First Lieutenant (then Second Lieutenant) Victor L. Kandle, Company I, 15th Infantry, Army of the United States was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. | On 9 October 1944 at about 1200 hours near La Forge, France, Lieutenant Kandle, while leading a reconnaissance patrol into enemy territory, engaged in a duel at point-blank range with a German field officer and killed him. Having already taken five enemy prisoners that morning, he led a skeleton platoon of sixteen men, reinforced with a light machine gun squad, through fog and over precipitous mountain terrain to fall on the rear of a German quarry stronghold which had checked the advance of an infantry battalion for two days. Rushing forward several yards ahead of his assault elements, Lieutenant Kandle fought his way into the heart of the enemy strongpoint and, by his boldness and audacity, forced the Germans to surrender. Harrassed by machine gun fire from a position which he had bypassed in the dense fog, he moved to within fifteen yards of the enemy, killed a German machine gunner with accurate rifle fire and led his men in the destruction of another machine gun crew and its rifle security elements. Finally, he led his small force against a fortified house held by two German officers and thirty enlisted men. After establishing a base of fire, he rushed forward alone through an open clearing in full view of the enemy, smashed through a barricaded door and forced all thirty-two Germans to surrender. His intrepidity and bold leadership resulted in the capture or killing of three enemy officers and fifty-four enlisted men, the destruction of three enemy strongpoints and the seizure of enemy positions which had halted a battalion attach. | By direction of the President, under the provisions of the act of Congress approved 9 July 1918 (Bull. 43, W.D., 1918) a Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty has been posthumously awarded by the War Department, in the name of Congress, to the following named Officer.