The Medal of Honor for Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

At the end of September 1944 the War Department announced that Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt, had been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor – the highest American military decoration. The award was for 6 June 1944, when, as assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, he had landed with the first wave on Utah Beach and spent the whole day under fire directing the movement of troops inland. Roosevelt himself had been dead for two and a half months: he died of a heart attack in Normandy around midnight on 12 July.

The date of the award is given differently in the sources. Many lists of Medal of Honor recipients and biographical entries give 28 September 1944, some biographies 21 September. The discrepancy probably arises because approving the award was one thing and announcing it in a War Department order and publishing the citation another. What is certain is that it happened in September 1944, and that the recommendation followed an unusual path: the commander of the 4th Division, Major General Raymond Barton, had originally put Roosevelt forward for the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest decoration, and it was only the higher commands that raised it to the Medal of Honor.

The citation – the official statement of the grounds for the award – records that after two verbal requests had been turned down, Roosevelt obtained written permission to land with the leading assault elements, that he “repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland”, and that his “precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership” enabled the assault troops to move rapidly inland “with minimum casualties”. It concludes that the general “contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France”.

The President’s son

Theodore Roosevelt Jr., known in the family as Ted, was born on 13 September 1887 at Cove Neck near Oyster Bay on Long Island, the eldest son of Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Roosevelt. He graduated from Harvard University in 1909 and went into business, but like his brothers he underwent officer training at the Plattsburgh camp before the United States entered the war. In 1917, as a reserve major, he went to France with the 1st Infantry Division and commanded a battalion and then the 26th Infantry Regiment. He was gassed and wounded at Soissons in the summer of 1918; for that war he received the Distinguished Service Cross. In July 1918 his youngest brother, the airman Quentin, was killed over France. After the war Ted was one of the founders of the American Legion, the largest veterans’ organisation.

In the 1920s he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps in politics. He sat in the New York State legislature, and in 1921–1924 he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy – the same post previously held by his father and then by his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His reputation was overshadowed by the Teapot Dome scandal over the leasing of the navy’s oil reserves, although a Senate committee cleared him. In 1924, as the Republican candidate, he lost the election for Governor of New York to Al Smith. From then on his relations with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt – Eleanor had followed him on the campaign trail in a car topped with a mock teapot, the symbol of the scandal – remained cool.

In 1929 President Herbert Hoover appointed him Governor of Puerto Rico, where he became the first American governor to learn Spanish and fought for money for schools during the Great Depression, and in 1932 Governor-General of the Philippines. He stepped down after Franklin Roosevelt’s election victory. In the 1930s he worked for the publishers Doubleday and for American Express, and in the reserve he completed officer courses, including the Command and General Staff School.

The general with a cane

In 1940 Roosevelt, by then a reserve colonel, sought a return to front-line service. According to accounts, his wife, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, herself asked the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, to assign him to a combat unit despite his age and old wounds. In April 1941 Ted took command of his old 26th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division, and at the end of the year he was promoted to brigadier general. He suffered from arthritis, a consequence of his wounds from the previous war, walked with a cane and hid his heart trouble from the doctors.

On 8 November 1942 he led the 26th Infantry in the attack on Oran as part of the landings in North Africa. Then, as assistant commander of Major General Terry Allen’s 1st Division, he fought in Tunisia, where he commanded a Franco-American force on the Ousseltia plain and was awarded the French Croix de Guerre. Allen and Roosevelt were extraordinarily popular in the division, but their relaxed style of command irritated their superiors: George Patton wrote of Roosevelt in his diary that he was “brave, but otherwise no soldier”, and General Omar Bradley felt that both men “loved their division too much”. After the fighting at Gela and the whole Sicilian campaign, Bradley relieved both generals of their posts in the division in August 1943 – in his memoirs he called it one of the most unpleasant duties of the war.

Roosevelt did not go home, however. He commanded the Allied forces on Sardinia, then served as General Dwight Eisenhower’s liaison officer with the French Expeditionary Corps in Italy, and kept asking for a combat command. In February 1944 he was sent to England as assistant commander of Major General Barton’s 4th Infantry Division – a division that had not yet seen action in this war and was to assault Utah Beach.

“We’ll start the war from right here”

Twice Barton refused when his assistant asked for permission to land with the first wave. Roosevelt therefore made the request in writing, arguing that the first minutes of combat would shape the behaviour of soldiers going into battle for the first time, and that his presence would “steady” the officers and men he knew personally. Barton agreed – with a heavy heart, as he later admitted, convinced that he would not see him alive again.

On the morning of 6 June 1944 Roosevelt stepped off a landing craft together with the first soldiers of the 8th Infantry Regiment. He was 56, the oldest man in the landings and the only general to come ashore from the sea in the first wave that day; on neighbouring Omaha Beach his son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt II, was landing. The current had carried the landing craft more than one and a half kilometres south of the intended spot. Roosevelt, with his cane and pistol, personally reconnoitred the ground behind the beach, found the causeways leading across the flooded meadows and agreed with the commanders of the two battalions that the attack would go in from where they had landed. He is credited with the words “We’ll start the war from right here”, although their exact wording is known only from eyewitness accounts. For the rest of the day he greeted the successive regiments on the beach and directed them to their new objectives, clearing jams of lorries and tanks under fire. The Utah landing proved the least bloody of all the Normandy landings. Asked years later what was the most heroic act he had seen in combat, Bradley is said to have replied: “Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach.”

In the weeks that followed Roosevelt toured the front in a jeep named “Rough Rider” – in memory of his father’s volunteer regiment in the Spanish–American War – and briefly served as military governor of Cherbourg. On 12 July, during the Battle of the Hedgerows, Bradley chose him to command the 90th Infantry Division with promotion to major general, and Eisenhower approved the appointment. Roosevelt never knew. That evening, after a long conversation with his son, he suffered a heart attack in his quarters – a captured German lorry converted into a sleeping van – and died around midnight. He was buried at Sainte-Mère-Église; the generals who walked in the funeral procession as honorary pallbearers included Bradley, Patton, Barton, Clarence Huebner, Courtney Hodges and J. Lawton Collins. Patton, who a year earlier had wanted him removed, then wrote that he was “one of the bravest men” he had ever known.

Place in the war

Roosevelt’s Medal of Honor was one of the few awarded to a general in this war – and not for directing an operation, but for personal leadership in the front line. For the American public it also carried a symbolic weight: the son of the President who in 1898 had led the “Rough Riders” up San Juan Hill, and the brother of an airman killed in 1918, had died at the front in another war in France. The Roosevelt family paid a high price in both wars: in 1943 Ted’s brother Kermit also died in service, in Alaska.

The father himself long went without a Medal of Honor for the war with Spain – it was awarded to him posthumously only by President Bill Clinton in January 2001. Since then Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt Jr. have been, together with Arthur MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur, one of the two father-and-son pairs awarded the Medal of Honor.

After the war the general’s body was moved to the American war cemetery above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer. In 1955 the family also had the remains of Quentin brought there; he had until then been buried where his aircraft came down. The brothers lie side by side, and Quentin is, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission, the only soldier of the First World War buried in that cemetery. Roosevelt’s role on Utah Beach was immortalised in the 1962 film The Longest Day, in which he was played by Henry Fonda.