A Cause Greater than Self: The Journey of Captain Michael J. Daly, World War II Medal of Honor Recipient

Note on Sources

xix This book is based on archival research in military and school records and on personal interviews with Michael J. Daly’s family, friends, and associates and with some of the men whom Daly commanded or with whom he served. During several trips to Europe, I retraced the route Daly had followed between his landing at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, and his near-mortal wounding in Nuremberg on April 19, 1945. In the course of those trips, I was able to interview some of those whom Daly helped both to liberate and to defeat. Unfortunately , by the time I began my research, many of Daly’s contemporaries had passed away or were too ill to be interviewed. Between 2002 and 2008, however, I was fortunate to share many hours of conversation—most over the telephone—with Michael Daly, who was seventy-seven years of age when we first began to correspond and converse. He remembered many things vividly, others only vaguely, some not at all. Initially I was stunned when he could recall very little about the specific actions that resulted in his three Silver Stars and the Medal of Honor. He explained that in the heat of combat, with adrenaline pumping, he seemed to fuse with the moment. And because combat was so similar from day to day, it tended to “run together” in his mind—an unintended acknowledgement, by the way, of how the heroic can become ordinary. He also explained that the bullet that struck him in the face on April 19, 1945, “scrambled” his memories of the engagement that led to his receiving the Medal of Honor. Luckily, army procedures for the awarding of medals require sworn descriptions from third-party witnesses. This was particularly true of the Medal of Honor. In using the Daly interviews in this book, I have attempted, when possible , to verify Daly’s recollections by consulting unit action reports and other military records as well as interviews, memoirs, and secondary accounts. Throughout the book I quote from the transcripts of our conversations, placing Daly’s statements in quotation marks. Sometimes I quote him looking back on events. At other times, I quote his best recollections of what he heard or said years before. Note on Sources A Cause Greater than Self ...