William Manchester’s stolen valor
A number of people have been sending links to The Spectator‘s article exposing historian and author William Manchester’s embellishment of his career in the Marine Corps, especially his participation in the battle for Okinawa. It’s a very long article and compares his own published writings to the letters he sent his mother during the battle and official Marine Corps records.
It seems that he claimed the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts, one Purple Heart for some minor injuries being the only verifiable award. He also boasted about the size of his maleness, while complaining about his overall size, which might explain the reason that he felt a need to embellish his exploits as a cartographer on the commander’s staff, far from the action. Apparently, the Marine Corps disapproved his application to be an officer because of his size (overall).
Manchester wrote such blockbusters as The Death of a President, The Glory and the Dream, and a trilogy on Winston Churchill. He did not serve as valedictorian at the University of Massachusetts. He did not win the Navy Cross. He did not rate a Silver Star. He did not receive two Purple Hearts.
The lists of Silver Star and Navy Cross recipients maintained by the Department of Defense omit Manchester’s name. His 199-page service record, obtained by The American Spectator, contains no mention of the Marine-turned-historian receiving two of the most prestigious awards given for combat valor. In the decades immediately following the war, Manchester not only never made such claims about his wartime heroism, but when noting the honors he did receive excluded any mention of a second Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and a Navy Cross.
According to Wiki, this isn’t brand new information;
Manchester…served in Pacific War’s final campaign on the island of Okinawa, was severely wounded on June 5, 1945, and was promoted to sergeant in July and awarded the Purple Heart. (Note: Various obituaries and other biographical articles on Manchester claim that he was also awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, and a second Purple Heart. These are incorrect, as reference to the authoritative 1955 publication “Heroes: U.S. Marine Corps 1861-1955” by Jane Blakeney will definitively confirm.)
He was able to pull the wool over people’s eyes for decades. But you should read the whole article when you have the time.
Category: Phony soldiers, Valor Vultures
Ain’t no phony like an old phony.
Manchester is like so many phonies we’ve seen: honorable service than anyone should be proud of, but still embellishes. Manchester’s offense is worse than most because it goes beyond telling tall tales in a bar or bragging on Facebook; he was a historian who put his bogus claims into a bestselling book. Good on the Spectator for setting the record straight.
199 page service record? Is that possible, or is it a misprint?
Personally, it’s my view that he’s overcompensating.
I wondered the same thing. Maybe that includes his health records?
Surely not. That would constitute a major HIPAA violation.
Stolen valor shitbird…
“He idolized his father, a World War I Marine Corps veteran scarred by chemical warfare.” So wrote the WaPo in Manchester’s obituary. Daddy issues, perhaps. His father was a Marine who suffered debilitating injury in WWI. The Manchester family, I read, had a number of men in Washington’s army and generations of men who served throughout the nation’s history. War service and a Purple Heart weren’t enough for him. He had to reinvent himself. He had to be a hero. That’s too bad. The grave offers no protection for valor thieves.
Honorable service, and yet another one shits all over that.
Now I can’t trust anything he wrote. I really liked his world war II memoir. What a jerk.
Am I missing something? Where does he explicitly claim awards and medals he didn’t earn?
+++++
“In the decades immediately following the war, Manchester not only never made such claims about his wartime heroism, but when noting the honors he did receive excluded any mention of a second Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and a Navy Cross”
Read it all. The point of the sentence you quoted means that he was a Stolen Valor late bloomer. In other words, his false claims were nowhere to be found in the 50s and 60s. They sprung up later.
I’ve read most of his books and thought he was the real deal…damn!
That’s the problem with clowns like him. They actually WERE the real deal. When they start embellishing, it makes us wonder whether the accolades and awards in his record were as they appear to be. Was his service really all that honorable or might there have been other lies going even then?
Sad. They needlessly call their own service into question.
Truly a cautionary tale.
You can take a respectable service, and noteworthy contributions to human knowledge, and flush it all down the crapper to boast of things you didn’t actually do. Now, all you did wil be assumed to be false and shoddy.
For what?
It is -difficult- and -noteworthy- to be the honest man.