Warren G.H. Crecy

Sergeant Warren G.H. Crecy was a badass killing machine in two major American wars, battling racial injustice on the homefront and angry Krauts on the battlefield.  Ultimately his bravery and badassitude would earn him a battlefield commission and six medals, including a Medal of Honor recommendation which by all accounts he more than qualified for.

Crecy enlisted in the Army nine months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was one of the founding members of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first-ever all-black armored unit.  At first, the cocks at U.S. Central Command were like, "fuck those colored folks, they can't fight.  Now where's my fucking banjo?  I'm fixin' to drink me some shine and do it with my cousin!"  However, once the shit started to hit the fan in Europe the Army was pretty much ready to throw every able-bodied man, woman and child into the battlefield meat grinder, so the 761st was shipped out to sunny luxurious France by way of Omaha Beach.

The 761st, dubbed "The Black Panthers", were assigned to Patton's 3rd Army during much of the European campaign.  At first the American generals were reluctant to put black soldiers into battle, but once they saw what the 761st was capable of that changed pretty quickly.  The 761st saw combat for over 180 straight days, battling in the Normandy and Ardennes campaigns.  They were a badass crew of tankers, and the baddest man in the 761st was Warren G.H. Crecy.

According to the unit historian, Crecy was a pretty mild-mannered, well-liked guy.  He was quiet, unassuming and polite.  But when he got out on the battlefield and had some Germans shooting machine guns at him, Crecy would totally flip out and become an unstoppable killing machine.  Listen to this:

On 10 November 1944, some of the forward American infantry came under attack from a German ambush.  Crecy hopped in his tank and busted through the German lines, blasting the ambushers in an attempt to rescue his friends.  Well the Nazis saw this coming and some jackass Panzerschreck team nailed Crecy's tank with a rocket.  This only made him EVEN MORE fucking pissed off.  Crecy jumped out of his burning tank, fucking hopped on a piece-of-shit American jeep, loaded up the .30 caliber machine gun and started wasting assholes left and right.  Of course the first guys he turned the gun on were the dudes who blew up his tank, so he gunned them down while they shouted, "mein leiben!" like when you kill Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D.  After wasting them, he braved machine gun and rifle fire to take out the forward observers who were acting as spotters for the German artillery.  Once those dudes were toast, the American infantry was able to fall back to safety.

But it doesn't end there.  After hearing this story of total badassery, the 761st hooked Crecy up with another tank so that he could get back to the whole "killing thousands of Germans" thing.  The next day, he's driving along, pressing the attack when all of a sudden his tracks get stuck in the mud.  You should know by now that Warren Crecy isn't the kind of guy who's just going to sit around in a broken tank when he could be killing motherfuckers, so he gets out of his tank with all the Krauts shooting machine guns, artillery and rockets at him, braves the enemy fire and tries to pull his tank out of the mud.  As he's doing this, he notices that the U.S. infantry is being pinned down by Nazi artillery and that the Germans are launching a counter-offensive so he abandons his efforts to free the immobilized tank and hops on the cupola-mounted .50 cal.  The fucking Germans come over the ridge and are completely moked the fuck out by Crecy's machine gun fire.  The dude completely wiped out a couple of machine gun nests that were pinning down the American soldiers and took out an AT team coming to blast the shit out of him with a rocket launcher, all the while taking fire from an exposed, immobile position.  If that's not the definition of balls-out hardcore, then I don't know what is.  According to the unit's historian, Crecy had to be physically pried away from his machine gun because he was so pissed off he didn't want to let go of it.

The unit historian dubbed Crecy "the baddest man in the 761st", crediting him with about 300-400 kills during the war.  For the actions described above, Crecy was nominated for the Medal of Honor.  Since High Command were dicks and Crecy was black, he got totally jobbed and only received the Silver Star instead.  During the rest of his service he would receive another Bronze Star for bravery and four Purple Hearts as well.

After the war, Warren Crecy served as a prison guard at Nuremberg, where he was entrusted with making sure that the most notorious war criminals in the history of the world didn't get away.  They didn't.  He returned home in 1950 only to face racism and segregation from the country he had fought so hard for.  This didn't discourage him though, and when the country called on him again Crecy shipped out to fight in Korea.

In October of 1952, Crecy was hit with a mortar shell which left him severely injured.  He was shipped home and would spend the next ten years in and out of various military hospitals.  He passed away in 1976 - a war hero, a pioneer who helped pave the way for the desegregation of the Armed Forces, a fearless survivor and a bad motherfucker in the truest sense of the word.

Links: 

The 761st Tank Battalion Bio

Corpus Christi Honors War Hero