Beyond the Call: Medal of Honor Stories

This is Beyond the Call: Medal of Honor Stories, from Dispatch, U. S. Military History Magazine, developed by Trackpads dot com. Today we are going into the frozen woods of Belgium in December nineteen forty four, to follow a twenty two year old heavy machine gunner named Private First Class Richard Eller Cowan. His war lasted only a little more than a year, but in a few brutal hours near a place called Krinkelter Wald, he made decisions that would save other men at the cost of his own life, and earn the nation’s highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.

Before we continue, I want to mention the Medal of Honor book series that accompanies this work. These books tell the stories of America’s Medal of Honor recipients in a serious, readable, and historically grounded format, with each volume focused on a specific campaign, battle, or part of the war. They are available in color paperback, Kindle ebook, and matching audiobook editions. You can find them at Military Author dot me.

The story begins in darkness and cold. It is the second day of the German winter offensive that will come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Along a thin defensive line near the Belgian village of Krinkelt, soldiers of the Second Infantry Division are dug into frozen ground, surrounded by dense pine woods. They know that a major attack is coming. Among them is Richard Cowan of M Company, Twenty Third Infantry. His heavy machine gun section has been pushed forward and attached to Company I, one of the rifle companies bracing for the blow. Their job is simple to describe and hard to survive: hold this piece of ground long enough for the division to react.

Cowan’s weapon is a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod, with long belts of ammunition feeding into the receiver. In open country, a gun like this can dominate hundreds of yards of ground. It can stop enemy infantry from crossing fields or roads, and it can shred any exposed attack. The tradeoff is that the gun is heavy and hard to move. The crew is tied to one position, and as soon as the weapon begins to speak, enemy artillery and tanks will do everything they can to silence it. In the pre-dawn gloom, Cowan and his crew know that if the Germans come, the machine gun will draw fire like a magnet.

They do not have to wait long. A numerically superior enemy force slams into Company I’s positions. German infantry advance through the woods, backed by armor, searching for weak spots in the line. Cowan’s gun opens up, its steady, harsh rhythm cutting through the chaos. He and his crew rake the first waves of attackers as they try to close with the American foxholes. Around them, riflemen fire from shallow positions clawed out of the frozen soil. For a time, the line holds. The weight of fire from Cowan’s weapon breaks up repeated assaults and buys precious minutes.

But the attacks do not stop. A seventh drive, this one with tanks pushing close behind the infantry, smashes into the forward positions. Shells explode in and around the American line, trees splinter, and men who have been awake for too many hours are thrown to the ground by concussion and shock. In the noise and smoke, Cowan’s section takes terrible losses. By the time the worst of that assault has passed, all but three of the men in his machine gun team are dead or wounded. The line is fraying, and there is a very real chance that the company will be overrun.

At this point, many soldiers would have been justified in pulling back immediately. A heavy machine gun is not easily dragged through a forest under fire. Yet the line still needs time. Other elements of the regiment have to adjust, and if the Germans burst through here, they can roll up positions on either side. Cowan stays on his gun. Alongside a small group of riflemen, he continues to fire, holding the attackers long enough for the battered company to begin a fighting withdrawal. Only when that movement is underway does he shift his focus. Now he must somehow move his gun.

The next position is a narrow firebreak cut through the woods, a straight lane where trees have been cleared. For an infantryman with only a rifle, that open ground is dangerous. For a machine gunner like Cowan, it is also an opportunity. From the edge of the firebreak, with the gun set low, his weapon can command the open strip from end to end. Under freezing conditions, he drags the heavy tripod, the gun, and boxes of ammunition forward alone. The work is slow and exhausting, but the firebreak offers something the forest did not: a clear field of fire where every burst can count.

When he reaches the new line, he sets up his gun to cover the open lane. A handful of riflemen scrape hasty firing positions along the edge of the trees. Behind them, the remains of the company and other units are trying to reorganize in the dark woods. Everyone in that thin line understands the stakes. This improvised position is a hinge point. If they fail to hold here, there may be little to stop the enemy from pushing deeper into the division’s sector. The heavy machine gun, squat and dark against the snow, becomes the anchor of the defense.

There is a brief lull, that taut silence that experienced soldiers come to recognize before a new attack. Then shapes begin to move among the trees on the far side of the firebreak. German infantry probe forward, testing the new line. When they break cover, Cowan squeezes the trigger. The gun’s harsh roar returns, sending long bursts down the lane. Each attempt to rush the position is met with a wall of fire from the machine gun and the rifles on either flank. Men shouting in German fall into the snow. Others dive behind what little cover they can find. Time stretches out into a series of attacks and repulses, each minute bought with ammunition and nerve.

The next phase of the battle raises the stakes again. Out of the woods looms the shape of a massive heavy tank, one of the armored beasts American soldiers know as a Royal Tiger, escorted by a large body of infantry. For the men of Company I, the sight is daunting. The tank’s thick armor and powerful gun are designed to break exactly this kind of line. German infantry, perhaps eighty strong, spread out and advance with the tank, intending to use the firebreak as a killing zone once they get close enough to pour fire into the American positions.

Here, Cowan makes a choice that speaks to both his training and his courage. Instead of firing early, he holds his fire and waits. Letting a tank and so many enemy soldiers draw closer to your position goes against every instinct to survive. But he understands that his machine gun will be most deadly when the enemy infantry bunch up at close range. So he tracks them through his sights and waits until they reach roughly one hundred fifty yards. Only then does he open up.

The first long burst tears into the advancing troops, cutting down or wounding a large share of them in seconds. The attack staggers. Men fall, others dive for cover, and the neat line of advance disintegrates into confusion. Cowan rakes the firebreak with more bursts, exploiting the moment before the enemy can recover. In this narrow strip of open ground, his gun once again becomes the decisive factor, turning what might have been a swift breakthrough into a bloody, halting push.

The Royal Tiger answers with violence of its own. Its eighty eight millimeter gun thunders, and a shell slams into the area around his position, showering him with dirt and fragments. Trees nearby are stripped by the blast. Yet when the smoke clears, his gun is still firing. A second shell comes in and barely misses, shaking the ground and stunning those nearby. Three German machine guns join in, along with small arms from the surviving infantry. Tracer rounds cut across the firebreak. At one point, a rocket explodes close enough to jolt him hard and send shock through his body, but he refuses to abandon the gun.

As the fight drags on, the danger increases from another direction. Enemy soldiers begin to slip around the flanks of the position, using the cover of the woods to infiltrate. The firebreak itself is becoming untenable. Higher up the chain of command, the decision is made to withdraw before the position is completely surrounded. For the men along the line, this means leaving cover and moving back through the trees under fire. Once again, someone needs to stay and hold the enemy’s attention. Once again, Cowan steps into that role.

He remains at his post, keeping the machine gun in action as the men on either side begin to fall back. His weapon continues to hammer at the enemy, forcing them to ground or making them think twice about rushing forward. Only after his comrades have withdrawn does he give ground. Somewhere in that final exchange of fire, in the churned up snow and shattered trees of the firebreak, he is killed. The withdrawal, however, succeeds. The line falls back to a more defensible position, and the German attack in that sector is blunted, in part because one machine gunner chose to be the last man to leave.

For a time, that is all anyone knows for certain. The front is fluid, and the German offensive threatens to break through in multiple places. Units shift, counterattacks are planned, and for the men who escaped because of his stand, survival and the next fight take priority over anything else. It is only later, after American forces regain the ground near the firebreak, that the full story becomes clear. Search parties move through the woods, stepping over frozen shell holes and splintered logs, and come upon the position where Cowan made his final stand.

There, beside his heavy machine gun, they find his body. Scattered around the emplacement are the bodies of many enemy soldiers who tried to rush the gun and were cut down. The trees nearby are stripped of branches. The earth is pocked with shell craters and the black marks of rocket explosions. The gun itself is still in place, pointed down the firebreak it had defended. It is a small patch of ground, only a few yards across, but it tells a clear story of someone who stayed where he was needed until he could no longer stand.

In the weeks and months that follow, officers and witnesses piece together the fight in formal reports. Out of those reports comes the recommendation that Richard Eller Cowan be awarded the Medal of Honor. The official citation describes how his section was reduced to three men, how he continued to serve his machine gun, and how he covered the withdrawal to the firebreak. It records that he held his fire until the enemy were within close range, then delivered devastating bursts into their ranks, and that he remained at his gun under the fire of artillery, rockets, and multiple machine guns.

On paper, the language is precise and measured, as Medal of Honor citations always are. On the ground, those neat sentences translate into a young man, just twelve days past his twenty second birthday, staying in place while everything around him explodes. They mean he chose not to run when most people would have understood if he had. His actions bought time in a battle where minutes mattered. That time allowed others to escape encirclement and establish a new line of resistance. His unflinching courage and self sacrifice, as the citation notes, were in keeping with the highest traditions of the service.

To understand how he reached that moment, it helps to step back and look at the life that brought him there. Richard Eller Cowan was born on December fifth, nineteen twenty two, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and grew up in Wichita, Kansas. His family had strong ties to Oberlin College in Ohio. His father, grandfather, and uncles were all alumni, and Richard hoped to become the third generation to study there. He attended school in Wichita and first enrolled at Friends University, a local institution, before transferring to Oberlin in the fall of nineteen forty two. His interests were those of many young Americans in that era, shaped as much by family expectations and personal ambitions as by world events.

But the world intruded. The United States was already at war when he arrived at Oberlin. News from North Africa, the Pacific, and later Italy made it clear that the conflict would demand more manpower and more sacrifice. Within a year, Cowan left college and enlisted in the United States Army from Wichita in September nineteen forty three. He trained as an infantryman and machine gunner and was assigned to the Twenty Third Infantry Regiment of the Second Infantry Division, a unit that would fight its way across Western Europe in nineteen forty four. By the winter of that year, the division was dug in along the Belgian German border, just in time to meet the last great German offensive of the war.

Richard Cowan never returned to Oberlin to finish his studies. He never resumed the quiet prewar life that might have awaited him in Kansas or Ohio. Instead, his story joined those of thousands of other young Americans whose lives ended in fields and forests far from home. He was laid to rest with honors, his name added to the roll of Medal of Honor recipients whose deeds are remembered in unit histories, memorials, and family stories. For his relatives in Wichita and Lincoln, the medal could not replace the son and brother they lost. It did, however, affirm that the nation had taken notice of what he did on that frozen morning in Belgium.

For students of military history, Cowan’s stand at Krinkelter Wald offers a clear example of how individual initiative and courage can shape events in a battle that might otherwise be understood only in terms of divisions and corps. A single machine gun position, handled with determination and skill, delayed a superior force at a crucial moment in a major offensive. For veterans and serving soldiers, his story underscores the bond between those who hold a line and those who depend on them to do so. And for listeners of Beyond the Call, his life is a reminder that behind every citation there is a real person, with hopes and plans, who made a choice under fire so that others might live.