On this day in 2011, a Medal of Honor recipient passes away at the age of 86. Michael “Mike” Colalillo was once asked how his life would have been different if he hadn’t received a Medal. “I have no idea,” he responded, “but it didn’t change me. I’m still a shy guy who doesn’t like to talk about himself.”
Colalillo might have viewed himself as a “shy guy,” but his hometown saw it differently. To the contrary, one local newspaper described, Colalillo had turned himself into a “one-man spearhead for his unit.” He'd taken out much of the enemy and saved lives.
Then-Pfc. Colalillo’s heroism came on April 7, 1945, near Untergriesheim, Germany.
“We were outside of town a little bit,” Colalillo later explained, “and that’s when they said, ‘We’re going to go up front and take the town.’ There was hills on the sides of us that had machine gun nests, and the Germans there were throwing bombs at us. The whole company got pinned down.”
The enemy fire was intense. Something had to be done, and Colalillo would be the one to do it. He stood up, braving the enemy onslaught, urging his fellow soldiers to join him. He took off running toward the enemy, firing as he went.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t gotten far when his weapon was taken out by shrapnel. He ran toward a friendly tank, clambering aboard to get to its machine gun. “[W]hile bullets rattled about him,” his Medal citation describes, “[he] fired at an enemy emplacement with such devastating accuracy that he killed or wounded at least 10 hostile soldiers and destroyed their machine gun. Maintaining his extremely dangerous post as the tank forged ahead, he blasted three more positions, destroyed another machine-gun emplacement, and silenced all resistance in his area . . . .”
Wouldn’t you know that the tank’s machine gun soon jammed, too? Colalillo grabbed a submachine gun from the tank crew. He was again moving forward on foot, braving enemy fire to continue his offensive.
He’d killed or wounded 25 of the enemy and destroyed some of their positions, but, by then, our boys had exhausted their ammunition and an order came to withdraw. Just then, Colalillo heard a cry, “Mike, I’m wounded, I’m wounded, I can’t walk.”
Colalillo ran to the wounded solider, picking him up and throwing him across his shoulder. “I took him down, oh, I don’t know how far back to the lines,” Colalillo concluded. “He would have been in the hands of the Germans if I’d have left him there, you know.” His description was modest. In reality, the rescue had required Colalillo to run across “several hundred yards of open terrain rocked by an intense enemy artillery and mortar barrage,” according to his Medal citation.
Colalillo would receive a Medal after the war, but he didn’t think he’d done much.
“He was not really explicit on a lot of the stuff that he did,” his daughter remembered after his passing. “What he told us was that it happened so fast that he didn’t realize what he was doing. He just did it because it had to be done.”
Humble, as so many of these heroes are. Rest in peace, Sir.
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Primary Sources:
4 Years After V-E, 6 Medal of Honor Men Typify Civilian-Veteran (Daily Press; May 8, 1949) (p. 10A)
Honor a True Northland, American Hero Today, Saturday (Duluth News Trib.; Jan. 6, 2012) (p. 7)
Medal of Honor citation (Mike Colalillo; WWII)
Medal of Honor oral history (Mike Colalillo; WWII)
Minnesota’s Last Medal of Honor Recipient Dies (Grant Forks Herald; Jan. 3, 2012) (p. B2)
Royleen Newman, Michael Colalillo: Medal of Honor Recipient (Minnesota Medal of Honor Memorial website)
World War II Hero, Duluth Institution, Dead at 86 (Duluth News Trib., Dec. 31, 2011) (p. A1)
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