b. 18/12/1891 Cresco, Iowa. d. 18/01/1990 Fairfax, Virginia.
DATE OF MOH ACTION: 21/05/1918 aboard German submarine U-90 as a POW.
Edouard V M Izac MOH
Edouard Victor Michel Izac was born on 18 December 1891 in Cresco, Howard County, Iowa, the youngest of nine children to Balthazar Izac, a builder of farm wagons, and Mathilda Geuth. His father emigrated to the United States from Alsace-Lorraine in 1852 amid instability from the coup d’état instigated by Napoleon III, while his mother was born in Philadelphia to a family that immigrated from Baden-Württemberg. Balthazar Izac’s name was changed to Isaacs by immigration officials as he entered the country, and all of his children except for Edouard adopted this spelling of the name as well. The family spoke an Alsatian dialect of German at home, and Izac learned to speak French early in his life.
Izac attended the School of the Assumption in Cresco, before moving to attend high school in South St. Paul, Minnesota. He decided to enter the United States Naval Academy to get a “complete education,” seeing private colleges as out of reach. After securing a recommendation from a Congressman in Chicago, he was appointed to the academy. Izac did not excel in academics at the Academy, however he did meet Agnes Cabell, daughter of General DeRosey Caroll Cabell, at a dance. Izac graduated the Academy in 1915, and he and Cabell were married the next day.
Following his graduation, Izac was assigned to the battleship USS Florida, as the United States began its involvement in World War I. When he was promoted from ensign to lieutenant (junior grade), he signed up for the Naval Transport Service, hoping for assignments less open-ended than battleship duty. During this time, his daughter Cabell was born in 1916. He transferred to the troop transport USS President Lincoln in July 1917, and helped to oversee the conversion of that ship from an ocean liner to a ship of war, duties which kept the ship in drydock until its maiden voyage on 18 October. The ship subsequently undertook four uneventful trips to Europe, including one in November 1917 escorting U.S. Representative Clarence B. Miller.
When the U.S.S. President Lincoln was attacked and sunk by the German submarine U-90, on 21 May 1918, he was second in command. German submarines were ordered to bring back proof of their “kills,” and the sub came up to the surface, demanding the Captain of the ship. The US crew was afraid the Germans wanted to kill him, so they hid him and Lt. Izac told them that he died when the ship was hit. The Germans took Izac prisoner, as proof they had sunk the ship. He kept his knowledge of reading and speaking German from his captors, and during his stay on the U-90 he obtained information of the battle plans and movements of German submarines. This information would make a major difference in how the Atlantic War would be fought. When the submarine returned to Germany, he was turned over to the German Army for transport to a prisoner of war camp. In attempting to escape, he jumped through the window of a rapidly moving train at the imminent risk of death, not only from the nature of the act itself but from the fire of the armed German soldiers who were guarding him. He was recaptured and confined until he reached the POW Camp. He made a second and successful escape attempt, breaking his way through barbed-wire fences and deliberately drawing the fire of the armed guards in the hope of permitting others to escape during the confusion. Two other Allied officers also escaped. He made his way through the mountains of southwestern Germany, having only raw vegetables for food, and at the end, swam the Rhein River to Switzerland during the night in the immediate vicinity of German sentries. He walked into the American Embassy at Bern, Switzerland, to deliver his strategic information on 11 November 1918, the morning the war ended.
Welcomed to the Department of the Navy as a hero, Izac was promoted to lieutenant commander within a few months and assigned to a prestigious post as the director of munitions at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C., moving there with his family. He was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 11, 1920, with whom he became friends. In addition, he was awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra and the Cross of Montenegro. However, the injuries he sustained to his knees in his escape attempts ended his Navy career and Izac was forced to retire.
Living only on a small pension, Izac moved his family to a home of his father-in-law in San Diego, where he took a job selling ads for the San Diego Union from 1922 to 1929, during which time he also began working as a freelance writer, focused mainly on subjects on problems of war veterans, history, and English. The newspaper job was lost following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and he briefly moved the family to rural France, living simply, likely off of the money awarded from the German government.
Izac was then elected to the House of Representatives for California and served in office between 1937 and 1947, when he lost his seat to Charles K. Fletcher.
After leaving office, he moved his family to land inherited from his father-in-law in Gordonsville, Virginia, where Izac became a farmer and led a simple life raising cattle and growing different kinds of fruit and vegetables. The family then grew most of its own food and survived on pensions from the Navy and Congress. At one point, he dammed a stream to make a small lake, which has since been known as Lake Izac. In retirement the family also took to traveling, visiting Jerusalem almost every year and using these visits as the basis for a 1965 book, The Holy Land: Then and Now. Of the book, he later said, “No one who has not visited the most momentous events in the history of the human race will ever be able to visualize just how it all happened. You simply have to go there.”
In 1952, one of Izac’s sons, 19-year-old Forrest, died in what the coroner ruled a suicide. His youngest son, Andre, eventually joined the Navy as a chaplain and served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. He later lived in Bethesda, Maryland, in the 1960s. An accident following the death of his wife in 1970 led him to live with his second daughter, Anna for the remainder of his life, in Fairfax, Virginia. By 1989 he was the oldest living Medal of Honor recipient and his 99th birthday was noted by Willard Scott on Today.
Izac died in his sleep of congestive heart failure on January 18, 1990. At the time of his death, he was the last living Medal of Honor recipient from World War I. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington, Virginia. Edouard Izac was survived by five children, nineteen grandchildren and twenty-five great-grandchildren.
MOH CITATION:
When the U.S.S. President Lincoln was attacked and sunk by the German submarine U-90, 21 May 1918, Lt. Izac was captured and held as a prisoner on board the U-90 until the return of the submarine to Germany, when he was confined in the prison camp. During his stay on the U-90 he obtained information of the movements of German submarines which was so important that he determined to escape, with a view to making this information available to the U.S. and Allied Naval authorities. In attempting to carry out this plan, he jumped through the window of a rapidly moving train at the imminent risk of death, not only from the nature of the act itself but from the fire of the armed German soldiers who were guarding him. Having been recaptured and reconfined, Lt. Izac made a second and successful attempt to escape, breaking his way through barbed-wire fences and deliberately drawing the fire of the armed guards in the hope of permitting others to escape during the confusion. He made his way through the mountains of southwestern Germany, having only raw vegetables for food, and at the end, swam the river Rhine during the night in the immediate vicinity of German sentries.
BURIAL LOCATION: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.
SECTION 3, GRAVE 4222-16.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: FAMILY.
