Michael Wodarczyk

Story by By Maj Allan C. Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret)


The gunny was in a tight spot. For that matter, the entire 2d Battalion, 5th Marines was in a tight spot. The out-of-date, inaccurate French maps the battalion had been issued--one to a company--called the place the Bois de Belleau, and on Monday, 10 June 1918, it seemed that every tree sheltered a German. Every man jack of them was blazing away enthusiastically, laying down enough fire to quell a revolution. Much of it was directed at Captain Charlie Dunbeck's 43d Company, where the gunny led the 4th Platoon. Even worse, to the gunny's way of seeing it, a large body of gray infantry was moving into a position on the company's left flank. Enfilade fire from there could shred the entire 43d Co, thereby stopping the battalion dead in its tracks.

The gunny wasn't one to waste time dithering about things. In 1915, while stationed at the Navy's Craney Island Ammunition Depot in Norfolk, Va., he had not hesitated to dash into a high-explosive storage bunker to remove burning refuse that could have set off a devastating explosion but for his action.

The gunny was a man of action, and he took action then. Without waiting for orders he gathered up the handful of men nearest him and led them in a looping movement to the left, angling for the rear of the rocky outcropping where the enemy machine-gunners were beginning to adjust their sights. Intent on the Marines advancing across their front, the Germans were completely unprepared for the band of howling wild men who burst out of the woods in their rear. Surprise, total and violent surprise, can unnerve the best of men. These Germans were no different. They dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender.

The 43d Co's executive officer, First Lieutenant Herb Bluhm, saw it this way: "This enemy position was on our flank, and only for the good work of GySgt Wodarczyk the company would have been caught in an enfilading fire and the loss would have been very large. GySgt Wodarczyk took a few men and advanced on this enemy position and without the loss of a man, captured the entire enemy position, which consisted of about fifty men well armed with rifles and machineguns."

Freed from the pressure on the left, the attack of the 2d Bn, 5th Marines rolled forward, methodically chewing up the German 40th Infantry Regiment, while the gunny and his small band herded their bag of prisoners to the rear. For the gunny it was all in a day's work. The French government saw it otherwise. In due course the gunny would receive both the Croix de Guerre Order of the Army and the Medaille Militaire, one of France's most prestigious combat awards, bestowed only upon generals in command of armies, admirals in command of fleets and noncommissioned officers for acts of extraordinary heroism.

His service record listed his name as Michael Wodarczyk. From the time he entered the Marine Corps at the age of 22 in 1912, it had been simply "Mike." The Marines of the 4th Plt, with that inherent talent Marines have for hanging nicknames on their leaders, had taken to calling him--always among themselves, of course--something else, something that would stick with him for years into the future. They called him "The Polish Warhorse." It always was said with affection and not a little bit of awe for a man who seemed indestructible.

The Germans put that theory to the test at Blanc Mont Ridge in October. They sent the man known as The Polish Warhorse kicking with wounds that would land him in a hospital for months and eventually put him out of the Marine Corps with a disability discharge. The Germans and the Marine Corps both failed to consider the determination Mike Wodarczyk could take to any obstacle in his path. With a single-minded purposefulness he set about working himself into condition to meet the physical standards for reenlistment. It took him 18 months, but on 18 Nov. 1920, Mike Wodarczyk went back to the Marine Corps he loved. In August of the following year he would be discharged once again, this time to accept appointment as a Marine Gunner.

Many Marines would justifiably regard donning the bursting bomb rank insignia of a Marine Gunner as the crowning achievement of a career. A skilled mechanic and maintenance officer by then, serving with the First Air Squadron in Santo Domingo, the Polish-born Wodarczyk was far from ready to sit back, put up his feet and admire his handiwork, however. He had one more thing in mind. The year was 1922, and 32-year-old Mike Wodarczyk wanted to be a naval aviator.

That was something that would take a bit of doing. Shrunken to a shadow of its wartime strength, the Marine Corps, like all services, was faced with a legal limit on the number of commissioned officers as a percentage of its total strength. As a simple matter of numbers, there was no room for Mike Wodarczyk among the ranks of Marine fliers.

That did not necessarily mean the door was firmly closed and locked. In the decades of the 1920s and 1930s there were farsighted men in the American naval establishment. Looking ahead, they saw the inevitability of war in the Pacific between America and an increasingly imperialistic Japan. When that war came, carrier-based aircraft would play a major role, and the Navy and Marine Corps would need every qualified aviator they could muster.

Out of this foresight was born the odd category of student naval aviator. For men so designated there would be no formal flight training, no Pensacola, Fla. They would learn their trade through on-the-job training, not counted against the number of aviators allowed the Navy and Marine Corps. So it was that in November 1922, Gunner Wodarczyk was "detailed to duty involving flying as a Student Naval Aviator" by Major Edwin H. Brainard, commanding officer of Marine Observation Squadron 1 (VO-1M). He flew his first solo flight on 8 Feb. 1923, and by July 1926 he had logged more than 620 hours behind the controls and was one of the squadron's most skilled and experienced pilots. An examining board found him "an exceptionally qualified aviation WO"; a "competent and well-trained pilot, who performs any and all missions that the NAs in this organization are called upon to carry out." No matter that, he still was not authorized to wear the gold wings of a naval aviator.

Whether or not Marine Gunner Wodarczyk, with more than 600 hours at the controls, was really an aviator was something for Marine Corps officialdom to puzzle out. However, events don't always wait upon officialdom. As often as not, events take off on their own. In mid-July 1927, events in Nicaragua took off running.


http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/warhorsearch.htm


Sempers,

Roger