The Hacksaw Ridge story: Desmond Doss saved dozens at the Battle of Okinawa
Running headlong into bullets and explosions at Hacksaw Ridge, this medic saved 75 lives, one-by-one, becoming the only soldier of World War II to earn a Medal of Honor without ever firing a gun
When the Empire of Japan launched its pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, a young Virginian called Desmond Doss was working at the Newport News shipyard. Though he was entitled to request a deferment, he felt a duty to serve his country and enlisted just months later.
It was an unusual move for a devoted member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, one who as a child had vowed never to kill. When Doss arrived at Camp Lee for training on 1 April 1943, a skinny vegetarian, his fervent beliefs immediately landed him in a world of trouble. While the other trainees perfected their marksmanship, he refused to even carry a weapon. This attitude infuriated Doss’ fellow recruits to no end, with one even threatening, “Doss, as soon as we get into combat, I’ll make sure you won’t come back alive.”
His commanding officers, too, believed a soldier without a gun was not only worthless, but a liability. Desperate to drive him out, they bullied and harassed him ruthlessly, even trying to have him discharged for mental illness. Defiantly, Doss told Captain Jack Glover: “Don’t ever doubt my courage because I will be right by your side saving life while you take life,” to which Glover replied, “You’re not going to be by my damn side if you don’t have a gun.”
Although the Fourth Commandment required him to honour the Sabbath, Doss believed that serving as a medic would allow him to work all week, as “Christ healed on the Sabbath”. After the successful August 1942 landing at Guadalcanal, in the southwest Pacific, the Allies spent the next two years slowly reclaiming territory from the Japanese – with one army roping through the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, into the Philippines, and a second across the Central Pacific Ocean, sweeping the Marshalls and then seizing the Marianas and Guam in the summer of 1944.
Doss served in Guam, and then the Philippines, with the 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. Although he initially struck his comrades as puritanical, he soon won them over with his selflessness and devotion to duty. In the thick of battle, he developed a fearless reputation for hurling himself into danger, dodging bullets and explosions to rescue wounded men – sometimes getting so close to enemy lines he could hear the Japanese soldiers whispering to one another. This commitment to duty not only earned Doss the respect of his fellow soldiers but two Bronze Stars.
As their empire crumbled all around, the Japanese grew increasingly desperate. Indoctrinated by an extreme nationalist version of the samurai warrior code, young soldiers were raised to see death as preferable to dishonour. Their emperor was a living god, and the idea of allowing a foreign nation to conquer the
“HE WAS ONE OF THE BRAVEST PERSONS ALIVE, AND THEN TO HAVE HIM END UP SAVING MY LIFE WAS THE IRONY OF THE WHOLE THING” Captain Jack Glover
Japanese archipelago, one neither China nor the Mongols had ever conquered, was unthinkable.
After the brutal battle for Iwo Jima, the only Pacific battle where American casualties exceeded Japanese, the Allies planned to seize Okinawa – the largest of the Ryukyu islands stretching south from Japan towards Taiwan. This would serve as a foothold from which to launch a bigger campaign for the subjugation of Japan.
Launching the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific campaign, the Allies made their first Okinawan landing on 1 April. Surprised at the lack of resistance, they quickly took the Yontan and Kadena airfields. Before long, 60,000 American troops had poured into Okinawa, where 110,000 Japanese soldiers had set up defences deep into the southern half of the island.
The further the Allies pushed, beneath artillery fire, typhoons and heavy rain, the harder the resistance became. The mountainous Okinawan landscape was brutal, and the Japanese had established networks of defensive fortifications of tunnels, caves and pillboxes. It took the American 184th Infantry eight days, and 1,500 lives, to capture a crag known as The Pinnacle. While taking the island of Iejima, the 77th killed 4,700 Japanese soldiers. This included 1,500 civilians who had been armed and forced to fight by the Imperial forces – almost a third of its civilian populace.
The fiercest fighting took place along the Shuriyonburu Line, a string of defensive positions cutting Okinawa in half, centred on Shuri Castle. Built along a series of steep ridges and escarpments, these would require grit and resolve to overcome.
After an enormous 27-battalion artillery barrage, with naval gunfire and aircraft hammering the
Japanese rear, the Americans launched a co-ordinated attack.
By the end of the month, while
“HIS NAME BECAME A SYMBOL THROUGHOUT THE 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION FOR OUTSTANDING GALLANTRY FAR ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY” Medal of Honor citation
some units had gained almost 2km of ground, the 96th Infantry Division was bogged down on its western flank by the 4.1km-long Urasoe– Mura Escarpment, which was defended by the Japanese 32nd Infantry.
With a cliff face towering 122 metres high, American soldiers began to refer to the escarpment as Hacksaw Ridge. Too narrow to set machine guns atop, the Japanese instead hunkered down in a series of caves, tunnels and pillboxes on the reverse side of the slope, waiting for the Americans to climb up – transforming the peak into a hellish battleground of attrition. On one occasion, the Americans formed a human ladder and tried to scale a giant monolith on the eastern end known as Needle Rock – only to be gunned down by machine gun fire. The Americans responded by driving Japanese soldiers from their caves with flamethrowers, shooting them as they fled.
In just four days, the 96th lost 536 men, pushing its numbers down to just 40% fighting efficiency. On 29 April, it was relieved by the 77th, just in time. In the ensuing days the 77th and the Japanese defenders engaged in endless attacks and counterattacks. The ridge became a living nightmare, where “all hell rolled into one”, a claustrophobic battlefield with a constant stream of grenade duels, night raids, satchel charging caves and hand-to-hand fights to the death. One American soldier even rushed into a Japanese machine gun position with a grenade in his hand, blowing himself up, alongside five enemies.
On another occasion, the machine gun fire was so intense, a soldier was decapitated. On 2 May, spotting a wounded man 180 metres ahead, Doss ran into rifle and mortar fire to retrieve him. Two days later, when four men were cut down attacking a heavily fortified cave, Doss ran through a shower of grenades to reach them. There, he treated them seven metres from the cave mouth, before hauling them back one-by-one, under fire.
Three days later, Japan’s 32nd Army launched its only large counter-offensive of the campaign. That Sabbath day the Japanese rained down artillery, mortar and machine gun fire upon the ridge, decimating the Americans
and forcing them back down the cliff. In the aftermath, 75 were left for dead; crawling and clutching their wounds. However, amid endless hail of bombs and bullets, Doss ignored the order to retreat.
Instead, he single-handedly tended to the wounded, carrying them 90 metres towards the cliff face, under constant enemy fire. Once there, he lowered them down using a makeshift litter on a rope, using double bowline knots and a tree stump for an anchor. Surrounded by grave danger, he lowered between 50 and 75 wounded men to a safe spot 11 metres below, before running back into the explosions and bullets to save more. Among them was Captain Glover, who had earlier tried to have Doss transferred.
Japan’s attempted counterattack ended in a series of disastrous defeats, and the next day the Americans finally overran Hacksaw Ridge, where more than 3,000 Japanese soldiers had fought to the death. Two weeks later, during another battle, as his men took cover Doss continued treating the wounded until a grenade blew up near him, riddling his legs with shrapnel. Rather than risk another medic’s life, he tended to his own injuries and waited five hours to be carried off on a litter. Upon spotting a soldier in worse shape, he jumped off and told his men to help him instead. While waiting for its return, he was shot in the arm by a Japanese soldier, and thinking on his toes, crafted a splint from a rifle stock before crawling 275 metres to safety.
After the bloody and gruelling Battle of Okinawa, which the Japanese called the Rain of Steel, rather than stage a costly invasion of the rest of Japan the US dropped nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – killing 105,000 mostly civilians instantly. Japan finally surrendered on 15 August, bringing the war to a close. Although Doss was one of 25,000 conscientious objectors to serve in non-combat roles, on October 12 1945 he was the only one to be awarded a Medal of Honor by President Harry S Truman. Reflecting on the award, he said, “I feel that I received the Congressional Medal of Honor because I kept the Golden
Rule that we read in Matthew 7:12: ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’”
Doss spent five years in hospital recovering from his injuries and later lost a lung to tuberculosis, leaving him unable to work.
Instead, he devoted himself to working with young people on church-sponsored programmes, before passing away at the age of 87 in 2006.