The widow of a Kentucky farmer received the Medal of Honor on his behalf at the White House on June 26, 2018, in recognition of one of the most extraordinary individual actions of World War II. Pauline Conner, then 89 years old, stood beside President Donald Trump as the military formally honored her late husband, Garlin Murl Conner, for his actions in the snows of eastern France nearly 75 years earlier. Conner died in 1998, after living quietly for decades without ever discussing his wartime service. The honor came after a 22-year campaign by his widow and a small group of supporters to correct what they saw as a historical injustice.
Conner had already received the Distinguished Service Cross, but his family and fellow veterans long argued that his actions deserved the nation’s highest military honor. The story that led to that recognition began on January 24, 1945, near the village of Houssen in the Alsace region of France. Allied forces were closing on the Rhine River, but the German army still held a fortified pocket around the town of Colmar, the last significant German-held ground west of the river. The U.
S. 3rd Infantry Division was sent into the freezing conditions to eliminate it. Many of its men had been fighting almost continuously since North Africa, and the cold was severe enough to freeze weapon oil and crack skin. That morning, the Germans launched a counterattack designed to break the American line.
Around 600 infantry, supported by tank destroyers and six heavy tanks, advanced directly toward the battalion commanded by the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment. The battalion was spread thin and lacked sufficient strength. If the defensive line collapsed, the units behind it would be crushed in succession. At the battalion command post, an intelligence officer volunteered to move forward into open ground where he could see the attack and direct artillery fire by telephone.
First Lieutenant Garlin Conner had only recently been in a field hospital recovering from a hip wound, his latest injury. According to his family, he had slipped out of the hospital and made his way back to his unit because his war was not finished and his men were still in the fight. Conner ran 400 yards through heavy enemy artillery fire, laying telephone wire as he advanced past the American forward positions and continuing 30 yards beyond the front line. There he found the only cover in the field: a shallow irrigation ditch about one foot deep, too shallow to fully conceal his body.
He carried a field telephone, a Thompson submachine gun, and a spool of wire. From that exposed position, he began directing artillery fire, whispering coordinates into the phone and breaking apart the German formation with precise strikes. The German soldiers soon realized an observer was active in the field. They scanned the area with binoculars and swept the cover with machine gun fire, but the attack continued to press forward.
Eventually, the enemy advanced to Conner’s position, surrounded him, and passed beyond him. Witnesses later said German soldiers came within yards of his location, some accounts say close enough to touch. Conner lay motionless in the winter daylight in a ditch that did not fully conceal him, controlling his breathing and remaining still, as he had learned to do as a hunter on the poor Kentucky hill farms of his youth. Born on June 2, 1919, in Indian Creek, Clinton County, Kentucky, Conner was the third of 11 children in a family that farmed poor land during the Great Depression.
Hunting was not a sport for him; it meant food. He took up shooting as a boy because his family depended on what he brought home: deer, squirrels, rabbits, and wild turkey, the hardest quarry in the American woods. He learned stillness to outwait a wild turkey, merging with the ground and becoming nothing for hours. That quality stayed with him through 28 months of continuous combat in North Africa, Sicily, the bloodbath at Anzio, and southern France.
He rose from private to lieutenant and was repeatedly decorated, receiving the Purple Heart three times by official count. His family said the real number of his wounds was closer to seven. As the German attack closed in on his position, Conner’s artillery support encountered a deadly problem. The enemy infantry was now so close to his location that American artillery could no longer fire on them without hitting him.
Fire direction officers ordered him to fall back. From the snow, with the German attack almost on top of him, Conner directed the artillery to fire on his own coordinates. He made the decision to die if that was the price of breaking the attack, according to the official account. The officer on the other end of the line had to decide whether to give the order.
He did. Shells fell on Conner’s map coordinates, which meant they fell on him. Explosives detonated in the field, tearing apart the German formations caught in the open. Some craters were later found only a few meters from his position.
The attack waves broke, regrouped, and broke again. For nearly three hours, Conner directed fire that destroyed the counterattack. When the attack finally receded, the field was black and full of craters. More than 50 German soldiers were killed and about 100 wounded.
The armor pulled back, and the line of the 3rd Battalion held. Conner emerged from the smoke, small, half-frozen, and completely unharmed. The men who examined the ditch and the shell craters around it could not explain how he survived. The official citation records the essential facts: he ran through intense bombardment, positioned himself ahead of his own line, and called fire on his own position when the enemy reached him.
The same battalion commander who recommended him for the Medal of Honor in 1945, Lloyd Ramsey, later wrote that Conner was the best fighting soldier he ever saw in the field and that words could not do his leadership justice. But the paperwork went nowhere in 1945, the war ended, files were closed, and the small farmer returned to his tobacco. Two days after Conner’s stand, on January 26, 1945, about five miles away in the same Colmar Pocket, another soldier from the same division climbed onto a burning tank destroyer by himself and repelled a German attack with its machine gun. His name was Audie Murphy.
Murphy received the Medal of Honor within months and Hollywood fame soon after. Two men from the same division, the same week, in the same frozen pocket of France; two of the most decorated American soldiers of the entire war, separated by 48 hours and five miles. One received the medal, the movies, and immortality. The other received the Distinguished Service Cross, a handshake, and a bus ticket to Kentucky.
Conner returned home in the spring of 1945. In May of that year, the town of Albany, Kentucky, held a celebration for its returning hero. The featured speaker was Sergeant Alvin York, the most famous Medal of Honor recipient of World War I, who came from Tennessee to greet the young lieutenant from Indian Creek. In the crowd that day was a 16-year-old local girl named Leda Pauline Wells.
She heard the stories told about the quiet man and later admitted she found them hard to believe. No one so small and soft-spoken could have done all that. She married him nine weeks later, on July 9, 1945. The next 58 years were spent learning how true those stories were, and the 20 that followed were spent proving it to the U.
S. government. Conner bought a small farm near Albany, about 36 acres, grew tobacco, and raised a son. He worked for years as the head of the county agriculture office.
He and Pauline quietly helped disabled veterans fight for their pensions, a kind of field observation of their own. About the war, he said nothing. Not to Pauline, not to his son, not at the veterans’ association. When pressed, he said he had left all that on the other side of the ocean.
His medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross, four Silver Stars, the Bronze Star, and the French Croix de Guerre, stayed out of sight. Garlin Murl Conner died on November 5, 1998, at age 79. He was buried in Memorial Hill Cemetery in Albany. That should have been the end of the story, but it was not, because of the girl who attended the parade.
Pauline Conner, along with a small group of allies that included a former special forces soldier turned researcher who dug into eyewitness testimony, spent 22 years fighting the U. S. government for recognition of her husband. They collected sworn statements from men who were there, gathered records, and petitioned the Army Board.
When the board refused, they went to federal court. When they lost on a technicality concerning the deadline, they appealed. In 2018, the Army finally agreed, and the Distinguished Service Cross dated January 24, 1945, was upgraded to the Medal of Honor. That brought the story back to the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2018, where the 89-year-old woman from the parade before the war, now a widow for 20 years, received the medal her husband never asked for, never displayed, and never used to justify his actions.
She wept.