Colonel Earnest Childers

Colonel Earnest Childers
Located at Floral Haven Cemetery - Tulsa, OK

About This Work
I was asked to portray Colonel Childers as he might have appeared around the time he received the Medal of Honor. His wife graciously invited me to spend all of the time necessary in the Colonel’s library, researching photographs and articles about his military life. Colonel Ernest Childers was a full-blooded Creek Indian from Broken Arrow, OK who received the Medal of Honor for action in Oliveto, Italy during World War II.

His story is that of a truly brave and determined soldier. He was the platoon leader of an all-Indian company of the Oklahoma National Guard. While suffering a severely injured ankle, his platoon was pinned down by two German snipers and two machine gun nests. Childers bravely crawled up the hill in the face of the enemy and killed both snipers and took out a machine gun nest. He continued on to the second machine gun nest and discovered he was out of grenades. Undaunted, he picked up a medium-sized rock and tossed it into the next. As two Germans scrambled out of their hole, Childers killed only one to discover his carbine was out of ammunition. To his relief, a fellow GI behind him killed the other.

I posed Colonel in a rifleman’s position, holding his carbine as if surveying what he was about to do. Next to his knee is a rock, representing his most effective grenade. This statue resides at the entrance of the beautiful military section of the Floral Haven Cemetery in Broken Arrow, OK.