Month: March 2022

During World War 2, U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant Maynard “Snuffy” Smith was so undisciplined as a soldier that he was late for his own Medal of Honor ceremony…..

Smith was known to be cantankerous, attitudinal, and did not take well to military discipline, so he was in trouble a lot.

But then during a bombing raid over France in 1943, Smith’s B-17 (on which he served as ball-turret gunner, so, maybe part of the reason for his attitude, or vice-versa) took several direct hits that ruptured the fuel tanks and cause a massive fireball that blew out pieces of the fuselage. Two crewmen were seriously wounded, and three bailed out of the crippled aircraft (they were never found).

While the pilot struggled to keep the plane in the air, Smith was everywhere at once: he tended the badly wounded men WHILE fighting off enemy fighters with the waist-guns WHILE trying to put out the fire.

And when all the fire extinguishers on board were empty, Smith finally got the fire under control by “relieving” himself on it.

When the battered B-17 finally touched down on the runway in England, it broke completely in half. The plane had been shot to bits, but it brought its crew home.

A few months later, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson showed up at the base to present Smith the Medal of Honor. The unit was assembled, the band was ready, and everyone was in place, but no one seemed to know where Smith was.

They finally found him at the kitchen scraping breakfast leftovers off the food trays into the garbage – he had been put on KP Duty for yet another infraction of military discipline: he’d missed a mandatory briefing.