Oldest Medal of Honor recipient
WORLD WAR II HERO
By the fall of 1944, 23-yearold Charles Coolidge was already battle-hardened from fighting in Italy during the Second World War. The Army technical sergeant had gone ashore in Salerno, crossed the Rapido River to attack German forces at Monte Cassino and later landed at Anzio, helping to clear a path for the liberation of Rome.
He received the Silver Star for his actions in Velletri, where he repelled an enemy attack with his machine-gun section, and once traversed a minefield with his fellow soldiers by forcing sheep through first at bayonet point. In quieter moments, he had dined on watermelon and cantaloupe while marching through the countryside.
Now he was in eastern France, wet from the cold rain and tasked with holding a tree-covered hill. Coolidge was a mere enlisted man, but with no officers on the battlefield he took command of an inexperienced, overmatched group of about 30 machine-gunners and riflemen, leading them through a harrowing four-day firefight against a much larger group of Germans.
“It's interesting how the world changes complexion,” he later told the Nashville Tennessean, recalling the fighting that led him to receive the Medal of Honor, the U.S.'s highest military decoration for valour. “And what you do to survive.”
Coolidge, 99, was the country's oldest living Medal of Honor recipient when he died April 6 at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn. His death leaves only one remaining recipient from the Second World War, Hershel Williams, 97, who was recognized for his bravery as a Marine Corps corporal on Iwo Jima.
The Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, which opened last year in Chattanooga, announced the death but did not give a cause. Coolidge had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 1970s.
Charles Henry Coolidge was born in Signal Mountain, Tenn., on Aug. 4, 1921. He suffered from a severe speech impediment as a child, which he overcame with several years of tutoring, according to a National Medal of Honor Museum biography.
In 1945, Coolidge married Frances Seepe. They had three sons, William, John and Charles Coolidge Jr. Coolidge's wife died in 2009. Survivors include his three sons; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.