Lucian Adams, 80; Cited for World War II Bravery
Lucian Adams, who earned a Medal of Honor in World War II by storming through a French forest and single-handedly eliminating three enemy machine guns and killing nine German soldiers, has died. He was 80.
Adams, who had suffered from diabetes and heart problems, died a week ago in a San Antonio hospital of unspecified causes.
Although he joked about his non-Latino sounding surname, , Adams was very proud of his Mexican heritage. He was featured last October in a History Channel documentary titled “Hispanics and the Medal of Honor.”
Born one of 12 children in Port Arthur, Texas, Adams knew nothing about guns before joining the Army in 1942. He learned fast.
Adams earned the military’s highest award for valor on Oct. 28, 1944, in a forest near St. Die in northeastern France “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.”
He was a staff sergeant with the Army’s 30th Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, which was meeting heavy fire as it tried to reopen a supply line to the isolated 3rd Battalion. Although at the outset three of his company were killed and six wounded, Adams borrowed a Browning automatic rifle and charged forward, firing from the hip as he dodged from tree to tree.
Skirting enemy grenades and crashing tree branches, he killed one machine-gunner with a grenade, shot a German lobbing grenades at him, killed a second machine gunner with another grenade and forced two German infantrymen to surrender. Although the German enemy force, according to Adams’ citation, “concentrated the full force of its automatic weapons fire in a desperate effort to knock him out,” he shot a third machine gunner and five more enemy soldiers. The whole episode took 10 minutes.
“In the course of the action,” his citation states, “he personally killed nine Germans, eliminated three enemy machine guns, vanquished a specialized force which was armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers, cleared the woods of hostile elements, and reopened the severed supply lines to the assault companies of his battalion.”
Adams received the Medal of Honor in ceremonies on April 22, 1945, from Lt. Gen. Alexander M. Patch, commander of the Seventh Army in Nuremberg, Germany, on a field where Hitler once rallied his Nazi followers. Adams also earned a Bronze Star for his military efforts in Italy.
After his discharge in 1945, Adams spent 40 years as a benefits counselor for the Veterans Administration in San Antonio.
“I never brought up the fact that I’d been in combat myself and been awarded the Medal of Honor,” he told the San Antonio Express-News last fall when the History Channel documentary was presented. “Because I’m no hero. I’m just an ex-soldier.”
He also told a reporter last year, “In combat, I had no fear. None, until the events were over, and I began to realize how serious and how dangerous the situations were.”
Divorced from the former Linda Cassias, Adams is survived by three children, Grace Adams Fawcett, Rosa Adams and Lucian Adams Jr., all of San Antonio; three brothers; three sisters; and two grandchildren.