Medal of Honor Monday: Maynard Smith

He alternated between fighting fires, tending to the wounded tail gunner, and firing at the enemy.

On this day in 1984, a Medal of Honor recipient passes away. Maynard H. Smith was not your typical recipient. Indeed, he’d grown up a bit entitled and even earned the nickname “Snuffy” because he was viewed as an obnoxious misfit.

Smith’s background surely contributed to his attitude.

He was the son of a local judge who’d protected Smith when he got in trouble. For instance, a young Smith was once speeding and hit a horse and buggy. He wasn’t prosecuted because of his dad. When his dad later passed away, Smith moved to Florida and lived a life of leisure.

“The only work that he was doing as Hitler was marching across Europe,” historian Bill Yenne observes, “was working his way through the money he had inherited from his father.”

Smith’s past finally caught up to him in August 1942 when he was arrested for failing to pay child support. The judge gave him a choice between the Army or jail—which is how Smith landed in the United States Army Air Forces.

He was entitled there, too—at least at first. He was an older recruit, and he balked at taking orders from younger men. He soon volunteered for Aerial Gunnery School because he wanted to be a sergeant.

He succeeded and went overseas with the 306th Bomb Group in March 1943, but he was still generally disliked. At some point along the way, people started calling him “Snuffy,” a nod to the ne’er-do-well comic strip character Snuffy Smith.

Then-Sergeant Smith’s first mission came on May 1, 1943: Bombers were to raid German U-boat pens in Saint-Nazaire, France. The raid went well, but the trip back was a disaster. The navigator had miscalculated, and the B-17s ended up too close to German-occupied Brest, France.

They were soon under attack, and Smith’s B-17 took several hits.

“At this point, I had lost my electrical controls and I knew something was wrong,” said Smith. “I manually cranked the thing around, opened the armored hatch and got back in the airplane when I saw it was on fire.”

The radio operator and two waist gunners were already bailing out. Smith couldn’t see the pilots, but the plane was flying level, and he figured they were still there. He decided to stay and fight the fire.

“The smoke and gas were really thick,” he later remembered. “I wrapped a sweater around my face so I could breathe, grabbed a fire extinguisher and attacked the fire in the radio room. Glancing over my shoulder at the tail fire, I thought I saw something coming, and I ran back. It was the tail gunner, painfully crawling back, wounded.”

Smith would later say that the next 90 minutes felt like a dream. He alternated between fighting fires, tending to the wounded tail gunner, and firing at the enemy. He pushed ammunition overboard before it could explode. He even urinated on a fire to put it out! By the end, he had protective cloths wrapped around his hands to extinguish flames.

Fortunately, the enemy was fought off, the plane limped back to base—and everyone aboard survived. With roughly 3,500 bullet and shrapnel holes, the plane broke in half after landing.

If Smith was an unusual hero, so was his Medal ceremony. He was the first enlisted airman to receive the Medal, so the military planned a huge media event, complete with a flyover.

Everyone was ready to go, except no one could find Smith.

It turned out he was on KP duty, as he so often was for oversleeping or missing required briefings. They retrieved him and cleaned him up so the ceremony could proceed.

Smith didn’t think he’d done much.

“I had just done what I had been trained to do. I didn’t know what the hell it was all about. I wasn’t there to get a medal. . . . I just wanted to get it over with and get home.”

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