‏Robert Meltzer‏

During the Second World War, Second Lieutenant Robert Meltzer served with Company A, 2nd Ranger Battalion. An ardent anti-Nazi, an earlier attempt to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil war had been foiled by his family.

Recently assigned as 1st platoon leader of Abel Company, Meltzer was killed by enemy machine gun fire on 21 August, 1944, in or near Le Folgoët, France, as he was leading his men through an opening in a hedgerow in an attempt to take charge of some German soldiers who had supposedly surrendered. His remains were later interned at the Brittany American Cemetery in St James, France (Plot I Row 5 Grave 12).

Robert Meltzer was the second youngest of six children born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Joseph and Ida Alderman Meltzer of Oakland, California. Joseph Meltzer worked as a superintendent at a local insurance company office and would go on to be a Bay area business leader and active in political and social circles until his death in 1930. The Leonard J. Meltzer Boys & Girls Club in Oakland is named after his oldest son, a former county deputy district attorney who died in 1947.

On 9 December, 1924, the Oakland Tribune ran a photograph of Robert Meltzer rehearsing with Piedmont Boy's Pioneer troupe for their annual play "Who Knows".

In 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, Meltzer caused a controversy among many state and school leaders when, as editor of the Pelican, the University of California at Berkeley student humor magazine, he published five pages of "Communist Art".

Before the war, Meltzer had worked as an uncredited writer on The Great Dictator (1940) and had written for director/writer Orson Welles.

The Writers Guild of America (West), states that "the Robert Meltzer Award honors one act of bravery by remembering another, recognizing an artist's singular act of courage in defense of freedom of expression and the rights of writers everywhere".