Wounded in the shoulder and ordered to retire from combat, Pfc. Delbert Tuttle refused to leave his fellow U.S.
Marines as his unit invaded the Japanese-held island of Saipan during World War II. The son of a Central Illinois farmer stayed to run ammunition to front-line troops, then went back again, still under heavy fire. He was wounded a second time while directing tank fire against the enemy.
Tuttle, then 24, showed such extraordinary grit during the bloody battle — one that proved critical to the Allied victory in the Pacific — that it earned him a Silver Star as well as a Purple Heart, which is awarded to those injured or killed in combat. On a recent fall day, Tuttle's 71-year-old daughter held her father's heartshaped medal for the first time after Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs presented it to her during a poignant Oct. 29 ceremony at the World War II memorial in Decatur, her hometown.
Frerichs' office had preserved the medal in a Springfield vault since October 2018, when a Pekin bank turned it over to the state from an abandoned safe deposit box. Now it was being returned to Tuttle's next of kin. Weeping tears of pride, Carolyn Peckham said her parents didn't share many details about the war, including the bravery her late father showed 80 years ago on Saipan.
"I guess I'm just so emotional because I never knew any of this and I'm just so proud of him," she told the Tribune. "I knew about the medals but as far as the stories behind them, the acts of herois.