When it comes to war, Calhoun County has many heroes who answered the call.
Among those is Richard Ellis Mooneyham of Calhoun City who returned home from World War II with the silver star, bronze star, purple heart, combat infantryman’s badge, the American Defense Operation’s ribbon and scars from wounds that he would carry for the rest of his life.
Mooneyham was one of 12 children born to Ester Bryant Mooneyham and Richard Ellis Sr.
Times were hard and the family carved out a meager existence by sharecropping.
Young Richard was always trying to do his part to support the family. He hired out on various farms and worked with the building of Grenada Dam.
He realized at a young age that he was extremely strong for his stature. He could lift white oak cross tie timbers weighing more than 300 pounds with little difficulty.
Little did he know then that it would be brute strength that would bring him home from the war.
He and a friend by the name of Jasper Harmon decided to join the Army in 1940. They went to boot training camp at Camp Shelby and from there on to Fort Benning. Mooneyham had his heart set on becoming a paratrooper, but on one of the practice jumps in Louisiana on a dark night the paratroopers were ordered to hit the ground and not move until they received further orders.
Mooneyham obeyed the orders, and was run over by a mess truck injuring his leg.
From there he was sent overseas and became involved with an amphibian group of the 165th Infantry Regiment of the 27th Division.
He would be trained to use heavy demolition, aircraft guns, drive tanks, learn judo and karate, Jungle warfare and live like a fox in the ground.
In addition he had to be able to swim up to 15 miles. The amphibians’ mission would be to swim islands held by the enemy, gather information and report back.
From submarines hiding in waters 15 miles away the team would swim ashore with only a cyanide pill, shot of morphine and piano wire. The piano wire was used as a weapon around the throat of the enemy, and the cyanide pill was to be used if caught, the morphine if wounded.
Sgt. Mooneyham said it was a dirty way to fight but it was a job that somebody had to do.
“The Japs were really no match for me in a fight. If I could ever get my hands on them I could break them like a stick of cord wood. If you sneaked up on a man with piano wire you could literally cut his head off. It was crude but there was no other way. We had to scout the place and get back in the water without them catching us.”
“The Japs were all little except for the royal army,” he said.
On Nov. 2, 1943 the sergeant along with four other soldiers wiped out two Japanese patrols consisting of 19 men on Gilbert Island which earned him the bronze star.
On June 17, 1944 he was engaged in a ground fire in which the wounded were being evacuated. He was firing a machine gun and mowing down the enemy as the wounded Americans were making way to safety.
When the gun was too hot to fire he started throwing grenades and even hand to hand combat. It was his action that made possible a safe withdrawal of his company that was mainly involved in the evacuation of the wounded. He was honored with the Silver Star.
On June 24 he received wounds near Saipan that would send him stateside to a hospital in Alabama for two years. His company had been caught in crossfire and he was firing the machine gun and engaged in hand to hand combat using bayonets and his fists on the enemy. His comrades were falling all about him and then he was shot down with machine gunfire. There were numerous wounds but the most devastating was a bullet that entered just under his left ear tearing out the pallet of his mouth and blowing his teeth away from the gums.
“I knew I was hit bad, but I was trained for the pain. I gathered up the dirt and started stuffing it in the hole. The blood made a mud pack. I knew I could live if I just stayed conscious – I knew I could make it. I used my shot of morphine.”
“When it got dark I crawled around among the dead using their morphine for more shots to ease the pain.”
During that night the Japanese came on to the battlefield moving through the dead bodies checking for survivors. They checked him and were convinced he was dead. During the time he lay on the battlefield under Japanese artillery and plane fire, his company pushed forward.
The next morning he was evacuated by American troops to Oahu, Hawaii. It had already been reported to his parents that he was missing in action.
It took two years of rehabilitation and plastic surgery for Mooneyham to bear the resemblance of the young man who went off to war in 1940, but he would always wear a deep scar on his face.
A newspaper reporter at Northington, Alabama wrote about the two star hero at the end of the war as he was recovering from his wounds and headlined the story that he had mowed down 30 Japanese.
Mooneyham, now in the winter of his life, said “That number came from one incident where someone saw me shoot the enemy with machine gun fire. I don’t like to think about the killing, especially the numbers. When you are holding a gun that shoots 650 rounds of ammunition a minute and people are running at you –you are dropping a lot more than 30 people, not to mention the ones I killed with my hands.
“But you know, I was in the war. It was my job and I did it for my country and if I was called to do it again I would. It was them or us and I wanted as many of us to come home as I could.”
When Mooneyham returned to Calhoun County he went to work with the Highway Department under John Boyd for $1.25 an hour. He later went to work for the Calhoun City Police Department. He liked law enforcement so much that he made a career out of it, working on the Derma and Bruce police departments and then with the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department where he was elected sheriff in 1972. He retired in 1976.
When asked about his duties at war compared to his duties at sheriff, “One I did for the people of my country, the other I did for the people of my county.”