b. 03/07/1865 Vohrenbach Baden, Germany. d. 25/11/1937 Mount Pleasant, Iowa.
DATE OF MOH ACTION: 21/12/1899 Alos Zambales, Philippines.
Paul F Straub MOH
Philippine Insurrection Medal of Honor Recipient. Paul Straub is credited as the only Surgeon General’s Office chief librarian to be a recipient of the Medal of Honor. He was a career military man serving for 25 years.
Born in Germany, he, along with his parents and his two siblings, immigrated in the fall of 1872 to New York City before settling in Iowa. He received medical degrees from the University of Iowa in 1886 and the Royal University of Berlin in 1892. In 1894 he entered the Regular Army from Iowa and was appointed a first lieutenant and assistant surgeon in the Army Medical Department. During the Spanish-American War, he served with valor with the Regular Army. Near the end of the Spanish-American War during the campaign to take Manila, on August 5, 1898, an outpost of the 23d Infantry was attacked at night and Straub volunteered to go forward “under a heavy fire of musketry and artillery,” where he assessed the casualties and treated the wounds of five men. His bravery was documented in his file but no action taken.
He served as a surgeon in the 36th Infantry, U.S. Volunteers. During the Philippine Insurrection at Alos, Zambales, Luzon on the Philippine Islands on December 21, 1899, Surgeon Straub’s Company was under a heavy enemy fire attack while fighting on horseback.
Surgeon Paul F. Straub was awarded the Medal of Honor from President Theodore Roosevelt on October 6, 1906, only after his commanding officer requested a review of his file for a promotion. Only after three recommendations for promotion, Straub was promoted in 1906 to major in the Regular Army and posted to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, D.C. The Surgeon General tasked him to prepare a 186-page manual, “A Handbook for Medical Officers in the Field,” which was published in 1910. The next year, he published the article “Sanitation of the Maneuver Camp at San Antonio, Texas” for the professional periodical, “The Military Surgeon.” During World War I, Straub was assigned as the Northeastern Department Surgeon from 1917 to 1918. Prior to his retirement to California on May 6, 1919, he served only a couple months as a librarian in what was the precursor of the National Library of Medicine, which was established in 1936.
MOH CITATION:
Voluntarily exposed himself to a hot fire from the enemy in repelling with pistol fire an insurgent attack and at great risk of his own life went under fire to the rescue of a wounded officer and carried him to a place of safety.
BURIAL LOCATION: LINWOOD CEMETERY, DUBUQUE, IOWA.
SECTION 3, LOT 66.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: UNKNOWN.
