Posted on 03/11/2006 9:52:04 AM PST by SmithL
Hershel "Woody" Williams doesn't remember everything that happened Feb. 23, 1945, the day he earned the Medal of Honor, the first of many U.S. Marines to earn the nation's highest decoration on that hell-shot Iwo Jima island during World War II.
Williams, 82, is West Virginia's only living Medal of Honor recipient and one of six Marine receivers still alive from World War II.
<A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://adsremote.scripps.com/event.ng/Type=click&FlightID=2028632&AdID=2035645&TargetID=2011448&Targets=2011020,2003385,2011361,2011448,2017830,2011669,2011703,2017874&RawValues=&Redirect=http:%2f%2fwww.advertisersite.com"><IMG SRC="http://images.scripps.com/1x1.gif" WIDTH=336 HEIGHT=280 BORDER=0></A> He will be in Knoxville today to speak to the Lt. Alexander "Sandy" Bonnyman Marine Corps League Detachment and its Young Marines Unit.
The Young Marines will hear the veteran beginning at 10 a.m. at Eagleton Elementary School on Old Sam Houston School Road in Blount County, and he will be the featured speaker at the Marine Corps League installation of officers beginning at 6 p.m. at the Bearden Banquet Hall on Kingston Pike in Knoxville.
Williams, a farm boy from the bucolic-named Quiet Dell, W.Va., does recall seeing the American flag being raised by the famous Marines of the 28th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division on the fourth day of fighting after the Marines had landed on the Japanese-held volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean.
"I was about one thousand yards away when the flag went up," Williams said. "All the boys began jumping and hollering and firing their weapons into the air. We thought the fighting was over."
It wasn't. The Marines suffered 5,000 casualties in the first few days of combat. The fight for the island was anything but over.
In fact, Iwo Jima had about 32 more days left of combat, and Williams would see every single day of that as a demolition and flamethrower specialist. He had made corporal by this time, a rank in the Marine Corps that yields small amounts of command with big responsibilities.
As the Marines fought their way off the first island plateau, where the sand was the size of BBs and very difficult to walk in, the intensity of the combat increased.
Williams' 3rd Marine Division was given the job of "going up the middle" between the 4th and 5th Divisions. They found themselves between two airfields, both important to the Japanese and to the Americans.
With none of his group left because they had been wounded or killed, Williams' commander asked him if he could take out a group of pillboxes with his flamethrower.
In the area where his 3rd Marine Division found itself, history records that there were about 800 Japanese pillboxes. Williams said he does not remember today what he told his commander when he was asked if the young corporal could eliminate some of the murderous pillboxes.
"Witnesses that day said I said, 'I'll try, sir.' " It was duty, honor, country, in that order with Williams, 19.
"That sounds like me, but I really don't know what I said," Williams said. "It was my job and my duty.
"I just started doing what I was trained to do and set off. I don't recall much of what happened."
He was assigned four riflemen to protect him. Two of them would lose their lives while trying to keep Williams alive long enough to burn out machine-gun nests.
The flamethrower Marines preferred was different from those used by the Army. Marines had decided on a mixture of diesel fuel and high-octane gas. It blew out a 20- to 30-foot ball of fire, broiling at 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
The tank's blast would last for 72 seconds before a refill tank had to be brought up. Marines fired the flamethrower in one- and two-second bursts, letting out raging orbs of fire, like the breath of hellhounds in some medieval movie.
Williams took out seven pillboxes. One he remembers well because Japanese bullets bounced off the top of the flamethrower's air compressor on his back. He could have become instant ash.
As Williams crawled along a ditch, one of the many canals connecting enemy pillboxes, a concrete machine-gun nest came into his view.
He was just about to give the machine gunners inside a blast when around both corners of the emplacement came shouting Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets. They were running straight for Williams like a disturbed nest of ants. It was a frightful moment.
"It was so fast and furious, I don't remember it all," he said. "Here they came. I squeezed the flamethrower's trigger. It sucked the oxygen right out of them. No one came out of that."
That's all he says about burning the Japanese alive.
He doesn't spend much time thinking about that moment, he said, because it was war. He performed his job and became one of the few Marines to live through that day.
His best friend, Vernon Waters from Floyd, Mont., a lanky 6-foot-4-inch wheat farmer, didn't make it.
"Vernon was closer to me than my brothers, and I have a lot of brothers," Williams said.
His voice cracks. It's been 61 years, but old Marines tough enough to take a chaw out of life never forget combat buddies, especially those who die on far-flung fields.
Today, Williams spends his retirement from working with veterans for more than three decades, speaking and talking to groups, mostly veterans, or those who are going to become veterans.
He rarely shows or wears his Iwo Jima Medal of Honor, brimming brightly with its golden star and blue, star-studded ribbon.
"I'm just a caretaker of the Medal of Honor," the old Marine said. "I could have never received it without the help of other Marines. So when I wear it I wear it in honor of those two Marines who gave their lives protecting mine.
"I am just the caretaker."
"Just because I like Heroes" Ping
"I'm just a caretaker of the Medal of Honor," the old Marine said. "I could have never received it without the help of other Marines. So when I wear it I wear it in honor of those two Marines who gave their lives protecting mine.
"I am just the caretaker."
It couldn't be in better hands.
God bless him.
Semper Fi Salute!
The present war will be much longer and before it is over, we can only pray that many others will step up to the plate, as "Woody" and his compatriots did.
Out standing!
Hero still and talking to the young people.
It couldn't be in better hands.
I have had the extremely good fortune to know four recipients of the MOH pretty well, and several more casually. I have heard the same or similar sentiments from all of them, along with the common belief that the real heroes were the ones who didn't make it back, and that those who survived to wear the Medal do so in the posthumous memory of those fallen comrades.
As for *couldn't be in better hands* that is usually the case, and certainly appears to be so in this instance. But I have also met a MOH recipient who was otherwise, the only one of those I've known who was anything less than a pretty spectacular personality. That is all right; it is not a popularity award, but a reminder that at a particular moment at a particular time, someone pretty average became someone very special for reasons above and beyond the usual.
It is said that the Vikings believed that those heroes in Valhalla's corner reserved for such spirits would not fade so long as anyone here still remembered them, and so songs and epic poems kept those memories of those deeds alive generations beyond their commission. I hope we do as well by those whose moments of valor we have noted, but it has not always been so.
Poor is the nation that has no heroes.
Shameful is the one that having heroes, forgets them.
--from a monument on the Davis Bridge Battlefield, Bolivar, Tennessee, near Shiloh.
Why is it that the real men always seem to say "I was just a ..." and downplay their role.
Thank you Mr. Williams.
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