Voices of WW2
@VoicesofWW2
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Aug 26
Van Barfoot took apart a German defensive line by himself, capturing seventeen prisoners, and then, when the Germans counterattacked with tanks, he stood in the open in front of them with a bazooka and knocked out the lead tank. He was a Choctaw from Mississippi, and decades later he made headlines again, as an old man, for refusing to take down a flagpole.
Barfoot was a sergeant in Italy in May 1944, part American Indian, of Choctaw descent, and on the day he earned the Medal of Honor his unit was attacking German positions near Carano. He went out ahead on his own initiative. He crawled up to a German machine gun nest and destroyed it with a grenade, killing and wounding its crew. He moved down the German line to a second machine gun position and took it with his tommy gun, killing some and capturing others. The crew of a third gun, watching this one man dismantle their whole line, simply gave up and surrendered to him. He kept mopping up positions until he had personally taken seventeen prisoners.
Then the Germans hit back with a tank counterattack aimed right at his platoon. Barfoot grabbed a bazooka and went out in front of his own position, into the open, directly in the path of three advancing tanks. At about 75 yards he fired and blew the track off the lead tank, disabling it and forcing the others to sheer off. He then went on to knock out an enemy field gun and, on his way back, helped two of his wounded men to safety.
They gave him the Medal of Honor. He served for decades, through Korea and Vietnam, and retired a colonel.
And then, in 2009, Van Barfoot made the news one more time. He was in his nineties, living in Virginia, and he flew the American flag every day from a flagpole in his yard. His homeowners association told him the freestanding flagpole violated the rules and ordered him to take it down. Barfoot, the Medal of Honor recipient, refused. The story went national, people were outraged on his behalf, and under the pressure the association backed down. The old soldier kept his flagpole, and raised the flag every morning and lowered it every night, as he had done all his life.
