January 29th, 1945, 2:47 p. m. Holtzheim, Belgium.
First Sergeant Leonard Funk walks around the corner of a farmhouse and stops dead. 90 German soldiers are staring at him. Half of them are holding weapons.
The other half are picking up rifles from a pile on the ground. Four American GIs kneel in the snow with their hands behind their heads. These Germans were prisoners 20 minutes ago.
80 of them captured by Funk's company during the assault on this village. Guarded by four men, all that could be spared. Now they're free, armed, and organizing to attack company C from the rear.
A German officer steps forward, shoves an MP 40 submachine gun into Funk's stomach, screams something in German. Funk doesn't speak German. Neither do any of the Americans.
The officer screams again, louder, face turning red. Funk looks at the 90 Germans, looks at his four disarmed soldiers, looks at the MP 40 pressed against his gut, and starts laughing. The German officer's face twists with confusion, then rage.
He screams louder. Funk laughs harder. What happens next takes less than 60 seconds.
21 Germans will die. The rest will throw down their weapons and surrender. And Leonard Funk will earn the Medal of Honor for one of the most insane acts of combat in World War II.
All because he couldn't stop laughing. Leonard Alfred Funk Jr. was born August 27th, 1916 in Bradock Township, Pennsylvania.
A steel town, smoke stacks and foundaries lining the Monahala River, 8 miles east of Pittsburgh. Funk grew up fast. learned responsibility early.
By the time he graduated high school in 1934, he'd already been taking care of his younger brother for years. The Great Depression was grinding through its fifth year. Jobs were scarce.
College was a fantasy. June 1941, with war raging across Europe and Asia, Congress extends the draft. Funk's number comes up.
He reports to the induction center at Wilingsburg, Pennsylvania. He's 24 years old, 5'5 in tall, 140 lb. The Army Physical Examiner looks at him and probably thinks clerk duty.
They're wrong. Funk volunteers for the paratroopers. In 1941, American airborne forces barely exist.
The concept is new. Jumping out of perfectly good aircraft to land behind enemy lines and fight surrounded. It sounds like suicide to most soldiers.
The volunteers are a different breed. They have to be. Airborne training is designed to break you.
Five weeks of running, jumping, climbing, falling, brutal physical conditioning that washes out half the candidates. Then the jump towers, then the aircraft. The first time you step out of a C-47 at 1200 ft.
Everything in your body screams to grab the door frame and hold on. The ground is a long way down. The wind tears at your face.
Your parachute is just fabric and cord and faith. Funk earns his jump wings. Gets assigned to company C, First Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Camp Blanding, Florida.
The 58th ships to England in late 1943. They join the 82nd Airborne Division, the All-Americans, Veterans of Sicily and Italy. These men have already jumped into combat.
They've already killed and watched friends die. Funk is the new guy. 27 years old, ancient by paratrooper standards.
Most of his squadmates are barely 20. But Funk has something they don't. Maturity, steadiness, the kind of quiet competence that makes men follow you into hell.
By D-Day, he's a squad leader. By whole time, he'll be acting company executive officer. First though, he has to survive Normandy.
June 6th, 1944. 1:30 a. m.
The C-47 Sky Train shutters as Flack explodes around it. Funk is standing in the stick. The line of paratroopers waiting to jump.
60 lbs of equipment strapped to his body. M1A1 Thompson's submachine gun. Ammunition, grenades, rations, medical kit.
The aircraft is at 400 ft, too low for a safe jump. But the pilots can't climb. German anti-aircraft fire is everywhere.
Tracers arc through the darkness like angry fireflies. The men can hear fragments pinging off the fuselage. The Normandy invasion involves 13,000 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.
They're supposed to land behind the beaches, secure bridges and crossroads, prevent German reinforcements from reaching the coast. Nothing goes according to plan. The green light comes on.
Funk jumps. The prop blast hits him like a truck. Then the shoot deploys and the world goes quiet.
Below him, France, occupied France. Enemy territory in every direction. The D-Day airborne operation is chaos from the first minute.
German anti-aircraft fire has scattered the formations across 50 miles of French countryside. Paratroopers are landing in flooded fields and drowning under the weight of their equipment. Others come down in the middle of German camps and die before they can cut free of their harnesses.
Funk lands hard. His ankle twists on impact, badly sprained, may be fractured. The pain is immediate and intense.
Every step will be agony for the next two weeks. But he can walk, he can fight, and that's all that matters. He gathers his chute, buries it, and starts moving.
He's 40 miles from his drop zone. 40 mi of German-h held territory in the dark alone. Within hours, he's collected a group of lost paratroopers.
Men from different units, different companies, different regiments. 18 of them eventually, all of them looking for leadership. Funk gives it to them.
For 10 days, Funk leads this group through German- held territory. Traveling at night, hiding by day, fighting when they have to. He insists on serving as lead scout despite his injured ankle, putting himself in the most dangerous position to protect his men.
They link up with Allied forces on June 17th. Every single man survives. Not one casualty.
10 days behind enemy lines. 40 mi of German occupied France. And Leonard Funk brings them all home.
The Silver Star, third highest combat decoration, plus a bronze star for meritorious service, plus his first Purple Heart. Funk is just getting started. September 17th, 1944, Holland.
Operation Market Garden. The largest airborne assault in history. 35,000 paratroopers dropping into the Netherlands to capture a series of bridges across the Rine.
British, American, Polish forces all jumping together. If it works, the Allies will be in Germany by Christmas. Field Marshall Montgomery's plan is ambitious, maybe too ambitious.
The paratroopers have to capture and hold seven bridges across 64 mi of Dutch territory. Ground forces will race up a single highway to link up with them. Everything depends on speed, on surprise, on nothing going wrong.
Everything goes wrong. The British First Airborne Division lands at Arnham, the furthest bridge. They're surrounded by SS Panzer divisions that weren't supposed to be there.
For nine days, they fight and die in the streets. Only 2,000 of 10,000 men make it out. The bridge too far enters military history as a cautionary tale.
But Leonard Funk doesn't know about the big picture. He only knows his mission. Support the landings, secure the drop zones, kill Germans.
After touching down, his company secures their objective. Standard stuff. The 5008th is operating near Nice Megan, helping to capture bridges that will allow ground forces to advance.
Then Funk notices something that isn't part of the plan. Three German 20mm flack veling anti-aircraft guns are firing at the incoming Allied gliders. The gliders carry reinforcements, jeeps, artillery pieces, ammunition, medical supplies.
If those guns keep firing, hundreds of men will die before they even hit the ground. The gun position is dug in on high ground near Voxill. Approximately 20 German soldiers manning the weapons and providing security, sandbags, camouflage, interlocking fields of fire.
Funk has three men. Standard military doctrine says you need a 3:1 advantage to assault a prepared position. Funk has the opposite.
He's outnumbered 7 to1. He attacks anyway. Leading from the front, Funk and his three-man patrol assault the German position.
They kill the security detachment, storm the gun imp placements, neutralize all three weapons in their crews. 20 Germans, three Americans. The guns go silent.
The gliders land safely. The Distinguished Service Cross, second highest decoration for valor, one step below the Medal of Honor. Funk now has a silver star and a DSC.
Two of the rarest combat decorations in the American military. Most soldiers who earn even one are considered heroes for life. Funk still isn't done.
December 16th, 1944. The Germans launch their last desperate offensive. Three armies, 400,000 men, 1,400 tanks, 1,900 artillery pieces.
They crash through the American lines in the Arden's forest, aiming for the port of Antworp. Hitler's plan is insane, but almost works. He's gambling everything on one massive attack.
split the Allied armies, capture Antwerp, force a negotiated peace in the west so Germany can focus on the Soviets in the east. For the Americans, it's a nightmare. The offensive hits thinly held sectors manned by green troops and exhausted veterans pulled off the line to rest.
Entire divisions crumble. Thousands of soldiers surrender. The German advance creates a bulge 50 mi deep in the Allied lines.
The Battle of the Bulge. The largest battle the American Army will fight in World War II. 89,000 American casualties before it's over.
The weather is brutal. Snow, ice, temperatures dropping to 5° below zero. Men freeze to death in their foxholes.
Weapons jam. Vehicles won't start. The cold is as deadly as the Germans.
Then comes Malmadi. December 17th, 1944. One day into the offensive, a convoy from the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion is moving near the Bognes crossroads when they run into the spearhead of Camp Groupa Piper, an SS armored battle group.
The Americans are rear echelon troops, artillery observers, radio operators. They're not equipped for a fight with tanks and armored infantry. After a brief engagement, 113 Americans surrender.
They're herded into a farmer's field near the crossroads. Hands up, disarmed, prisoners of war. Then the SS opens fire.
Machine guns, pistols, rifles. The Germans shoot them down like cattle. Men who try to run are cut down.
Men who fall wounded are finished off with shots to the head. 84 Americans die in that field. Some survive by playing dead.
They lie in the snow for hours. German boots walking past them. German voices laughing.
When darkness comes, 43 survivors crawl away and make it back to American lines. The news spreads through the American army. Within hours, the Germans are executing prisoners.
Malmi changes everything. Before the war in Europe had rules, unofficial, unspoken, but real. Soldiers surrendered when the situation was hopeless.
Prisoners were treated according to the Geneva Convention. There was a kind of grim professionalism between enemies. After Malmid, the rules are gone.
American soldiers swear they'll never surrender to the SS. Some units pass down orders. No SS prisoners.
When Funk hears about the massacre, something hardens inside him. He's already seen too much. Normandy, Holland, friends dying in fields and forests across Europe.
But this is different. This is murder. Cold-blooded execution of men who had surrendered in good faith.
Leonard Funk decides he will never surrender to the Germans. No matter what, that decision will matter very soon. January 29th, 1945.
The Ardens. The German offensive has been broken. Now the Allies are pushing back.
Company C, 58th Parachute Infantry, gets orders to capture the Belgian village of Holtzheim. There's a problem. Company C is under strength.
The executive officer, second in command, has been killed. They don't have enough men for the assault. Funk is now acting executive officer.
He looks at his depleted roster and makes a decision. He walks to the company headquarters tent. Inside are clerks, supply personnel, cooks, men who normally never see combat.
You're all infantry now. Funk tells them. Grab your weapons.
We're taking that village. He forms a makeshift platoon. 30 men who've spent most of the war behind desks.
They've had basic training, sure, but real combat, most of them have never fired a shot at another human being. Funk doesn't care. He needs bodies.
He'll turn them into soldiers. The march to Holim is 15 miles through waste deep snow in a driving blizzard. Temperatures well below freezing.
German artillery shells explode around them, harassing fire from the flanks. Funk leads from the front. They reach Holtzheim.
Funk organizes the assault. His clerks, his makeshift warriors, follow him into the village. 15 houses, Germans in everyone.
Machine guns, rifles, grenades, funk, and his men clear them all. 30 prisoners captured. Not one American casualty.
Another unit captures 50 more Germans on the other side of town. 80 prisoners total. They're coralled in the yard of a farmhouse.
Funk looks at his exhausted men. They've been marching and fighting for hours. There's still resistance in other parts of the village.
Scattered German soldiers who haven't surrendered yet. He can only spare four men to guard the prisoners. Keep them here, he tells the guards.
We'll send reinforcements when we can. Funk heads back into the fight. He has no idea what's about to happen behind him.
While Funk is clearing the rest of Hulltime, a German patrol approaches the farmhouse. 10 men, maybe 20, wearing white camouflage capes over their uniforms. In the snow and confusion, they look almost identical to American troops in winter gear.
The four guards don't realize the danger until it's too late. The Germans overwhelm them, disarm them, force them to their knees. Then they free the prisoners.
80 German soldiers plus the patrol that freed them. 90 men total. They grab weapons from the pile.
They organize quickly. They know exactly what they're going to do. Attack company C from the rear.
Funk's company is scattered across the village, mopping up resistance. They're not expecting an attack from behind. If 90 Germans hit them while they're spread out, it'll be a massacre.
The German officer in charge, probably a lieutenant or captain, begins giving orders. Position the machine guns here. Set up the ambush there.
Wait for my signal. That's when Leonard Funk walks around the corner. Funk has come to check on the prisoners.
Routine. Make sure the guards are okay. See if reinforcements have arrived.
He's not expecting to walk into 90 armed Germans. He rounds the corner of the farmhouse and freezes. The scene is surreal.
His four guards are on their knees in the snow. The prisoners, who should be unarmed and contained, are standing everywhere, rifles in their hands, organizing for battle. The German officer spots Funk immediately.
The first sergeant stripes on his sleeve, mark him as a leader, a prize. The officer strides forward, shoves his MP 40 into Funk's stomach, screams a command in German, surrender. Drp your weapon.
Except Funk doesn't speak German. He has no idea what the officer is saying. The officer screams again, louder.
His face is red, veins bulging in his neck. Funk looks around. 90 Germans, half of them armed.
His four men disarmed and helpless. One other American soldier standing beside him, equally helpless. The mathematics of survival are zero.
There is no scenario where Leonard Funk wins this fight. He's outnumbered 90 to1. The sensible thing, the rational thing is to surrender.
But Funk remembers Malmedi. 84 Americans murdered in a field, shot like animals, left to freeze in the snow. He's already decided he'll never surrender to the Germans.
So instead of complying, Leonard Funk does something inexplicable. He starts laughing. Nobody knows exactly why Funk laughed.
Maybe it was a ruse, a deliberate tactic to confuse the enemy and buy time. Maybe it was stress. The human brain does strange things when faced with certain death.
Maybe it was genuine amusement. The absurdity of the situation. An officer screaming in a language Funk couldn't understand, expecting compliance.
Funk himself later said he tried to stop laughing but couldn't. Something about the German screaming in German touched a nerve. Whatever the reason, the effect is devastating.
The German officer screams louder. Funk laughs harder. He bends over, shoulders shaking, calls out to his men.
I don't understand what he's saying. Some of the German soldiers start laughing, too. The tension is bizarre.
Their officer is turning purple with rage. And this American won't stop cackling. The officer is completely thrown off.
This isn't how prisoners behave. They beg. They plead.
They comply. They don't stand there laughing while you shove a gun in their stomach. For a few critical seconds, the German officer doesn't know what to do.
And Leonard Funk uses those seconds. Still appearing to laugh. Funk slowly reaches up toward his Thompson submachine gun.
It's slung over his shoulder, the standard carrying position for paratroopers. The German officer watches. This is good.
The American is finally surrendering his weapon. Funk's hand closes around the grip of the Thompson. He begins to unslling it slowly, carefully.
The German relaxes slightly. He's about to have another prisoner, another trophy. Then Funk moves in one motion, faster than thought.
He swings the Thompson down, brings the muzzle into line, and squeezes the trigger. The M1A1 Thompson fires 45 ACP rounds at 600 per minute. At close range, each round hits like a sledgehammer.
The bullets don't just wound, they destroy. The first burst catches the German officer in the chest. 30 rounds in less than 3 seconds.
The officer is dead before he hits the ground. Funk doesn't stop. Can't stop.
The moment he started shooting, he committed to killing everyone or dying himself. There's no middle ground. He pivots, still firing.
The Thompson sprays an arc of lead across the German soldiers nearest to him. Men scream, men fall. Blood sprays across the snow.
Brass casings tumble through the air, steaming in the cold. The magazine runs dry. 30 rounds gone in seconds.
This is the critical moment. A Thompson takes 2 seconds to reload if you're practiced. 2 seconds is forever in a firefight.
2 seconds is enough time for 90 Germans to kill one American. Funk yanks the empty magazine out, slams a fresh one in, racks the bolt, and keeps shooting. The whole sequence takes less than a heartbeat.
Muscle memory. Thousands of hours of training compressed into one fluid motion. At the same time, he's screaming at his men.
Pick up their weapons. Pick up their weapons. The four guards, still on their knees, scramble for the rifles the dead Germans have dropped.
Seconds ago, they were prisoners. Now they're fighting for their lives. The Germans are in chaos.
Their officer is dead. The American who was laughing is now killing them. Nobody gave orders for this.
Nobody knows what to do. Some of them shoot back. Bullets crack past Funk's head.
One round kills the soldier standing beside him. Funk keeps firing, moving, killing. His guards have weapons now.
They're shooting, too. The Germans are caught in a crossfire they never expected. 60 seconds, that's all it takes.
21 German soldiers lie dead in the snow. 24 more are wounded. The rest, more than 40, have thrown down their weapons and raised their hands.
The prisoners are prisoners again. Leonard Funk stands in the middle of the carnage, smoke rising from his Thompson, surrounded by bodies. That, he says to his men, was the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
The aftermath is almost anticlimactic. Company C secures Holzheim. The captured Germans, the survivors anyway, are marched to the rear under much heavier guard this time.
Funk reports the incident to his commanding officer. Just another firefight, just another day in the war. But the story spreads through the regiment, through the division, through the entire 82nd Airborne.
The sergeant who laughed at 90 Germans and killed half of them with a Tommy gun. When the Medal of Honor recommendation reaches Washington, nobody questions it. What Funk did at Holtzheim is beyond dispute.
outnumbered 90 to1 enemy weapon in his gut and instead of surrendering he attacked. The official citation reads he was ordered to surrender by a German officer who pushed a machine pistol into his stomach. Although overwhelmingly outnumbered and facing almost certain death, first Sergeant Funk, pretending to comply with the order, began slowly to unslling his submachine gun from his shoulder, and then with lightning motion, brought the muzzle into line, and riddled the German officer.
He turned upon the other Germans, firing and shouting to the other Americans to seize the enemy's weapons. September 5th, 1945. The White House.
President Harry Truman places the Medal of Honor around Leonard Funk's neck. I would rather have this medal, Truman says, than be president of the United States. Let's count what Leonard Funk earned during World War II.
Medal of Honor for Holim, Distinguished Service Cross for the anti-aircraft guns in Holland. Silver Star for leading 18 men through 40 mi of enemy territory in Normandy. Bronze Star for meritorious service, Purple Heart, three of them.
He was wounded three separate times and kept fighting. Plus the Quadigare from France, the Order of Leopold from Belgium, the military order of William from the Netherlands, their equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Leonard Funk is the most decorated paratrooper of World War II.
5' 5 in tall, 140 lb. a former store clerk who became a legend. The war ends.
Funk goes home. He doesn't write a book, doesn't do the lecture circuit, doesn't turn his Medal of Honor into a speaking career or a political platform. He doesn't cash in on his fame.
He goes back to Pennsylvania and gets a job with the Veterans Administration. The VA, the massive bureaucracy responsible for taking care of America's former soldiers, helping other veterans navigate the paperwork, processing disability claims, cutting through red tape for men who'd given everything and now needed help getting what they were owed. The same kind of clerk work he did before the war.
The same quiet, unglamorous, necessary work. For 27 years, Leonard Funk sits at a desk and helps veterans. He rises through the ranks, becomes division chief of the Pittsburgh regional office.
Good salary, steady hours, a pension waiting at the end. His wife, Gertrude, sticks with him through all of it. They have two daughters.
They live in McKisport, Pennsylvania, a workingclass neighborhood in a workingclass town not far from where he grew up. The Medal of Honor hangs in a case somewhere. the distinguished service cross, the silver star, all the foreign decorations from France and Belgium and the Netherlands.
He never talks about them. When people ask about Holzheim, about the laughing, about the 90 Germans, he shrugs it off. Did what I had to do.
That's it. That's all he ever says. November 20th, 1992.
Bradock Hills, Pennsylvania. Leonard Alfred Funk Jr. dies of cancer.
He's 76 years old. They bury him at Arlington National Cemetery. Section 35, grave 23734.
Among the heroes of every American war. At the time of his death, he's the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II. What are a fitness center at Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, is named after him.
A highway in Pennsylvania bears his name. A post office in McKesport was dedicated to him in 2023. But most people have never heard of Leonard Funk.
They know Audi Murphy. They know Alvin York, the famous Medal of Honor recipients. They don't know the short, quiet paratrooper who laughed at 90 Germans and killed 21 of them with a Tommy gun.
Here's what the story of Leonard Funk tells us. War doesn't favor the big. It doesn't favor the strong.
It doesn't favor the reckless or the fearless. War favors the ones who keep thinking when everyone else has stopped. At Holtzheim, Leonard Funk had every reason to surrender.
The math was impossible. 90 against one. A gun in his stomach.
His men already captured. Any rational person would have given up. But Funk wasn't thinking about the math.
He was thinking about Malmedi. about 84 Americans murdered in a field, about what the Germans did to prisoners, and he was thinking about his men, the four guards on their knees, the soldiers scattered across the village who would be hit from behind if these Germans escaped. So he laughed, maybe as a tactic, maybe from stress, maybe because the whole thing struck him as absurd.
And while the German officer was confused, while everyone was off balance, Leonard Funk made his move. 60 seconds later, he was standing in a field of bodies alive when he should have been dead. There's a quote often attributed to President Truman about the Medal of Honor.
I would rather have this medal than be president of the United States. He said it to Leonard Funk. September 5th, 1945.
The White House Rose Garden. Think about that. The most powerful man in the world.
The man who had just ended World War II. The man who would reshape the entire global order. Looking at a 5'5 former store clerk from Pennsylvania and saying, "I'd rather be you.
" Because what Truman understood, what everyone who reads the Medal of Honor citations understands, is that courage isn't about size or strength or training. Courage is what you do when there's a gun in your stomach. and 90 men want you dead.
