List of Medal of Honor recipients for World War II

This is a list of Medal of Honor recipients for World War II. The Medal of Honor was created during the American Civil War and is the highest military decoration presented by the United States government to a member of its armed forces. The recipient must have distinguished themselves at the risk of their own life above and beyond the call of duty in action against an enemy of the United States. Due to the nature of this medal, it is commonly presented posthumously.

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• References

World War II, or the Second World War, was a global military conflict, the joining of what had initially been two separate conflicts. The first began in Asia in 1937 as the Second Sino-Japanese War; the other began in Europe in 1939 with the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. This global conflict split the majority of the world's nations into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers.

The United States, and its military, was drawn into World War II on December 7, 1941, when Axis-member Japan launched the Attack on Pearl Harbor and European territories in the Pacific Ocean.

During this war 464 United States military personnel received the Medal of Honor, 266 (57.3%) of them posthumously. Seventeen of these were Japanese-Americans fighting in both Europe and the Pacific, many of which were upgraded from Distinguished Service Crosses during the Clinton administration. Additionally, Douglas Albert Munro was the only serviceman from the United States Coast Guard in United States military history to receive the Medal for his actions during the war.

The earliest action for which a U.S. serviceman earned a World War II Medal of Honor was the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, for which seventeen U.S. servicemen were awarded a Medal. The last action to earn a contemporaneous Medal of Honor prior to the August 15, 1945, end of hostilities in World War II, were those of Melvin Mayfield, on July 29, 1945 – though several honorees may have been cited for their Medal after Mayfield's recognition on May 31, 1946. Additionally, seven African Americans and twenty-two Asian American veterans who had received the Distinguished Service Cross during the war were awarded the Medal of Honor in 1997 and 2000 — most of them posthumously — after two studies determined that racial discrimination had caused them to be overlooked at the time.