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MSGT MELVIN OSCAR HANDRICH

Life and Death of Melvin Handrich
   The life of Melvin Handrich of Manawa should have been a placid and a well-ordered one.
   A son of Northeastern Wisconsin's prosperous farm country, it was natural that he should spend his boyhood doing the chores on his father's farm, attending school in the nearby small city and growing into healthy and clean-cut young manhood. Had he lived in "normal times," he probably would have married and bought a farm of his own, and perhaps would have been a leader in a local farm organization and even a town councilor or county supervisor.
   Death should have come to Melvin Handrich when his full life was done, with his children and grandchildren around him and in the knowledge that he had led fruitful life of service to his family and his community.
   But death came to Melvin Handrich on a lonely outpost "in Korea, with hundreds of screaming Chinese charging at him. For a full night and a day he held that position, leaving it only to race through rifle and mortar fire to rally his comrades who were preparing to abandon their less exposed defense line. Although severely wounded, he returned to his forward outpost and continued to fight until overrun and mortally wounded by the sheer mass of enemy soldiers. When the Americans retook the position later, they found Melvin Hand-rich's body, along with more than 70 bodies of Chinese he had killed.
   In the 15 years from the time this young man graduated from Little Wolf High school at Manawa to his death at the age of 32, he saw far more death and bloodshed and suffering than a dozen average men see in a lifetime.
  The real tragedy of this man's life emerges when we read the record of his battles and decorations. The Aleutians, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, Korea. The Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters, the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman's badge, the campaign ribbons studded with battle stars.
   With such chapter headings is the story of an American youth in this century told. Melvin Handrich's death was not tragic, but his life was. In those final hours when the battle rages and the blood pounds and the senses reel at the sheer frenzy of the fight, there is no room in the mind for fear or remorse or reflection. It is rather during the long days and nights, the weeks and months of soldiering when a man thinks of the times death has brushed close but passed by and the near certainty of its coming again, that the steel of the nerves and the set of the backbone are truly tested. Melvin Handrich went through all this over a span of almost 10 years before meeting Death with his chin up and his rifle blazing on that lonely outpost.
   When congress created the Medal of Honor as this nation's highest award for valor, it was thinking of men like Melvin Handrich.

[Green Bay Press-Gazette, Green Bay, WI, , Page 10]


[courtesy of Don Morfe]

Application for Headstone or Marker for Melvin Oscar Handrich  and resulting grave marker in Lot 141, Space 8, Little Wolf Cemetery, Manawa (Waupaca county), Wisconsin.

On 19 August 1942, Oscar enlisted ib the Army at Milwaukee, WI. 

T/4 Handrich was transferred from the 3rd Replacement Depot to Company I, 508th PIR.

On 29 January 12945, he was wounded in action and evacuated to a field hospital.  He was transferred to the hospital's Detachment of Patients on 1 May 1945.

However, on 31 May 1945, T/4 Handrich was transferred back to Company I from the 19th Reinforcement Depot.

T/4 Handrich was subsequently transferred to the 513th PIR on 18 August 1945.