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This Day in History: Edward G. Wilkin's Medal of Honor

  • tara
  • 1 hour ago
  • 3 min read

On this Memorial Day in 1948, a soldier is honored in a ceremony led by none other than General Omar Bradley. Edward G. Wilkin’s young son had received a Medal of Honor on his behalf two years earlier. Now he was also present as Wilkin’s remains were finally brought home.

 

The younger Wilkin remembers the ceremony, “but what it really meant, what it represented,” he admitted. “I never really understood it until I got older of course.”

 

He also remembers Bradley, who spoke to the assembled crowd: “Here on the long green meadows of this tranquil New England town, we have come to do honor—not alone to one brave soldier—but to the generation of earnest young men who left their homes to defend them at Concord, Antietam, San Juan, the Argonne—and in the snows of the Ardennes. For as long as free men have lived, worked, worshipped and reared their families under these elms, so long have their sons been summoned to arms against those who would covet or destroy them.”

 

Wilkin’s act of bravery occurred nearly three years earlier, on March 18, 1945. On that day, the “painter turned soldier,” as one journalist said, threw himself into danger, over and over again.

 

Corporal Wilkin was then serving with the 45th Infantry Division near the Siegfried Line in Germany. They were trying to crack that heavily fortified line, but his company had become pinned down by enemy fire.

 

That’s when Wilkin turned himself into a “One-Man Spearhead,” as another journalist marveled.

 

His citation reads like something out of a movie script. He was moving forward alone and storming enemy fortifications, despite the fire aimed at him. He was taking out the enemy, either by killing them or taking them prisoner. Barbed wire in his path was taken out with Bangalore torpedoes. At one point, he was engaged in firefights in the open. At another, he pursued retreating enemy soldiers across an exposed field.

 

As night fell, it seemed that he must fall from sheer exhaustion. Instead, he leapt into action, assisting litter bearers in taking wounded men off the field.

 

“All that night he remained in the battle area on his mercy missions,” his Medal citation concludes, “and for the following two days he continued to remove casualties, venturing into enemy-held territory, scorning cover, and braving devastating mortar and artillery bombardments.”

 

Over the course of his three-day Medal action, Wilkin is credited with capturing 6 enemy pillboxes, single-handedly. He killed 9 or more of the enemy, wounded another 13 and took 13 more prisoner.

 

Amazingly, he survived. Unfortunately, he was taken out by a sniper about a month later.

 

His 4-year-old son received his Medal on his behalf in January 1946. “Robert Jesse did not know his father,” a local paper reported, “nor could a four-year-old be expected to know the significance of what was occurring. Yet he sensed the importance of it and he stood in proudly for his father . . . .”

 

The younger Wilkin would later join the Air Force, but the Medal he’d received on his father’s behalf became lost at some point. As an adult, he sought help getting it back or replaced. Fortunately, it was found at a museum in his father’s hometown of Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

 

“I am truly grateful to have this medal back. It is actually the only thing I have that represents my father,” an 81-year-old Wilkin said at the time.

 

He remains proud of his father, as is the whole family.

 

“He didn’t care about himself, whether he got killed at all,” his sister-in-law Lucy Schmidt concluded. “He was probably so mad at the Germans.”

 

 

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