In the aftermath of the first Japanese air raid on Darwin on February 19, 1942, a six-month-old kelpie pup with a broken leg was rescued from the ruins of an RAAF mess hut. To secure medical treatment, airmen from No. 2 Squadron officially enrolled him as an unofficial member of the RAAF, naming him "Gunner" and assigning him the service number "0000." Placed under the care of Leading Aircraftman Percy Westcott, the pup quickly recovered and integrated into daily life on the base.
Gunner soon developed an extraordinary ability to detect the sound of approaching Japanese aircraft up to 20 minutes before they were visible or picked up by radar, while completely ignoring friendly Allied planes. Recognizing the reliability of his alerts, leadership authorized Westcott to sound a portable air raid siren based on Gunner's behavior, providing crucial early warnings that saved lives. Gunner became a vital part of the community and a massive morale booster, accompanying the men everywhere and even joining pilots during practice flights.

A Japanese American kid from New Mexico won the Medal of Honor in Korea, and the United States kept it a secret for over two years because telling the truth might have gotten him killed.

Hiroshi Miyamura, called Hershey by everyone who knew him, was born in Gallup, New Mexico,… pic.twitter.com/FZVwom5alk

— The Forgotten War (@ForgottenWarPic) July 11, 2026

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A Japanese American kid from New Mexico won the Medal of Honor in Korea, and the United States kept it a secret for over two years because telling the truth might have gotten him killed.

Hiroshi Miyamura, called Hershey by everyone who knew him, was born in Gallup, New Mexico, to Japanese immigrant parents. He grew up in the shadow of Pearl Harbor and the internment camps, a time when a lot of Americans looked at a face like his and saw the enemy. He joined the Army anyway, signing up with the famous all Japanese American unit in World War II, determined to prove exactly where his loyalty was.

His real test came in Korea. On the night of April 24, 1951, near the Imjin River, the Chinese launched one of their massive human wave attacks and came at his position in the dark by the thousands. Miyamura was running a machine gun squad, and he could see they were about to be overrun.

So he made the call. He ordered his men to fall back and get out, and he stayed behind alone to hold the enemy off and buy them time.

What he did next is almost hard to believe. He worked his machine gun until it was about to be swarmed, then jumped out of the hole with his bayonet and fought the enemy hand to hand. He went back to another gun and kept firing. He administered aid to his wounded, he fell back only when he had to, and then he fought some more. By the time it was over he had killed a staggering number of the enemy, more than fifty men, holding an entire assault by himself long enough for his squad to escape. Then, badly wounded, he was captured.

Here is where the story turns into something no other Medal of Honor has ever done. When the Army learned he had been captured, they realized the medal they wanted to give him was a death sentence. If the Chinese found out that this one prisoner had killed fifty of their soldiers, they would surely torture and execute him. So the United States took his Medal of Honor and stamped it top secret. To this day it is the only Medal of Honor ever classified. It sat locked away, unspoken, for more than two years.

And Miyamura had no idea. He spent twenty eight months as a prisoner, marched hundreds of miles, starved, beaten, watching men die all around him in the camps. When he was finally released at the end of the war, he honestly believed he might be in trouble, court martialed even, for losing his position and his men that night.

Instead they told him the secret. The kid from Gallup had won the nation's highest honor, and it had been waiting for him the whole time he was in that camp. President Eisenhower himself hung it around his neck in 1953. A Japanese American who had to prove his loyalty his entire life had proven it beyond anything anyone could ever question again.

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KentK93 said:

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A Japanese American kid from New Mexico won the Medal of Honor in Korea, and the United States kept it a secret for over two years because telling the truth might have gotten him killed.

Hiroshi Miyamura, called Hershey by everyone who knew him, was born in Gallup, New Mexico,… pic.twitter.com/FZVwom5alk

— The Forgotten War (@ForgottenWarPic) July 11, 2026

Quote:

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A Japanese American kid from New Mexico won the Medal of Honor in Korea, and the United States kept it a secret for over two years because telling the truth might have gotten him killed.

Hiroshi Miyamura, called Hershey by everyone who knew him, was born in Gallup, New Mexico, to Japanese immigrant parents. He grew up in the shadow of Pearl Harbor and the internment camps, a time when a lot of Americans looked at a face like his and saw the enemy. He joined the Army anyway, signing up with the famous all Japanese American unit in World War II, determined to prove exactly where his loyalty was.

His real test came in Korea. On the night of April 24, 1951, near the Imjin River, the Chinese launched one of their massive human wave attacks and came at his position in the dark by the thousands. Miyamura was running a machine gun squad, and he could see they were about to be overrun.

So he made the call. He ordered his men to fall back and get out, and he stayed behind alone to hold the enemy off and buy them time.

What he did next is almost hard to believe. He worked his machine gun until it was about to be swarmed, then jumped out of the hole with his bayonet and fought the enemy hand to hand. He went back to another gun and kept firing. He administered aid to his wounded, he fell back only when he had to, and then he fought some more. By the time it was over he had killed a staggering number of the enemy, more than fifty men, holding an entire assault by himself long enough for his squad to escape. Then, badly wounded, he was captured.

Here is where the story turns into something no other Medal of Honor has ever done. When the Army learned he had been captured, they realized the medal they wanted to give him was a death sentence. If the Chinese found out that this one prisoner had killed fifty of their soldiers, they would surely torture and execute him. So the United States took his Medal of Honor and stamped it top secret. To this day it is the only Medal of Honor ever classified. It sat locked away, unspoken, for more than two years.

And Miyamura had no idea. He spent twenty eight months as a prisoner, marched hundreds of miles, starved, beaten, watching men die all around him in the camps. When he was finally released at the end of the war, he honestly believed he might be in trouble, court martialed even, for losing his position and his men that night.

Instead they told him the secret. The kid from Gallup had won the nation's highest honor, and it had been waiting for him the whole time he was in that camp. President Eisenhower himself hung it around his neck in 1953. A Japanese American who had to prove his loyalty his entire life had proven it beyond anything anyone could ever question again.

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I love this story. What it is to be a servicemember, to be a fellow American....no matter what your origin. So missing, so much today.

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The first Black American to earn the Medal of Honor in fifty years grew up with nothing, in and out of poverty and institutions as a kid, and he spent the last few minutes of his life making sure other men got to keep theirs.

William Thompson was born to a single mother in a poor corner of New York City. He had a rough, unsettled childhood, the kind of start that gives a person every excuse to expect little from the world and give little back. He joined the Army in 1945 looking for something steadier, and when the Korean War broke out he was a machine gunner in the 24th Infantry Regiment.

That regiment matters to the story. The 24th was an all Black unit in a still segregated Army, a group of men expected by a lot of their own leadership to fail, whose successes got ignored and whose stumbles got magnified to prove a point. Thompson was fighting two things at once. The enemy in front of him, and the low expectations behind him.

On a night in early August 1950, in the brutal fighting around the Pusan Perimeter, North Korean troops slammed into his company in the dark. It was chaos. Men were panicking, the line was coming apart, and soldiers were scattering into the night to save themselves.

Thompson did the opposite. He dropped his machine gun into position right in the path of the attack and opened up, and he would not move. His fire held the enemy back and gave his platoon the chance to pull out of the trap and survive. Grenade fragments tore into him. Small arms fire hit him. His own men yelled at him to fall back with them.

He refused. He stayed on that gun, bleeding, alone, hammering the enemy in the dark so the others could get clear. He kept firing until an enemy grenade finally killed him where he sat. He never left his position. Not once.

For that stand he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the first African American to receive it since the Spanish American War half a century earlier. He never knew. The medal was posthumous, and in 1951 it was placed into the hands of his mother, the woman who raised that poor New York kid, by General Omar Bradley himself.

A man the Army of his time did not expect much from held the line when braver situated men ran, and wrote his name into history in the dark.

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The first Black American to earn the Medal of Honor in fifty years grew up with nothing, in and out of poverty and institutions as a kid, and he spent the last few minutes of his life making sure other men got to keep theirs.

William Thompson was born to a single mother in a… pic.twitter.com/Nofny5JAa8

— The Forgotten War (@ForgottenWarPic) July 12, 2026

It wouldn't be there except for an Aggie I knew who saved it…My dad.

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In 1945 the USS Indianapolis secretly delivered the parts for the atomic bomb that would hit Hiroshima.

Days later, mission done, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into her. She sank in 12 minutes.

Nearly 900 men made it off the ship alive and into the open ocean. Then it got worse.

No one knew they were missing. Three separate Navy stations picked up the distress signals and every one of them ignored it. One officer thought it was a Japanese trap. Another had ordered not to be disturbed.

So the men floated. For almost five days. No food, no fresh water, burning by day and freezing at night. Some drank seawater and went insane. And the whole time, the sharks were circling and feeding. It is considered the worst shark attack in human history.

When rescue finally came by accident, only 316 of the nearly 1,200 crew were still alive.

The Navy needed someone to blame for the disaster. They chose Captain Charles McVay, one of the men who survived it. He became the only U.S. captain in the entire war to be court-martialed for losing his ship to the enemy.

At his trial the Navy did something almost unheard of. They brought in the Japanese commander who sank the ship to testify against him. Instead, the enemy captain told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference and that McVay did nothing wrong.

They convicted him anyway.

For years afterward McVay got hate mail from the families of the dead. Some sent letters every Christmas telling him he murdered their sons. In 1968 he walked onto his front lawn and shot himself, holding a toy sailor he had kept since he was a boy.

Case closed. For fifty years.

Then in 1996 an 11-year-old named Hunter Scott watched Jaws with his dad and got hooked on the 30 second speech about the Indianapolis. He made it his sixth grade history project.

He tracked down and interviewed nearly 150 survivors. He dug through more than 800 documents. And buried in there he found what the Navy had left out, including that they knew enemy subs were operating right on the ship's route and never warned McVay.

A kid's school project turned into a national story. It reached Congress. In 2000 lawmakers passed a resolution clearing McVay's name and President Clinton signed it. The Navy officially cleared his record in 2001.

The captain the Navy spent decades blaming was finally exonerated by a sixth grader.

Hunter Scott grew up and became a naval flight officer.

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In 1945 the USS Indianapolis secretly delivered the parts for the atomic bomb that would hit Hiroshima.

Days later, mission done, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into her. She sank in 12 minutes.

Nearly 900 men made it off the ship alive and into the open ocean. Then it… pic.twitter.com/YjaOaN0UkM

— Hidden History (@HiddenHistoryYT) July 13, 2026