WASHINGTON – Of the thousands of aging veterans who gathered yesterday for the dedication of the World War II Memorial, no one’s story was more harrowing and inspiring than that of Francis Currey.
The 78-year-old Currey, from Selkirk in the Catskill Mountains, is the lone survivor of 28 New Yorkers who were awarded the Medal of Honor during WWII. In an interview with The Post, he told of his greatest lament – that many of his comrades-in-arms were not alive to attend the ceremonies. “I think it’s the right thing to do to have this ceremony, to have this memorial,” he said. “But I think it’s long overdue. I wish some of the others could have lived to have seen it.”
Currey’s wartime heroics as a raw 19-year-old infantryman during a brutal nine-month Allied offensive through the teeth of the Nazi war machine in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany in 1944 and 1945 are the stuff of legend.
The day he earned the Medal of Honor was Dec. 21, 1944. He says it was just like all the rest – bitterly cold, frightening and extremely violent. At the height of the Battle of the Bulge, his 3rd Platoon from the Army’s 30th Infantry Division was in the Belgian town of Malmedy with orders to stop an advancing German tank offensive that had broken through American lines.
Currey, then 6-foot-3 and weighing 130 pounds, charged through enemy fire to get to a building that had ammunition for a bazooka and then ran out into the street to fire at and destroy a German tank, Army records document.
Later in the day, he saved five American soldiers by launching grenades at advancing German units and took control of a machine gun that forced the Germans to eventually retreat.