Edward S. Michael
United States Air Force Medal of Honor recipient
Edward Stanley Michael (May 2, 1918 – May 10, 1994) was a United States Army Air Forces officer and a recipient of the United States military's highest decoration—the Medal of Honor—for his actions in World War II.
Early life
Edward S. Michael was born at Chicago, Illinois, 2 May 1918. He was the son of Stanley W. Michael and Lillian Harriet Konior Michael. He graduated from Chicago High School in 1936 and joined the Army Air Corps from his birth city of Chicago, Illinois in November 1940.
World War II
In 1941, private Michael was transferred to Wheeler Field, Hawaii to train as a mechanic. At first he failed the aviation cadet examination and was preparing to retake it when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. In mid 1942 he was accepted for a pilot training and on 12 April 1943 he received a commissioning and his pilot wings at Douglas Army Air Field, Arizona.By April 1944 he was a first lieutenant piloting B-17 Flying Fortresses with the 364th Bomb Squadron, 305th Bombardment Group. He named his aircraft after his first wife, Bertie Lee. On 11 April, while flying a mission over Germany, his aircraft was singled out by enemy fighters and severely damaged by their cannon fire. As flames burned in the plane's bomb bay, Michael, who had been seriously wounded, ordered his crew to bail out. Finding that one crewman's parachute was unusable, he returned to the controls and managed to evade the enemy fighters and heavy anti-aircraft fire to fly his bomber into Allied territory.
“Edward S. Michael” enters the record as united States Air Force Medal of Honor recipient. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edward, Michael and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward S. Michael” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.