Nicholas Oresko of Cresskill, World War II hero, dies at 96
Nicholas Oresko of Cresskill, the nation’s oldest Medal of Honor recipient, died Friday evening, having been watched over all week by veterans and military personnel who’d heard he was in a hospital with a broken leg.
Oresko, 96, was a U.S. Army master sergeant during World War II, when, although badly wounded, he wiped out two enemy bunkers near Tettingen, Germany, during the Battle of the Bulge.
He died at 6:30 p.m. at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center of complications from surgery for a broken right femur, said lawyer John “Jack” Carbone, a family friend. It was the same leg injured on Jan. 23, 1945, as he crawled from one enemy bunker to another.
Oresko had no living immediate family, but he was never alone at the hospital after being taken there earlier in the week from a Cresskill assisted living facility, Carbone said. Veterans and young members of the military were at his side, with more than two dozen at the hospital Friday afternoon before he was taken to have surgery.
“The kids held his hand; they prayed with him,” said Carbone, of North Haledon.
On Friday night, Bergen County Police led a hearse taking Oresko’s body to the Vander Plaat Funeral Home in Wyckoff in a procession that included Englewood firetrucks. Funeral arrangements were pending. Carbone said Oresko will be buried with military honors at George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus toward the end of next week.
One of Oresko’s friends, Richard E. Robitaille, had sent emails about his status this week to students at Berkeley College in Woodland Park, where he is the vice president of military veterans affairs. Robitaille said the students posted the information on Facebook and other sites, leading to an outpouring of affection from people across the country.
“They understood the type of person we were talking about and said, ‘We can’t let him die alone,’Ÿ” Robitaille said, adding that people came from as far away as Maine and Maryland to visit Oresko. “He’s loved throughout the Army. He’s an American hero.”
Robitaille said Oresko continually thanked visitors. An Army unit in Afghanistan had waved a flag in Oresko’s honor Tuesday and mailed it to the hospital, he said, but it had not yet arrived.
Friday night, Oresko’s longtime friend and companion, Genevieve Doocey, cried when told of his death by Bob Jerome of Park Ridge, a friend of Oresko’s and representative of the Medal of Honor Foundation.
Oresko lived for years in Tenafly. He had grown up in Bayonne, where the city’s high school has been named for him. His son, Robert, died in 2010 at age 63, and his wife, Jean, died in 1980.
He related his battle experiences to The Record in January 2012.
In the early morning of Jan. 23, 1945, the 28-year-old set off to assault a machine-gun bunker.
“We [had] attacked their positions several times, and we got beaten back,” he said. “It’s terrible. It scares the hell out of you.
“So we figured this time, let’s sneak up on them. Instead of getting prepared with artillery fire, let’s just go as it gets dark and sneak up on them and then attack ’em.”
Oresko started out at 4:30 a.m. — alone and resigned to fate. “I looked up to heaven and said, ‘Lord, I know I’m going to die, please make it fast,’Ÿ” he said.
He tossed a grenade into the bunker and then rushed it with his M-1 rifle. Another machine gun opened fire and knocked him down, wounding him in the right hip and leg, yet he managed to crawl to another bunker and take it out with another grenade.
“The machine gunner who shot me thought I was dead,” Oresko said. “I was able to move around, sneak around, so they didn’t see me. They saw me go down. They thought they’d killed me, but they didn’t. I slipped around and somehow got around, and they were in a bunch.”
Oresko killed 12 German soldiers, then refused to leave the area — “They wanted to take me back to the hospital,” he said. “I said ‘No, let’s take the position first.’ I didn’t want to give it up after doing so much.”
President Harry S. Truman presented the Medal of Honor to Oresko during a White House ceremony on Oct. 30, 1945.
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