During the 76 hours of violent battle at Tarawa last November the Marines' beachhead commander, 39-year-old Colonel David M. Shoup, of Battle Ground, Indiana, carefully concealed a painful fact: as he waded ashore his leg had been pierced by a shell fragment. For that wound, indestructible, broad-beamed Colonel Shoup received his second Purple Heart (he had been wounded before by a bomb at New Georgia).
Last week, arriving in the U.S. from Saipan, where he was chief of staff of the 2nd Marine Division, Colonel Shoup learned that his "indomitable fighting spirit" at Tarawa had won him another award: the...
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