Minnesota history: The kid who won America's greatest honor 100 years ago
Just weeks from the end of World War I, a 22-year-old private, first inducted into the army in Crookston, Minnesota, took on a German machine gun emplacement near Cheppy, France.
It was the opening day of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the final push to end World War I and the deadliest battle in U.S. military history. It was Nels Wold's fifth such attack of the day.
He'd already captured nearly a dozen German troops earlier and jumped into a battlefield trench to rescue a comrade about to be shot by a German officer. Wold killed the officer instead. The private from Minnesota silenced four other machine gun emplacements that day.
"He kept on volunteering to individually attack those machine gun nests, justifying it by stating that he knew how following the first one," said Dean M. Henney, a 14-year Marine veteran of much newer vintage, but a fellow native of Winger, Minnesota, the tiny town of about 200 people in the state's northwest corner, where Wold was born.
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Henney, 60, and a management consultant, lives there now. He is a student of Wold's heroics.
"I heard about it as a kid. It fascinated me as a native of northwestern Minnesota," Henney said.
Wold wasn't so lucky the fifth time around. He was finally shot by German gunners. His comrades battled back, knocked out the gun and retrieved Wold's body. Accounts differ on whether he survived any time at all, or was killed instantly, but he didn't survive that September 26th, a century ago.
"His actions were entirely voluntary ..." reads his citation for the Medal of Honor. "The advance of his company was mainly due to his great courage and devotion to duty."
It was one of 72 Medals of Honor won by servicemen with Minnesota connections.
Wold, though, wasn't even the only soldier from Winger to die that day. Selmer Ekre, one of 87 Winger men to serve in World War I, died in the same battle.
Both their names are listed, as are the other Great War veterans, on a memorial put up in Winger in 1925.
There are no statues or other memorials to Wold's heroics.
He was buried first in France. Major General Leonard Wood went to Winger in 1919 to present the medal to Wold's family, Henney said.