Korean War: Hiroshi Miyamura’s Medal of Honor

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Miyamura recalled the nightmarish events leading up to his capture. The eastern horizon was beginning to grow lighter, and the enemy soldiers were now pouring off the ridge he had evacuated. He spotted a friendly tank that had been staked out to cover the withdrawal, now preparing to pull out. Miyamura ran desperately toward it, only to stumble into American barbed wire. Sobbing in pain, he heard the tank rumble away.

‘When last seen, he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers,’ the general continued. But that wasn’t quite the way it happened, Miyamura remembered. He managed to free himself from the wire and dropped into a small shellhole, throbbing with pain from the barbed-wire punctures and from the grenade-fragment wound in his leg. Enemy troops swarmed down the back slope and walked by the hole in which he lay, ignoring what they thought was a dead GI. If he could last through the day playing dead, he might be able to make it back to his own lines when night fell. A lone enemy soldier stopped beside him and leveled a U.S. Army 45-caliber pistol at his head. ‘Get up,’ he ordered in English. ‘I know you’re alive. We don’t harm prisoners.’

Four days later, a 3rd Division task force slashed its way back to the position Miyamura had evacuated. Miyamura was not among the dead GIs who lay there with more than 50 enemy dead, scattered on both slopes of his position.

Why was Miyamura’s Medal of Honor citation classified top-secret? General Osborne explained: ‘If the Reds knew what he had done to a good number of their soldiers just before he was taken prisoner, they might have taken revenge on this young man. He might not have come back.’ Sergeant Hiroshi H. Miyamura, America’s first secret hero, was formally presented his Medal of Honor by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a White House ceremony on October 27, 1953.

Miyamura has since visited Washington several times as an invited guest at presidential inaugurations. A career as an auto mechanic and service station owner made it possible for him to send his three children to college. Miyamura is now retired in his hometown of Gallup, N.M., and ‘doing the many things that I now have time for.’ An avid freshwater fisherman, he spends much of his time trout fishing in the many lakes in the Southwest.

This article was written by Edward Hymoff and originally published in the April 1996 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Korean War, People

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