This Day in History: Michael Joseph Daly's One-Man Advance

On this day in 1924, a future Medal of Honor recipient is born. Perhaps Michael Joseph Daly was an unexpected hero? True, his father was a highly decorated World War I vet, but the younger Daly’s experience at West Point suggested that he’d be unlikely to follow in his father’s footsteps.

To the contrary, Daly’s time there was rife “with severe disciplinary problems, on special confinement, continuously walking off punishment tours,” according to his own description. He left West Point, figuring that his time there was a “failure.”

He somehow ended up back in the Army anyway. “[T]here is something about the place that sticks to your ribs,” he shrugged.

Daly joined the Army as an enlisted man, participating in the D-Day landings and joining our boys as they fought their way across France. A change could already be seen in the young man, though. No longer a “failure,” he instead received a battlefield commission.

His Medal action came a year later, in Germany. Daly’s unit was then going into the “shell-battered, sniper-infested wreckage of Nuremberg,” as his Medal citation describes it.

Our boys were working to clear the city.

“We knew the war would be over soon,” Daly explained, “[but] some of the individual German units were determined to fight on. . . . Wanted to bring down as many Americans as they could before the end of the war.”

Which is exactly what happened on April 18, 1945, when the enemy ambushed then-Lt. Daly’s unit. “[W]e ran into kind of a hornets’ nest there,” Daly acknowledged.

He ordered his men to take cover.

“[Daly] dashed forward alone,” his Medal citation describes, “and, as bullets whined about him, shot the three-man gun-crew with his carbine.” That was just the first of four firefights that Daly would tackle singlehandedly.

Daly was the object of all enemy fire, yet he still advanced. He took out enemy armed with rocket launchers, then entered a park where he encountered and defeated more of the enemy. He could not get to some of the enemy himself, but he directed fire on them from his own exposed position. Finally, he took out a machine-gun emplacement by firing upon it from 10 yards away.

“By fearlessly engaging in four singlehanded firefights with a desperate, powerfully armed enemy,” his Medal citation marvels, “Lt. Daly, voluntarily taking all major risks himself and protecting his men at every opportunity, killed 15 Germans, silenced three enemy machine guns, and wiped out an entire enemy patrol.”

Yet Daly remained modest.

“I did the best I could to try and help the company, protect them. . . . I just got out in front, and I got very lucky ‘cause they didn’t stop me. Luck was a very important part.”

He didn’t think he’d done anything special.

“I feel the bravest people I knew were: One was a farmer from Mississippi, a father in Minnesota, and a guy from Brooklyn who worked in his father’s grocery store,” he mused. “And they were all killed, but they were tremendous soldiers….”

He thought often of those who didn’t make it, as he did. (He even survived a shot to his face the day after his Medal action!)

“You wonder if you have lived up to your survival,” he said. “Have you made the most of your life, when people around you didn’t have a chance to survive?”

His country answered that question in the affirmative. Daly was promoted to Captain and received the Medal of Honor in August 1945.

Daly unfortunately passed away of cancer in 2008, but “faced death with the same composure and dignity he had shown in battle,” a Friends of the National World War II Memorial blog observes, “pointing out that he should have died in Nuremberg.”

Rest in peace, Sir.

  Enjoyed this post? More Medal of Honor

stories can be found on my website, HERE.

Primary Sources:

• Alex Kershaw, A Cause Greater Than Self (Friends of the National World War II Memorial; March 9, 2023)

• Captain Michael J. Daly of Southport wins Congressional of Honor (Hartford Courant; Aug. 5, 1945) (p. 1)

• Leonard Felson, Medal Changes Lives of Surviving Heroes (Hartford Courant; Nov. 11, 1987) (p. A1)

• Medal of Honor citation (Michael Joseph Daly; WWII)

• Medal of Honor oral history (Michael Joseph Daly; WWII)

• Richard Goldstein, Michael Daly won the Medal of Honor for fighting Germans (Sacramento Bee; July 30, 2008) (p. B5)

• Sid Moody. Medal of Honor winners make this point: That face of a hero could well be anyone’s (Bridgeport Sunday Post; Dec. 3, 1961) (p. C3)