he met a nurse with whom he fell in love, Tara Ross explains.
Five decades later, Davila finally received the Medal of Honor. His wife and son were very proud. The son remembers that Davila himself was “elated” and “not so much for himself but for his family. He saw this as a statement about who we are as a family and who we are as Americans.”
We call the WWII generation “the Greatest Generation,” and Rudolph Davila was certainly an outstanding representative of how they earned that title.
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