Carlos C. Ogden

On the morning of 25 June 1944, below Fort du Roule guarding the approaches to Cherbourg, First Lieutenant Ogden's company was pinned down by an 88-millimetre gun and two machine guns. He armed himself with an M-1, a grenade launcher and what rifle and hand grenades he could carry, left his company in position, and went up the slope alone.

A machine gun bullet glanced off his head and knocked him down. He got up and kept climbing. From a vantage point he silenced the 88 with a well-placed rifle grenade, then knocked out both machine guns with hand grenades, wounded a second time in the doing of it. The company advanced and took its objective.

He was 27 years old. He had joined the Army from Fairmount, Illinois in April 1941, and left it a major in 1947.

Afterwards he married Louise Sanford and they raised four sons. He gave his years to Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and boys' sports leagues. In 1956 he went to France with the American delegation for the dedication of the Normandy American Cemetery. In 1958, at President Eisenhower's invitation, he served as an honorary pallbearer at the interment of the Unknown Soldiers of the Second World War and Korea at Arlington - two of the four men the Tomb holds. In 1964 he was one of fifteen Americans invited to France for the twentieth anniversary of the landings.

He died at 83 and lies at Arlington. His headstone reads MEDAL OF HONOR.