Youngest WW2 Medal of Honor Winner Dies
Robert E. Bush, an 18-year-old Navy medical corpsman during the Battle of Okinawa who was the youngest sailor to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II, died Nov. 8 at an assisted-living facility in Tumwater, Wash., near Olympia. He was 79 and had kidney cancer.
On May 2, 1945, Mr. Bush was serving with a rifle company in the 1st Marine Division and met resistance from Japanese forces on Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands.
He darted among the artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire to care for casualties. While feeding plasma into a fallen Marine lieutenant with a dire chest and shoulder injury, he refused to leave his exposed position on a ridge in the midst of a Japanese counterattack.
Mr. Bush held the plasma bottle aloft with one hand while he took the officer’s carbine with his free hand, then fired at the charging Japanese. He reloaded his gun and maintained point-blank fire on the foe, killing six at the cost of his right eye as hand grenades exploded around him.
“They got me,” he told a reporter in Aberdeen, Wash. “The first grenade took my eye out, and I put my arm up to hold it off, and got some fragments in the other eye. Got a lot in my eye and shoulders. They hit me with three hand grenades in a matter of seconds. I was firing on them with [the lieutenant's] carbine. Every time I saw a Japanese head pop up, I could see the star on their helmets, I’d fire one round a foot below where I saw that head come up, because I knew I couldn’t miss, I’d get ‘em on the way down.”
Mr. Bush stayed with the lieutenant until the man was safely evacuated. He then collapsed after trying to walk to the battle aid station.
According to the military publication Stars and Stripes, Mr. Bush was one of 482 Navy corpsmen at Okinawa and one of six who received the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award for valor. A spokeswoman for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society said Mr. Bush was the youngest Navy awardee during the war.
Find Robert E. Bush’s Medal of Honor citation, and read the MSNBC.com and Washington Post articles.
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