Military Cpl. Jake Allex earned the Medal of Honor for extraordinary braveness whereas main his males ahead beneath heavy fireplace in the course of the Battle of Amiens in World Conflict I.
Allex was born Angelko Allex Mandushich July 13, 1887, in Streska, close to Prizren, within the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, present-day Kosovo. He was of ethnic Serbian descent, born to Sava A. Mandushich and Savka Sosevich.
He married Valinka Mandushich, per the 1930 U.S. census. They’d two daughters and a son.
Allex immigrated to the US, crusing from Bremen, Germany, about June 1912, in response to his 1919 kind requesting naturalization and a passport, and altered his title to Jake Allex.
He enlisted within the Illinois Military Nationwide Guard on April 27, 1917, simply weeks after the US entered World Conflict I, April 6, 1917.
On the day Allex earned the Medal of Honor, Aug. 9, 1918, he was assigned to Firm H, 131st Infantry Regiment, thirty third Infantry Division, at Chipilly Ridge, France, about 75 miles north of Paris.
His quotation reads that at a essential level within the preventing, when the platoon commander and all of the noncommissioned officers of his platoon turn out to be casualties, he took command and led the lads ahead till the advance was stopped by enemy machine-gun fireplace.
Allex then superior alone for about 30 yards within the face of intense enemy fireplace and attacked the machine-gun nest. He killed 5 enemy troopers together with his bayonet, and when it broke, he used the butt of his rifle to smash the enemy. In the course of the preventing, he captured 15 prisoners.
The motion at Chipilly Ridge occurred in the course of the Battle of Amiens, which befell Aug. 8-11, 1918. Allex and the remainder of the thirty third Infantry Division would later struggle within the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the Second Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Saint-Mihiel.
The Medal of Honor was offered to Allex on April 22, 1919, in Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, by Military Gen. John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces throughout World Conflict I.
Allex was honorably discharged from the Military on June 4, 1919, as a sergeant. He grew to become a naturalized U.S. citizen Sept. 16, 1919.
After coming back from the struggle, he labored for a time on the Morris & Co. meat-packing plant in Chicago, the place the workers referred to him as Sgt. Jake. The 1930 U.S. census lists Allex as a building foreman in Cook dinner County, Illinois, and it additionally lists the worth of his house at $1,800.
In 1931, Allex, who was a member of the Veterans of Overseas Wars, was invited by the Illinois governor to attend an deal with by President Herbert Hoover on the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, which he accepted.
Allex retired from the Chicago municipal water division in 1954. In December 1958, the Disabled American Veterans of Illinois offered him with a colour tv. Most individuals had black-and-white televisions at the moment.
He died Aug. 28, 1959, and was buried on the Serbian Orthodox Cemetery and Monastery of Saint Sava in Libertyville, Illinois.
This text is a part of a weekly sequence referred to as “Medal of Honor Monday,” by which we spotlight one of many greater than 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients who’ve acquired the U.S. navy’s highest medal for valor.
