The Famous Last Words of the Coast Guard’s Only Medal of Honor Recipient

Of the more than 3,500 Medals of Honor awarded in American history, only one has ever gone to a member of the Coast Guard. Signalman First Class Douglas Albert Munro earned it Sept. 27, 1942, at Guadalcanal, in an action that lasted a matter of minutes and cost him his life at 22 years old.

A Kid From Cle Elum

Munro was born Oct. 11, 1919, in Vancouver, British Columbia, to American parents. He grew up in South Cle Elum, Washington, a small logging town on the eastern slope of the Cascades. He was a capable athlete in high school, spent a year at Central Washington College of Education, and enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939, three years before the country entered World War II.

Before Guadalcanal, he’d already served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.

In the Pacific, he formed a close working partnership with fellow Coast Guardsman Raymond Evans, the two of them nicknamed the Gold Dust Twins by the men who served alongside them. When Munro reported for duty on Guadalcanal in August 1942, having just come from ferrying Marines ashore in the invasion’s opening waves, he showed up wearing nothing but shorts, boots and his hat. His commanding officer asked if that was really how he intended to report for duty. “It is today, sir,” Munro told him.z

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500 Marines, Trapped on the Beach

By late September 1942, Munro and Evans were part of a boat pool operating small landing craft known as Higgins boats, ferrying men, supplies and casualties along Guadalcanal’s coastline. On Sept. 27, then-Lt. Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller led three Marine companies ashore near the Matanikau River at a beachhead called Point Cruz, intending to push Japanese forces back and establish a patrol base further inland. The Japanese had other plans. They were dug in, prepared and drove the Marines back toward the water with heavy fire. Many of the Marines had no radios to call for help. On a ridge above the beach, someone spelled out a single word using T-shirts laid out on the ground: HELP.

Back at the staging area, Munro volunteered to lead the rescue. Nearly 500 Marines needed to come off that beach, more than the available Higgins boats could carry in a single run, which meant multiple trips under continuous fire. Munro organized a group of 24 boats and led the first wave toward shore himself, five craft closing on the beach directly under machine gun fire from the tree line.

The Last Boat Off the Reef

As the evacuation neared completion, one fully loaded landing craft ran aground on a coral reef, stuck and exposed with wounded Marines still aboard. Munro maneuvered his own boat between the stranded craft and the shore, using his vessel and its two small guns as a shield to draw enemy fire away from the trapped Marines while they worked the boat free. Some of the able-bodied Marines climbed out into the water to lighten the load. The boat came loose, turned toward the open sea, and got away. Munro’s boat was right behind it when he was shot in the back of the head.

He died in Evans’s arms a few minutes later. According to the account of Lt. Cmdr. Dwight Dexter, the Coast Guard’s senior officer in the area at the time, Munro’s last words were a question: “Did they get off?”

They had. Every Marine from that trapped battalion made it off the beach alive.

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The Citation

Munro’s Medal of Honor was presented posthumously by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to his parents in the Oval Office on May 24, 1943. The official citation credits him with, in the language of the time, extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action above and beyond the call of duty as petty officer in charge of a group of 24 Higgins boats engaged in the evacuation of a battalion of Marines trapped by enemy Japanese forces at Point Cruz, Guadalcanal.

It notes that after making preliminary plans for the evacuation, he led five of his small craft toward the shore under constant strafing, and that when the evacuation was nearly complete, he placed his own boat between the beachhead and the Japanese to protect the loaded craft leaving with the wounded, and was killed by enemy fire as the last boat cleared the beach.

His mother, Edith Munro, later joined the Coast Guard herself, serving as an officer in the SPARS, the Coast Guard’s World War II women’s reserve, to continue the legacy her son had started.

What Carries His Name

Munro’s name has attached itself to a long list of Coast Guard institutions and honors in the decades since. Two ships have carried it: a Navy destroyer escort that served from 1944 to 1960, and a Coast Guard high endurance cutter after that. A new national security cutter, USCGC Munro, was commissioned in April 2017 and remains in active service today. The Coast Guard Academy has a Munro Hall, as does the Coast Guard’s training base in Cape May, New Jersey, where a statue of Munro stands and his actual Medal of Honor is on permanent display. Since 1971, the Douglas A. Munro Award has been given annually to an enlisted Coast Guard member for inspirational leadership. In 2013, Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., was formally named in his honor.

Ask a Coast Guards member or a Marine about Munro today, and there’s a good chance they know the story, even if they couldn’t place the date. It sits at the center of the working relationship between the two services, a single afternoon on a Pacific beach that neither one has stopped telling.