Audie Murphy made his first landing across an enemy beach on the morning of July 10, 1943 near the town of Licata on the southern coast of Sicily as part of Operation HUSKY. Later that day he saw his first American soldier killed in action. From there, he fought through the entirety of the European Theater of Operations.

As he did so he became increasingly known for his valor. When we knew Audie Murphy was in the front lines, one member of his regiment said, the men in the rear areas could go to sleep. As he fought, he also became a living embodiment of the unimaginable stresses that combat places on a soldier, and of their lasting effects.  In his day people referred to the symptoms of stress as “battle fatigue” or “combat exhaustion,” which indeed they were, but it was supposed that they were a temporary condition.  There was no sense that their effects could linger beyond the battlefield.  Some men who were in combat immediately broke down under the effects of such stress.  Some collapsed in uncontrollable crying and had to be taken to the rear; others sat motionless, unable to move.  Audie Murphy first saw such cases in Sicily when he had been in combat only a short time, and he reacted very strongly against it.   “I have seen the face of a coward and found it loathsome,” he said.

As Murphy himself experienced more combat and learned exactly what it could do to a man, his attitude softened considerably. Much later in the war, Murphy—who by this point was an officer—came up to a new, nervous soldier in his unit and told him what to expect: “Now there’ll be times when you’ll be scared to death,” he told him. “I’m always scared when we’re up front. Don’t be ashamed of it. There’ll be times that you want to cry. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“He was more friendly” than the other officers, that soldier later said of Murphy. “He’d sit in a foxhole with you or shell hole and just talk about personal things. You know, you’d never do that with any other officers.”

American supply ship explodes during invasion of Sicily, July, 1943