Spotlight: What You Need to Know about Michael J. Daly
It was an April morning in 1945. World War II was in its closing days, and Lieutenant Michael J. Daly of the United States Army’s Third Infantry Division was in charge of a company of soldiers picking their way through the rubble just outside Nuremberg, Germany. Only 20 years old, the exhausted, sleep-deprived officer had only one thought in mind: protecting his men.
Amidst the street fighting happening around them, they found themselves pinned down under enemy fire. Daly told his men to stay where they were, charged forward by himself, and took on four separate fire fights with the enemy single-handedly. In that incident, Daly alone was responsible for taking out three German machine gun stations and killing 15 enemy soldiers. He had just destroyed the entire complement of men in the German patrol and saved the lives of his company members.
Four months later, Daly received the Medal of Honor—the nation’s highest military recognition of exceptional bravery—from President Harry S. Truman. Daly stood there, newly-released from the hospital and still battered by wounds from the confrontation that had almost ended his life in April.
As Truman placed the medal around his neck, Daly thought about all the men he had known who hadn’t been able to come home again. He vowed to live the rest of his life in ways that would truly honor their memory. Daly, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2008 at age 83, fulfilled that youthful pledge over and over again. Here’s what you need to know about this exceptional man:
Youth
Michael Joseph Daly was born on September 15, 1924, to an Irish-American family in New York City. His father, Paul, was an attorney and a decorated war hero from service in the First World War. His mother, Madeleine, was the granddaughter of Thomas Francis Gilroy, New York mayor from 1893 to 1894.
Young Michael grew up with his six siblings on a horse farm near Fairfield, Connecticut. As a boy, he listened to his father’s stories extolling the virtues of duty, honor, and courage. The boy’s favorite story was the medieval poem “The Song of Roland," an epic about the most famous paladin in the service of Charlemagne the Great.
As a young man, Daly attended the US Military Academy at West Point. He was a notably disruptive, rebellious cadet, constantly in trouble for defying rules and regulations. After a year, he resigned so he could immediately join the fighting in Europe. Serving in his father’s former regiment, I Company, 3rd Battalion, 18th Regiment, he was part of the second wave of the Allied infantry forces that came ashore at Omaha Beach at Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. It would be his first experience in combat.
First Battle
As Daly’s boat approached the beach, it came under mortar and artillery fire. He and his fellow soldiers waded to shore through water more than three feet deep while trying to avoid land mines. Immediately thrust into heavy fighting, he dragged a wounded comrade to the shelter of a rocky outcropping.
Firing his weapon as he struggled through the blood and death around him, Daly tried to remember that the soldiers next to him needed him to be at his best. He tried to show as much strength and aggression as possible, and earned his commander’s notice for valor and superior performance.
By the time darkness fell across the beach, he and his unit had advanced up and over the cliffs and into the hedgerows, elevated banks of earth thick with trees. The men had to take it slowly, hedgerow by hedgerow, as the German troops shot at them from far more defensible territory. Daly’s best friend died among those hedgerows.
Military Service
Daly volunteered for every patrol dispatched behind enemy lines, bringing back crucial intelligence. On June 15, he earned a Silver Star for his courage in exposing himself to enemy fire in order to get a good look at the terrain and enemy positions ahead.
Seeing a German patrol trying to infiltrate the Allied line, he fired on the enemy, which alerted his company and halted the incursion. In a later encounter, Daly stayed at his observation post as he came under heavy fire, enabling the American forces to disperse the Germans.
His numerous other acts of bravery included the occasion, with the Americans pushing across northern France, when his daring as a scout again helped ensure the success of his mission. When he led his men into the village they had been assigned to capture, he was able to point out the important targets for the tank and infantry crews.
Wounded in action on several occasions—including with a severe head wound—Daly earned commissions promoting him first to second lieutenant, then to captain. Aside from being temporarily released to attend the Medal of Honor ceremony, he would spend more than a year in hospitals after his return home. In addition to the Silver Star, he earned multiple other awards for valor, including a Purple Heart.
Life as a Veteran
After the war’s end, Daly returned home to Fairfield, where he married and became a father to a son and a daughter. He entered the business world at the head of manufacturer’s representative firm Michael Daly & Associates, and took up a long-lasting responsibility as a trustee of St. Vincent’s Medical Center.
Much later in life, Daly went back to Normandy, to the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, where more than 9,000 American soldiers are buried. Standing on that hallowed ground, he later wrote in describing the experience, makes a person feel alone. But, he said, if you only pause to listen, you will hear “the notes of a distant trumpet” that urges everyone to higher moral ground.
There will come a deeper knowledge, he continued, “when all the smoke has cleared” away and all battles are gone, when human beings will find themselves looking at their own sense of humanity and realizing the urgent need to show each other help and respect. “For us,” he wrote, “there is no other answer.”