Last WWII Medal of Honor recipient Hershel Williams
A hero in the battle for Iwo Jima was 98
NEW YORK » Hershel Williams, the last survivor among the 472 servicemen who were awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in World War II and the oldest living recipient of the medal, died on Wednesday in Huntington, West Virginia. He was 98.
His death, at the Huntington Veterans Affairs Medical Center, was announced by the Woody Williams Foundation.
Williams was lying prone on the black volcanic ash of Iwo Jima the morning of Feb. 23, 1945, when he was startled by the sounds of cheering. “Suddenly, the Marines around me starting jumping up and down, firing their weapons in the air,” he told the Marine Corps History Division long afterward. “My head was buried in the sand. Then I looked up and saw Old Glory on top of Mount Suribachi.”
The raising of a large American flag by six Marines atop Iwo Jima, photographed by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press, became an enduring image of the American fighting man in World War II.
But the fight for the Japanese-administered island and its airfields some 750 miles south of Tokyo, needed by the Army Air Forces to support longrange bombing missions over Japan, was only in its fifth day when the flag went up. The battle was just beginning for Williams, a 21-year-old Marine
Marine World War II vet Hershel Williams in 2018.
corporal from West Virginia.
That afternoon, Williams wiped out seven Japanese pillboxes with flamethrowers, opening a gap that enabled Marine tanks and personnel carriers to break through the enemy defenses.
He received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, from President Harry Truman in October 1945. The citation stated that his “unyielding determination and extraordinary heroism in the face of ruthless enemy resistance were directly instrumental in neutralizing one of the most fanatically defended Japanese strong points encountered by his regiment.”
A total of 27 Marines and Navy servicemen received the medal, 14 of them posthumously, for heroism in the 36-day battle for Iwo Jima.
Decades after World War II, the Medal of Honor was awarded to more than two dozen African American and Asian American servicemen who had engaged in extraordinary combat feats in the war but had been passed over for it, presumably a result of racial prejudice, bringing the total of recipients to 472.