Obituaries: Robert Maxwell, Medal of Honor recipient who fell on grenade to save lives, dies at 98

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Obituaries
Robert Maxwell, Medal of Honor recipient who fell on grenade to save lives, dies at 98

By Harrison Smith, Obituary writer
May 14 at 8:51 PM

He heard the hand grenade well before he saw it. And as the seconds ticked away and Robert D. Maxwell searched blindly through the darkness, he decided that the only thing worse than running away was picking up the explosive device and attempting to throw it back at the enemy — an act that risked killing the three soldiers crouched alongside him.

When he finally found the grenade, lying on the cement courtyard outside his battalion’s embattled observation post in eastern France, he did the only thing that made sense. Clutching a blanket to his chest, he dropped on top of the device, absorbing the full force of its explosion and saving the lives of his comrades.

“It’s not the case that I was brave or a hero or anything like that,” Mr. Maxwell, an Army technician fifth grade during World War II, said years later. “Because I just did what the only alternative was at the time. There was nothing else to do.”

For his actions early that morning on Sept. 7, 1944, Mr. Maxwell was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration for valor. He was 98, and the oldest surviving Medal of Honor recipient, when he died May 11 in Bend, Ore., leaving only three surviving recipients from World War II. ... His death was announced by the Medal of Honor Society, which did not say precisely where or how he died.
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Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. Since joining the obituaries section in 2015, he has profiled big-game hunters, fallen dictators and Olympic champions. He sometimes covers the living as well, and previously co-founded the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago. Follow https://twitter.com/harrisondsmith