Sergeant Hawk, darting from one spot to another in that orchard, escaped being hit a second time that day, but he was wounded three more times during the war.

On June 21, 1945, he received the Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman for, as the citation put it, his role in “crushing two desperate attempts of the enemy to escape from the Falaise Pocket and for taking more than 500 prisoners.”

It was not until he returned to his home in Washington State that Sergeant Hawk was told he was being considered for receiving the medal at the White House. But he was emotionally and physically drained from six months in combat and did not want to make the train trip east. So he prevailed on Senator Warren G. Magnuson, a Democrat from Washington State whom he knew from his high school days, to ask Truman to present the medal during the president’s stopover while en route to the San Francisco conference that was drawing up the United Nations Charter. The White House agreed.

Still, the stress became overwhelming for Sergeant Hawk when it came time for the medal ceremony outside the state Capitol in Olympia. To his relief, though, the spotlight was taken off him momentarily when Truman began chatting with his father, Lewis, a fellow World War I combat veteran.

“I was really feeling very, very badly about me receiving a medal and with the serious memories of all the friends I’d lost,” he told the website tankbooks.com in 1996. “In six months, you lose so many machine gunners.”

John Druse Hawk was born on May 30, 1924, in San Francisco but grew up on Bainbridge Island, Wash. He was drafted in 1943 after graduating from high school.

After the war, he graduated from the University of Washington and settled in Bremerton, where he was an elementary school teacher and principal.