Kelly Earns a Medal

Technical Sergeant Charles E. Kelly, a thin-faced, 23-year-old redhead from Pittsburgh, is one of seven brothers, all in service. He has seen 70 days of active combat in Italy, suffered no wound worse than a scraped nose and some minor cuts on his hands from shell fragments.* He fought at Salerno, San Pietro, Cassino.

As a platoon sergeant he led men across the blood-dyed Rapido River three times, and three times had to pull back before overwhelming enemy strength. In combat reports Kelly is officially credited with killing at least 40 Germans. Admiring fellow infantrymen rib him as "Commando" Kelly, or "The One-Man Army."

Kelly had been cited and promoted before this, but last week, "somewhere in the Mediterranean Theater," he got the highest of all U.S. awards, the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is how he won it:

Two Busy Days. On Sept. 13, near Altavilla, on the Salerno front, Kelly volunteered for a patrol assigned to wipe out enemy machine-gun positions. Said Kelly:

"We cleaned them out all right, and then I stuck my neck out again and volunteered to locate our 3rd Battalion, which was beyond a hill a mile away. . . ."

He walked and crawled a mile under continuous rifle, machine-gun and mortar fire, then worked his way back with important information that the battalion was not there at all, and the Nazis had dug in strongly. Said Kelly:

"I got back to headquarters okay and then, I don't know why, but I volunteered to help clean out another machine-gun nest. That night was a real show. . . ."

Kelly got into a first-class scrap that time. He joined in heartily until ammunition began to run low, then volunteered to go for more. Next day also was brisk. Said Kelly:

"We were in a three-story building. When the third floor got too hot, we went to the second. When that got too hot, we went to the first, and then back to the third. I burned out four automatic rifles, they were so hot from continuous firing."

One-Man Retreat. When he had run out of rifles and the enemy was closing in, Kelly snatched up 60-mm. mortar shells, pulled the safety pins and threw them as hand grenades. One burst killed five Nazis. But that could not go on indefinitely. The detachment had to pull out.

Kelly volunteered once more, this time to cover the retreat. As the others left, they saw him at a window, methodically loading and firing a bazooka to slow up the foe. When he made his own getaway he slid down a hill, found an abandoned 37-mm. antitank gun, served and fired that at the enemy positions until he had used up the shells on hand. Then he withdrew in good order, eventually rejoined his own outfit. Said Kelly:

"It is a rugged life."

* News had not come to him of his girl's marriage to a merchant sailor

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