Profiles of Valor: T/SGT Charles MacGillivary

Charles Andrew MacGillivary was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. At age 16, he joined the Merchant Marines and immigrated to the United States to live with a family member in Boston, Massachusetts.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in January 1942, then-24-year-old MacGillivary joined the Army.

When in boot camp, as he recalled, “An officer asked me and two other immigrants … whether we wanted to become U.S. citizens. [They took us] to a federal courthouse and [swore us] in before a judge. I thought that if I was going to fight for this country, I should be a U.S. citizen.” Notably, today, noncitizens who qualify for military service are eligible for citizenship once honorably discharged.
On New Year’s Day 1945, MacGillivary was a Sergeant serving as commander of the 463rd Battalion’s Company I, after his platoon’s more senior officer had been killed. On that freezing winter day, he and his men were pinned down during a massive German attack by the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, a Waffen-SS panzer unit.

They were trapped in deep forest snow, and his men had been discussing surrender for a week. “The Germans were promising Americans Christmas dinner if they surrendered,” he recalled, “but they’d just march the Americans with hands over their heads in front of a tank and shoot them.”

Low on ammunition and virtually surrounded, MacGillivary knew, “As the head of my company, I had a duty to do something.”

And what he did was single-handedly attack multiple German machine gun positions with grenades and enemy machine guns he picked up along the way: “I thought that this was the only way we were going to get out.”