At 07:30 on October 24th, 1944, Technical Sergeant Charles Culage crouched in the Voj forest east of Belmalt Sur Bhuton, watching cold rain drip from pine branches that concealed an unknown number of German soldiers somewhere ahead.
23 years old, 14 months of continuous combat.
Solerno, Anzio, San Pietro, the Rapido River, Monte Casino, Rome.
The 36th Infantry Division had already bled across Italy.
At the Rapido River crossing in January 1944, the division attempted to force a crossing against entrenched German positions.
In 48 hours, nearly 2,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured.
Entire rifle companies ceased to exist.
The disaster became one of the most controversial operations of the Italian campaign.
Congressional investigations followed.
Generals blamed each other.
Kulage had survived all of it.
Now he was in France.
The 36th had landed in southern France in August, pushing north through the Ron Valley toward Germany.
By late October, they had reached the Voj mountains, dense forest, steep ridges, freezing rain, and Germans who had turned every hilltop into a defensive position.
Kulage led a section of heavy machine guns, water cooled 30 caliber Brownings, weapons that could shred an infantry assault if positioned correctly.
He had been attached to company K with orders to cover the right flank of third battalion near Hill 623.
The problem was not the mission.
The problem was his men.
Of the 12 soldiers under his command that morning, most were replacements who had arrived within the past 2 weeks.
They had completed basic training.
They had crossed the Atlantic on transport ships.
They had been assigned to fill the gaps left by men killed or wounded in the division’s advance through France.
They had never been in combat.
No officer was present on that hilltop.
No lieutenant, no captain.
The highest ranking American on Hill 623 was technical sergeant Charles Culage from Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
A man who had worked in his family’s printing business before the war.
a man who had been drafted in June 1942 and never asked for promotion beyond sergeant.
The Voge campaign was bleeding the American army.
In the weeks before October 24th, rifle companies throughout the 36th division had been reduced to half strength or worse.
A company that should have fielded 180 men might have 70.
Platoons of 40 were operating with 15.
The army fed replacements into the line as fast as transport ships could deliver them.
Most lasted days before becoming casualties themselves.
The casualty rates were not random.
The Germans knew these mountains.
They had fortified every ridge.
Machine gun positions covered every approach.
Mortar teams had pre-registered every clearing.
American units that advanced without proper reconnaissance walked into kill zones.
Kulage understood this.
He had earned a silver star in Italy for actions under fire.
He knew what German machine guns could do to men caught in the open.
He knew that green troops made fatal mistakes.
He knew that mistakes got people killed.
That morning, Kulage took a sergeant from Company K and moved forward to scout positions.
They needed to find where to place the heavy guns.
They needed fields of fire coordinated with the rifle platoon.
They needed to see the terrain before committing his inexperienced men to defensive positions.
What they found was worse than expected.
Moving through the fog and rain, Coolage and the sergeant stumbled directly into German positions.
Not a patrol, not a listening post, an entire German infantry company.
Roughly 150 soldiers dug into prepared fighting positions with overlapping fields of fire.
The Germans spotted them instantly.
Kulage had perhaps two seconds to react.
He could run, he could surrender, or he could try something that existed in no Army field manual ever written.
He chose the third option.
Standing in the open with nothing but a carbine, Technical Sergeant Charles Kulage demanded that the entire German company surrender to him.
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Back to Coolage.
The Germans did not surrender.
They raised their weapons.
One American sergeant facing 150 enemy soldiers.
The distance between them measured in yards.
Kulage did not run.
He did not drop his weapon.
He raised his carbine, aimed at the nearest German soldiers, and fired first.
He wounded two of them before the entire company opened fire on his position.
The four longest days of his life had just begun.
The bullets snapped past Koolage before he finished pulling the trigger.
German rifles, machine pistols, and at least one MG42 opened up simultaneously.
The forest erupted.
Kulage and the sergeant from Company K sprinted back toward their position.
Rounds cracked through branches.
Bark exploded from tree trunks.
The Germans were pursuing, pressing the advantage, trying to overrun the Americans before they could organize.
Kulage reached his men in seconds.
What he found nearly stopped him.
The replacements had heard the gunfire.
They knew contact had been made.
Several had frozen in place.
Others were looking at each other, waiting for orders, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
A few had started to edge backward, instinctively, wanting to run from the sound of combat.
They had trained for this moment.
They had practiced fire and movement at statesside bases.
They had been told what combat would feel like.
Nothing prepared a man for the reality of bullets passing close enough to hear.
Kulage had no time to explain.
The Germans were coming.
He could hear them moving through the forest, shouting commands, organizing their assault.
Perhaps 90 seconds until they hit the American position.
Perhaps less.
He started walking, not running, not crawling, walking.
Coolage moved along the line of his men, speaking calmly, pointing to positions, adjusting fields of fire.
He checked each machine gun imp placement.
He positioned riflemen to protect the guns.
He made certain every man knew his sector.
The German fire intensified.
Rounds slammed into the trees above the American position.
The MG42 ripped bursts that sounded like tearing canvas.
Mortars began falling somewhere to the left.
Koolage kept walking.
The heavy machine guns were his only advantage.
The water cooled Brownings could fire continuously for extended periods without overheating.
The German MG42 fired faster, but required barrel changes every few hundred rounds.
In a sustained fight, American heavy guns could maintain volume of fire that would break an infantry assault.
If the crews stayed on the guns, if they did not panic, if they fired where he told them to fire.
The first German assault came through the trees like a gray wave.
Infantry advancing in short rushes, covering each other, using the forest for concealment.
Professional soldiers, men who had been fighting since Poland in 1939, men who knew exactly how to clear a hilltop defended by Green American troops.
Kulage shouted fire commands.
The Brownings opened up.
The effect was immediate.
German soldiers dropped.
Others dove for cover.
The assault stalled 20 yards short of the American position.
For a moment, the firing decreased as the Germans pulled back to reassess.
They had expected frightened replacements.
They had expected easy prey.
They had not expected concentrated machine gun fire directed with precision timing.
The Germans attacked again within 15 minutes.
Different approach, different angle, same result.
The Brownings cut them apart before they reached the American line.
By midday on October 24th, the German company had launched four separate assaults against Hill 623.
Each attack had been repelled.
The forest floor in front of the American position was littered with German casualties, but Kulage understood mathematics.
The Germans had roughly 150 soldiers.
They had lost perhaps 20 in the morning attacks.
They still outnumbered his force by more than 10 to one.
They would not stop.
They would probe for weakness.
They would bring up reinforcements.
They would find a way to flank his position or simply overwhelm it with numbers.
His ammunition was finite.
His men were exhausted.
Several replacements had performed beyond expectations once the firing started, but the psychological strain of sustained combat was cumulative.
Men who fought bravely in the morning might break by evening.
The rain continued falling.
Temperatures dropped toward freezing.
The Voj forest turned into a nightmare of mud, fog, and sporadic gunfire.
Culage had held through the first day.
His inexperienced troops had survived their baptism of fire without a single American casualty.
But the Germans were still out there regrouping, planning, waiting for darkness to mask their next assault.
Night fell on hill 623.
Somewhere in the forest, German commanders were studying their maps, counting their losses, and preparing something larger.
Kulage posted centuries, checked his ammunition supply, and waited.
Dawn was 8 hours away.
The Germans had all night to prepare.
The night of October 24th passed in frozen silence, broken by occasional gunfire.
German patrols probed the American perimeter twice before midnight.
Each time, Coolage directed brief bursts from the Brownings that drove them back into the darkness.
No one slept.
The temperature dropped below 40°.
Rain turned to sleet, then back to rain.
The men in their foxholes had no opportunity to build fires, no chance to dry their uniforms, no relief from the cold that seeped through wool and cotton until it reached bone.
Kulage moved between positions throughout the night, checking ammunition counts, ensuring sentries remained alert, speaking quietly to men who were experiencing their first combat and discovering that war was mostly waiting.
Waiting in the cold, waiting in the dark, waiting for something terrible to happen.
Dawn on October 25th brought fog so thick the tree line disappeared at 30 yards.
The Germans used it.
The first attack came without warning.
No preparatory fire, no visible movement, just gray shapes materializing from gray mist already within grenade range when the American sentry spotted them.
Kulage reacted instantly.
He had positioned his guns for exactly this scenario.
Overlapping fields of fire that created a kill zone regardless of visibility.
The Brownings erupted.
Tracers vanished into the fog.
German soldiers fell.
The attack broke apart in less than 2 minutes.
But the Germans had learned something.
They had tested the American response time.
They had identified gun positions by muzzle flash.
They were gathering intelligence.
The second attack of October 25th came from a different direction.
The Germans had maneuvered through the night, circling east, looking for a gap in Koolage’s perimeter.
They found the seam between two machine gun positions and poured through it.
Fighting reached hand-to-h hand distances.
American riflemen fired at shapes appearing from the fog.
Germans threw stick grenades that detonated among the trees.
For 90 seconds, Hill 623 became a confusion of close combat where friend and enemy were distinguished only by the sound of their weapons.
Kulage grabbed his carbine and ran toward the brereech.
He found three German soldiers inside the American perimeter working their way toward a machine gun position from behind.
He killed one, wounded another.
The third retreated into the fog.
The gap was sealed.
The attack was repulsed, but the cost was visible.
Two of his men had been wounded.
Not seriously, but enough to reduce their effectiveness.
His already small force was shrinking.
The afternoon brought three more assaults, each smaller than the morning attacks, each testing different sections of the perimeter.
The Germans were probing systematically, looking for the weakness that would allow them to collapse the entire position.
They did not find it.
By nightfall on October 25th, Kulage had been in continuous contact with the enemy for 36 hours.
His men had repelled at least eight separate attacks.
Ammunition was running low.
His two wounded soldiers needed evacuation that could not happen while German forces surrounded the hill.
The mathematics remained brutal.
The German company had taken significant casualties over 2 days, perhaps 30 or 40 dead and wounded, but reinforcements were reaching them.
Kulage could hear vehicles moving somewhere beyond the forest.
Engines, voices, the sounds of an enemy growing stronger while his own force grew weaker.
That night, American artillery fired harassment rounds into the German rear areas.
The shells passed overhead with a sound like freight trains detonating somewhere beyond the treeine.
Each explosion briefly illuminated the fog.
Kulage used the light to check his positions one more time.
His men were holding, exhausted, frozen, running low on everything except determination, but holding.
He had no communication with battalion headquarters.
His radio had failed on the first day.
No one behind the lines knew whether his force was still fighting or had been overrun.
No relief column was coming because no one could authorize relief to a position that might no longer exist.
October 26th would be day three.
Kulage counted his remaining ammunition, calculated how many more attacks he could repel, and arrived at a number that was not encouraging.
Somewhere in the darkness, German commanders were reaching the same conclusion.
3 days of infantry assaults had failed.
The American position on Hill 623 would not break through persistence alone.
They needed something heavier.
October 26th began with mortar fire.
The Germans had adjusted their approach.
Instead of infantry rushing through the fog, shells began falling on the American position at first light.
The explosions walked across hill 623 in a methodical pattern.
Air burst rounds detonated in the tree canopy, showering fragments downward into foxholes.
Kulage ordered his men deeper into their fighting positions.
The mortars were designed to break them psychologically before the next infantry assault.
Keep them pinned.
Keep them afraid.
Soften them for the killing blow.
The barrage continued for 20 minutes.
When it stopped, the silence felt almost painful.
Then the Germans came again.
This assault was different, larger, better coordinated.
The enemy company had received reinforcements overnight.
Fresh troops who had not spent two days bleeding against American machine guns.
They advanced in proper formation, using fire and movement, suppressing each position before pushing forward.
Kulage watched them come.
He had perhaps 40 rounds left for his carbine.
The Brownings had enough ammunition for maybe two more sustained engagements.
After that, his men would be fighting with rifles, pistols, and whatever they could take from the enemy dead.
The machine guns opened fire.
Germans dropped, but more kept coming.
The volume of return fire was heavier than anything the previous two days had produced.
Bullets struck the logs protecting the gun positions.
Bark and splinters filled the air.
One of the Brownings jammed.
The assistant gunner worked frantically to clear the malfunction.
A belt had twisted during feeding.
A simple problem with a simple solution, but under fire.
Simple problems became life-threatening emergencies.
Culage sprinted to the position, grabbed the weapon, and cleared the jam in seconds.
He had performed this action hundreds of times in training and combat.
His hands knew the movement without conscious thought.
The gun resumed firing.
The German assault faltered again, but the pattern was clear.
Each attack pushed closer to the American line.
Each attack lasted longer before breaking.
Each attack left more German bodies on the ground, but also depleted more American ammunition.
By midday, Kulage conducted an honest assessment of his situation.
His force had suffered four wounded over three days.
All remained on the line, fighting through their injuries.
His ammunition supply would sustain perhaps two more major engagements.
His men had been awake for over 60 hours with only brief intervals of rest.
The Germans had lost far more, perhaps 50 or 60 casualties over 3 days of continuous assault.
But they were being resupplied.
They were rotating fresh troops into the line.
They had the weight of numbers that could absorb losses and keep attacking.
Kulage had 12 men on a hilltop with no relief in sight.
The afternoon of October 26th brought something unexpected.
The German attacks stopped.
The forest fell quiet.
No probing, no harassing fire, nothing.
Kulage recognized the silence.
He had seen it before in Italy.
The Germans paused their assault when they were preparing something decisive.
When they were bringing up assets that would change the nature of the fight.
He sent two men forward as scouts.
They returned within the hour with information that confirmed his fears.
Vehicles were moving in the German rear, not trucks, something heavier.
The scouts had heard the distinctive sound of tracked vehicles grinding through the forest, the metallic clank of tank treads on frozen ground.
The Germans were bringing armor.
Infantry alone had failed to break Hill 623.
Machine guns alone had failed to dislodge the American defenders, but tanks changed everything.
A single armored vehicle could absorb machine gun fire indefinitely while its main gun systematically destroyed each American position.
Two tanks would make the work faster.
Kulage had no anti-tank weapons except a single bazooka.
The M1 rocket launcher was theoretically capable of penetrating German armor at close range.
Theoretically in practice, the bazooka was unreliable.
Rockets failed to detonate.
Launchers misfired.
Even successful hits often failed to stop a tank completely.
Night fell on October 26th.
Somewhere beyond the tree line, tank engines idled in the darkness.
German infantry rested, knowing that tomorrow they would advance behind steel instead of dying in front of American machine guns.
Kulage checked the bazooka, one launcher, three rockets, and a decision that would determine whether his men lived or died when Dawn arrived.
Dawn on October 27th, 1944, the fourth day.
Kulage had not slept in over 70 hours.
His men had managed brief intervals of unconsciousness in their foxholes, but true rest was impossible.
The cold prevented it.
The fear prevented it.
The knowledge that German tanks were somewhere in the forest prevented it.
The morning fog was thinner than previous days.
Visibility extended to 50 yards, then 60.
Kulage could see the treeine where German infantry had launched their assaults.
He could see the bodies that still lay in the undergrowth.
He could see the approach route that tanks would use.
The sound reached him before the site.
Metal grinding against earth.
Engine straining.
The unmistakable noise of armored vehicles moving through dense forest.
Not one engine, two.
German infantry appeared first.
They advanced slowly, staying behind the treeine, waiting for the armor to clear a path.
These soldiers moved differently than the assault troops of previous days.
They were patient, confident.
They knew what was coming behind them.
Then the tanks emerged from the fog.
Two German armored vehicles pushed through the forest toward Hill 623.
Their main guns traversed slowly, searching for targets.
Machine guns mounted in the halls and turrets added to their firepower.
Each tank carried enough ammunition to sustain hours of continuous combat.
Kulage watched them approach.
His Brownings were useless against armor.
The water- cooled machine guns that had shattered every infantry assault for 3 days could fire at those tanks until their barrels melted and accomplished nothing.
The rounds would bounce off the steel plate like rain off a roof.
The bazooka was his only option.
The M1 rocket launcher required close range to be effective.
50 yards was optimistic.
25 yards was realistic.
To have any chance of stopping a tank, Kul would need to leave his protected position and advance into the open toward the enemy while German infantry provided covering fire.
He checked the launcher one more time.
The electrical firing mechanism appeared functional.
The three rockets were loaded and ready.
Everything that could be inspected had been inspected.
The tanks continued forward.
Behind them, German infantry began spreading into assault formation.
This was the coordinated attack that three days of fighting had been building toward.
Armor and infantry working together, each element covering the weakness of the other.
Kulage’s machine gunners looked at him.
They had held this position through everything the Germans had thrown at them.
They had repelled assault after assault.
They had performed beyond any reasonable expectation for replacements experiencing their first combat.
Now they were facing tanks with nothing but a single unreliable rocket launcher and a sergeant from Tennessee.
The German formation closed to 100 yards, 80 yards, 70.
The tanks moved deliberately, their commanders confident that the American position would collapse under the combined weight of armor and infantry.
At 60 yards, the lead tank stopped.
The turret hatch opened.
A German officer stood up in the cupula, clearly visible.
Clearly unafraid, he called out to the American position.
The German commander demanded surrender.
He spoke in fluent English, making certain the Americans understood the situation.
Tanks, infantry, overwhelming force.
Continued resistance was pointless.
Surrender now and they would be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Kulage stood up from his position.
His men watched as their sergeant, the man who had kept them alive for 4 days against impossible odds, responded to the German demand.
He refused.
His words were brief, defiant, and carried clearly across the distance between the two forces.
The German commander stared for a moment.
Then he dropped back into his turret and closed the hatch.
The tank lurched forward.
The infantry began their advance.
Kulage grabbed the bazooka.
He checked the rocket one final time.
Then he climbed out of his foxhole and started walking toward the tanks.
Not running, walking.
The same steady pace he had used for 4 days while enemy fire cracked around him.
The same calm movement that had kept his men from panicking when panic would have been the natural response.
25 yd.
That was the range he needed.
25 yd from a German tank that was also moving toward him.
The distance closed with every step.
German machine gun fire erupted the moment Koolage left his foxhole.
Bullets tore through the air around him.
Tracers flickered past like angry insects.
The infantry behind the tanks had spotted the American sergeant advancing with a rocket launcher and understood exactly what he intended.
Kulage kept walking.
40 yards from the lead tank.
35 30.
The bazooka was heavy across his shoulder.
The rocket inside it was his only chance to stop the armor that would otherwise roll over his position and kill every man under his command.
25 yds.
Kulage dropped to one knee, brought the launcher to his shoulder, aimed at the front glaces plate of a lead tank, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The electrical ignition system had failed.
The rocket sat inert in the tube.
The firing mechanism that was supposed to send a shaped charge into German armor produced only a hollow click.
Kulage pulled the trigger again.
Another click.
The weapon was dead.
He threw the bazooka aside.
For a moment, he was kneeling in the open, 25 yds from a German tank with no weapon capable of stopping it.
Machine gun fire continued snapping past him.
The tank’s main gun was traversing toward his position.
German infantry was advancing behind the armor.
Most men would have run.
Most men would have sprinted back toward their foxholes, hoping to reach cover before the tank’s gunner found the range.
Most men would have accepted that the situation was hopeless and tried to survive.
Kulage did not run.
He gathered every hand grenade he could carry.
Fragmentation grenades from his own equipment.
Grenades taken from wounded men over the past 4 days.
Grenades scavenged from German bodies after repelled assaults.
His pockets bulged with explosives.
Then he started crawling forward.
The tank’s machine gun opened fire.
Rounds chewed into the ground around him.
Dirt sprayed into his face.
He kept crawling.
The German infantry was closer now, advancing in short rushes, trying to reach positions where they could shoot down at the American sergeant who refused to retreat.
Kulage began throwing grenades, not at the tank.
Grenades would not stop armor.
He threw them at the infantry, at the German soldiers who were trying to close with his position, at the men who would overrun his machine gun crews if he did not stop them here.
The explosions ripped through the German advance.
Soldiers dropped, others dove for cover.
The coordinated assault that had begun with such confidence began fragmenting as grenades detonated among the infantry formations.
Kulage threw grenade after grenade.
He crawled forward between throws, closing distance, making each explosion more accurate.
The Germans had expected the American position to collapse when the tanks appeared.
They had not expected a single sergeant to attack them.
Behind Kulage, his machine gunners poured fire into the German infantry.
The Brownings had been ineffective against armor, but remained devastating against exposed soldiers.
The combination of grenades from the front and machine gun fire from the hilltop created chaos in the German ranks.
The infantry assault stalled.
German soldiers went to ground, unwilling to advance into the storm of fragmentation and automatic weapons fire.
The tanks continued forward, but tanks without infantry support were vulnerable.
Isolated armor could be flanked, could be swarmed, could be destroyed by determined soldiers with improvised weapons.
The German commanders recognized the problem.
Their infantry was pinned.
Their coordinated attack had disintegrated.
The American sergeant, who should have been killed in the first seconds of his suicidal advance, was still throwing grenades, still inflicting casualties, still refusing to die.
But mathematics had not changed.
Kulage ran out of grenades.
His machine gunners ran out of ammunition.
The tanks were still operational, still advancing, and now his men had nothing left to stop them.
4 days of fighting had depleted every resource.
Courage alone could not substitute for bullets and rockets.
Kulage made the decision that commanders dread.
He ordered withdrawal.
Not a retreat, not a route, an organized movement to the rear.
Each element covering the others, maintaining discipline even as they abandoned the position they had held for 4 days.
The last man to leave Hill 623 was technical sergeant Charles Culage.
The withdrawal from Hill 623 was executed with precision that defied the circumstances.
Kulage positioned himself at the rear of the column, carbine ready, watching for German pursuit as his men moved through the forest toward American lines.
The pursuit never came.
The German force that had spent 4 days trying to capture a single hilltop was too damaged to follow.
Their infantry had suffered catastrophic casualties.
The coordinated assault with tank support had collapsed into confusion.
By the time German commanders reorganized their forces, the Americans had vanished into the Voge fog.
Kulage led his men back to battalion headquarters, 12 soldiers had held Hill 623 for 96 hours against a reinforced German company supported by armor.
They had repelled more than a dozen separate assaults.
They had inflicted an estimated 50 to 60 enemy casualties.
Not a single American had been killed.
The wounded who had been hit during the 4-day engagement all survived.
They had continued fighting through their injuries, manning positions, following orders, trusting the sergeant who had kept them alive when every tactical calculation said they should have been overrun.
Battalion command was stunned.
The position on Hill 623 had been considered lost after the first day.
When radio contact failed, headquarters assumed the small force had been destroyed or captured.
Relief operations had been considered but rejected as too costly given the German strength in the sector.
The 12 men on that hilltop had been written off.
Now they walked back into American lines, exhausted, frozen, out of ammunition, but alive.
Every single one of them.
Word of what had happened spread quickly through the 36th Division.
Officers who had fought across Italy and France recognized the significance.
Holding a position for four days against overwhelming odds was extraordinary.
Holding it without losing a single man was almost unprecedented.
The recommendation for the Medal of Honor was initiated within days.
Military bureaucracy moved slowly, even for exceptional cases.
Documentation had to be gathered.
Witness statements had to be collected.
The chain of command had to review and approve each level of the nomination.
Months would pass before the final decision reached Washington.
Koolage remained on the front lines throughout the process.
Regulations specified that Medal of Honor nominees should be removed from combat.
The military did not want to risk losing a potential recipient before the award could be presented, but no one told Culage about this regulation, and no one in his chain of command enforced it.
He continued fighting through the winter of 1944 and into 1945.
The 36th Division pushed through the Voge, crossed into Germany, and drove toward the heart of the collapsing Reich.
Kulage was present for all of it.
He had been offered a battlefield commission after his actions in Italy, a promotion to lieutenant that would have recognized his leadership abilities and given him formal authority over the men he already commanded informally.
He had refused.
He had entered the army as an enlisted man and intended to leave the same way.
The Medal of Honor presentation occurred on June 18th, 1945 at a bombed out airfield near Dornstat, Germany.
Lieutenant General Wade Hastlip performed the ceremony.
The war in Europe had ended 5 weeks earlier.
Kulage was 23 years old.
The citation documented what had happened on Hill 623.
Four days of continuous fighting, leadership of inexperienced troops under fire, the advance against German tanks with a malfunctioning bazooka.
The grenade assault that broke the final enemy attack.
The orderly withdrawal that preserved his entire force.
The medal itself was a five-pointed bronze star hanging from a light blue ribbon.
The same design awarded to soldiers since the Civil War for actions above and beyond the call of duty.
Kulage wared for the official photographs, then packed it away.
He did not consider himself a hero.
He had done what the situation required.
His men had needed leadership.
He had provided it.
The outcome could have been different.
The bazooka could have fired.
The Germans could have pressed their final assault.
He could have died on that hilltop like thousands of other sergeants died across Europe.
The war was over.
Charles Kulage wanted to go home to Tennessee.
But the Medal of Honor would follow him for the rest of his life, shaping the next 76 years in ways he never anticipated.
Charles Culage returned to Signal Mountain, Tennessee in the autumn of 1945.
He went back to work at Chattanooga Printing and Engraving, the family business where he had learned bookbinding as a teenager.
He married, he raised a family.
He lived quietly in the same community where he had grown up.
The Medal of Honor recipient became a printer.
Kulage rarely spoke about the war.
When asked about Hill 623, he deflected attention from himself to the men who had served with him.
12 soldiers had held that position.
12 soldiers had fought for 4 days without rest.
The metal around his neck represented their collective effort, not his individual heroism.
Decades passed.
The 36th division veterans held reunions that grew smaller each year as age claimed the men who had survived Solerno Anzio and the Voge.
Kulage attended when he could.
He shook hands with soldiers who remembered the sergeant who had walked through German fire like it could not touch him.
Recognition accumulated slowly.
In 1989, a 9mm section of US Route 27 in Hamilton County, Tennessee was renamed the Charles H.
Culage Medal of Honor Highway.
In 1999, the city of Chattanooga opened Koolage Park on the northshore of the Tennessee River.
13 acres of public space featuring a restored carousel, walking paths, and river overlooks, a park named for a man who had never sought fame and never understood why strangers wanted to shake his hand.
France remembered what Kulage had done in the Voge.
In 2006, 62 years after the Battle for Hill 623, the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, their highest military decoration presented to an 85-year-old veteran who had helped liberate their country when he was barely old enough to vote.
The Charles H.
Koolage Medal of Honor Heritage Center opened in downtown Chattanooga in February 2020.
A museum dedicated to preserving the stories of Medal of Honor recipients and educating visitors about the meaning of service above self.
Kulage attended the opening ceremony.
He was 98 years old.
By then, he was one of only two living Medal of Honor recipients from World War II.
The generation that had fought across Europe and the Pacific was disappearing.
Men who had stormed beaches and held hilltops and endured horrors that defined the 20th century were dying at a rate of several hundred per day.
Each death took memories that could never be recovered.
Each funeral closed a chapter of history.
Charles Kulage died on April 6th, 2021.
He was 99 years old.
His death left only one living World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the last connection to a conflict that had shaped the modern world.
the final witness to an era when ordinary men performed extraordinary acts because the situation demanded it and no one else would.
Kulage had lived 76 years after Hill 623.
He had watched the world transform from the devastation of global war to the complexity of the 21st century.
He had seen his country fight in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
He had witnessed new generations of soldiers earn the same medal that hung in his closet.
When asked how he had survived four days against a German battalion, his answer never changed.
He had not cared about himself.
He had cared about his men.
12 soldiers on a hilltop in France.
A sergeant who refused to let them die.
A position that should have fallen in hours but held for 4 days.
And a question that historians still ask, “What separates the men who run from the men who stay?” Charles Kulage never claimed to know the answer.
He only knew what he had done when the moment arrived.
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Stories about sergeants who held hilltops with nothing but machine guns and grenades.
Real people, real heroism.
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