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This Day in History: Johnnie David Hutchins, WWII Hero

  • tara
  • 6 hours ago
  • 3 min read

On this day in 1922, a future Medal of Honor recipient is born. Perhaps few would have expected Johnnie David Hutchins to become a military hero? The young man came from humble beginnings, having grown up in a one-room shack in Lissie, Texas.

 

He seemed to always be doing something to help someone else. When he was just 7 years old, he began plowing fields alongside his father, who was a sharecropper. He wanted to help put food on the table. When he was old enough, he went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps, which enabled him to send money to his family. Later, he worked on a tug in Houston, which gave him a new way to send money home.

 

One of his shipmates would remember Hutchins as a “swell guy” who loved his family and was always working for them.

 

But his family surely knew that better than anyone else. When he joined the Navy, they watched him buy an insurance policy just in case he didn’t make it back home. He instructed his mom to use the funds to buy a better house.

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“Johnnie wanted us to own a home and get the children educated,” his mom explained. “He was the finest boy that ever lived.”

 

Seaman First Class Hutchins lived up to that description on September 4, 1943. He was then serving aboard U.S.S. Landing Ship Tank LST-473, carrying men and supplies during the amphibious landings near Lae in New Guinea.

 

Enemy shore batteries were taking aim at the approaching LSTs, as were enemy aircraft overhead.

 

“Hutchins had just been relieved at the helm,” his shipmate V.L. Dolezal would later describe. “Dive bombers and torpedo planes came in and dropped their fish and eggs. An egg struck the boat and blew the helmsman overboard.”

 

Dolezal couldn’t see what Hutchins could see: a torpedo in the water. It was on track to hit the LST.

 

“Fully aware of the dire peril of the situation, Hutchins,” his Medal citation explains, “although mortally wounded by the shattering explosion, quickly grasped the wheel and exhausted the last of his strength in maneuvering the vessel clear of the advancing torpedo.”

 

He’d carried out the last order he’d heard before the helmsman was blown overboard: “right rudder full.” They had to pry his fingers off the wheel afterwards. He’d succumbed to his injuries by then, but he’d also saved the ship and much of the crew.

 

“When we heard that Johnnie might get a medal,” his mom later said, “my husband said he bet Johnnie did something to try to save somebody else. That’s the way he was.”

 

His fellow Texans were proud of their hero. His former employer in Houston paid for his family’s travel expenses when they attended the launch of the destroyer USS Johnnie Hutchins less than a year later. Hutchins’s siblings had never been on a train before—nor had they ever stayed in a hotel.

 

It was also the first time that a train had stopped in the small town of Lissie to pick up passengers.

 

“Why all this to do about a bunch of country hicks?” his dad joked with a reporter. But our country was proud of his son.

 

“The name of Johnnie David Hutchins has been added to the growing list of the nation’s naval immortals,” Rear Admiral A.C. Bennett said at Hutchins’s Medal ceremony. “He joins the proud company of patriots who over a period of a century and a half gave their all—first to create and then to preserve this democracy.  Hutchins gave his life for his shipmates, for his home, his country—for us here.”

 

Rest in peace, Sir.


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Primary Sources:

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