Tommy Gwynn smiles in this undated photo. The decorated World War II and Korean War veteran died Monday in Tullahoma, Tenn., two months before his 107th birthday. (Department of Veterans Affairs)
The Nazis couldn’t kill Thomas E. Gwynn, and the communists failed, too — though he earned a dozen Purple Hearts fighting them.
But no one lives forever, not even the Tennessean who called himself “the greatest Ranger that ever was.” The World War II and Korean War veteran died Monday, according to an online obituary. He was two months from turning 107.
Born in June 1919 outside Memphis, Gwynn joined the Army in 1941 and became a Ranger in April 1943, the obituary said. He told an interviewer in 2023 that a fateful coin flip helped spur his decision to try to join, but he was initially turned down in 1940.
He would go on to distinguish himself as an infantryman, earning two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars fighting in some of the most storied battles of the wars.
They included the Normandy invasion and Battle of the Bulge during World War II and the Korean War landing at Incheon. He told a local TV reporter in 2021 that he was scared only once: the entire time.
As a sergeant in early December 1944, he was called before Gen. Omar Bradley, a top Army general in Europe and future five-star general who would become the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I thought they was gonna court-martial me,” Gwynn said in a 2023 interview with the veterans nonprofit Operation Song. “They saluted me. Throwed that arm up and said, ‘Lieutenant Gwynn.’ ”
He’d earned a battlefield promotion. And it was Bradley who said there’s never been a Ranger like him and never will be, Gwynn told Nashville’s WZTV news in a November 2021 interview.
It’s not clear from the obituary and other sources whether Gwynn was part of the famed Ranger battalions of WWII, precursors to today’s special operations units that bear the same name, or graduated from an early Ranger school that trained members of other units.
Even today, use of the Ranger moniker can cause confusion, as it may refer to members of a special operations unit, who wear distinctive scroll patches on their uniforms, or to graduates of the Army’s small-unit leadership school, who wear Ranger tabs.
The date the obituary says Gwynn became a Ranger matches that of the activation of the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tullahoma, Tenn., where Gwynn would settle after the war.
Troops from that battalion scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, between Utah and Omaha beaches at Normandy, to take out enemy positions ahead of the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
A 1945 news article, however, says Gwynn was a Ranger of the 30th Infantry Division in Germany when he received his commission from Bradley. The division landed on Omaha Beach five days after D-Day.
In any case, Gwynn remained in Europe through the end of World War II. Five years later, he was called back to duty while working at a Kroger grocery store in Memphis, according to a local newspaper report citing his family.
The report said he had already been shot twice while serving in Korea as of June 1951. Counting those injuries, he was wounded two dozen times on the battlefield, including from a bayonet up his nose and a bludgeoning with a rifle butt, WZTV reported in 2021.
Once, he was nearly hanged with his own belt after being captured, alone on a mountaintop, by North Korean soldiers.
But while one of his captors was stripping him down, the Tennessean “wheeled, bashed him on the jaw, sent him sprawling, and flung himself down the slope,” the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal reported in January 1952, shortly after he returned home from 14 months at war.
“You can roll a lot quicker than you think you can,” said Gwynn, then a 32-year-old first lieutenant with the 38th Infantry Regiment.
Through gunfire, he worked his way back to American forces over the course of less than four hours.
“I’m here largely because I know how to shiver,” he told the paper. “Nothing like shivering all the time to keep the circulation going. Without that, I’d be frozen long ago.”
That was one of the two times he was captured in Korea. By 1952, he’d received two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars and had been recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism.
But he told the newspaper that he considered the Good Conduct Medal “the best they’ve got.”
“The other medals sort of come to you in the course of things, and I don’t even remember exactly what they were given for,” he said. But the Good Conduct Medal, that was the “result of your own self.”
His obituary credits his “great physical condition and strong faith in God” as allowing him to repeatedly return to duty despite his many injuries. In 2021, regarding his exploits, he told WZTV “I didn’t do it. The Holy Spirit did it in my body; he did it in my body.”
After serving in Korea, Gwynn ran an appliance repair shop and spent time as a jail minister, the obituary said. He outlived his wife, son, daughter, a brother and three sisters.
The U.S. Army W.T.F! Moments Facebook page put out a call Thursday for soldiers and veterans to pay respects at Gwynn’s funeral and burial services, which will be held April 15 in Tullahoma.
Correction: An earlier version of this story imprecisely described the location of the Battle of the Bulge.
