MEDAL OF HONOR: ALTON W. KNAPPENBERGER
Posted: Monday, August 13, 2007 11:47 AM by Petra Cahill
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Medal of Honor Recipients
Every weekday for 110 straight days we will feature a different living recipient of the
Medal of Honor. These are the men who have received their nation's highest military honor. Brian is a board member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. The words and photos are courtesy of Artisan Books, publishers of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty by Peter Collier with photographs by Nick Del Calzo.
ALTON W. KNAPPENBERGER
Private First Class, U.S. Army Company C, 30th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division
Alton Knappenberger was working on a Pennsylvania pig farm when he was drafted in 1943 at the age of nineteen. He landed at Anzio, on the Italian coast, on January 22, 1944, as part of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, and although he did not know it at the time, he was about to become engaged in one of the toughest combat actions of World War II. “Knappie,” as his friends called him, was surprised by how little resistance the Germans initially offered. But as his unit slowly pushed inland over the next few days, he could sense that the enemy was regrouping. It rained constantly. He never forgot the mud; it was so thick and viscous that he worried it might suck off his boots.
On February 1, as Private First Class Knappenberger’s battalion neared the small town of Cisterna di Littoria, the Germans launched a strong counterattack with tanks and artillery that nearly overwhelmed the U.S. force. It was the Germans’ intent to push the Americans into the sea. With American soldiers taking heavy casualties all around him, Knappenberger crawled to a rise so that he could see the enemy. A German machine gun about eighty yards away opened fire, its slugs hitting right in front of Knappenberger and kicking mud into his face. He scrambled to a Browning Automatic Rifle lying beside one of his dead comrades, stood up, and aimed a burst at the machine gun, killing the three Germans operating it. Two Germans crawled to a point within twenty yards of Knappenberger’s knoll and threw potato masher grenades at him. Knappenberger wheeled and killed them both with one burst from his automatic rifle.
He was moving forward when a second German machine gun opened fire from a range of a hundred yards. Knappenberger silenced it with the BAR. Shortly afterward, a German 20 mm antiaircraft gun directed fire at his unit. He took out the German position with his BAR. For the next two hours, Knappenberger single-handedly held off the enemy infantry, which was threatening the efforts of the U.S. force to organize a defense. When he ran low on ammunition, he crawled through heavy fire to the body of another fallen American and grabbed clips from his pack. He resumed firing and repelled a German platoon armed with automatic weapons. Despite heavy fire, shells bursting within fifteen yards of him, he held his precarious position while continuing to fire at the enemy. Finally, his ammunition supply completely exhausted, he rejoined his company, having disrupted the enemy attack for more than two hours. Only six men out of his company of two hundred had not been killed or wounded.
Over the next few weeks, the breakout from Anzio stalled and developed into a stalemate between Allied and German forces as each regrouped. Knappenberger was in a foxhole not far from where the February action had occurred when he was informed that he was to receive the Medal of Honor. It was presented to him on June 8, 1944, by General Mark Clark, commander of the 5th Army, with American troops looking on and the regimental band playing. Soon therafter, Knappenberger was sent home and traveled around the country telling his story as part of a war bond drive. After the war, he returned home to Pennsylvania and worked as a truck driver and supervisor of an asphalting crew.
