IWO JIMA HERO, LAST WWII MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT
Hershel “Woody” 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, W.Va. 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 21year-old Marine 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 scurried from one pillbox to another, miraculously untouched by the intense Japanese machinegun fire that bounced off his equipment — sounding, as he told it, like a jackhammer.
During his four-hour foray, in which he received supporting fire from several fellow Marines, two of whom were killed during the mission, he returned five times to his headquarters to get new flamethrowers when his supply of diesel fuel and high-octane gasoline ran out.
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.
Hershel Woodrow Williams, known as Woody, was born on Oct. 2, 1923, in the tiny community of Quiet Dell, W.Va., the youngest of 11 children of Lloyd and Lurenna Williams. Six of his brothers and sisters had died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic.
He helped his parents run their small dairy farm; after his father died of a heart attack when Woody was 11, his brother Lloyd Jr. took over the farm with help from the other children. He later quit high school to join the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, working on projects in Montana.
As a youngster, he had been impressed by the dressblue uniforms and the bearing of some hometown boys on furloughs from the Marine Corps. He enlisted in the Marines in May 1943. He was only 5 feet 6 inches tall, the service’s minimum height requirement, and weighed just 135 pounds, but he was well muscled from his farm work.
He saw combat on Guam a year later, then arrived on Iwo Jima with the 21st Marines of the 3rd Marine Division. When Marine armored vehicles became bogged down in their attempt to penetrate the network of Japanese defense positions, his commander asked him if he could do something to support them.
Thus began his one-man flame-throwing foray.
Williams left active military service in November 1945 and returned to his native West Virginia, where he was a counselor for the Veterans Administration. He remained in the Marine Corps as a reservist and retired as a chief warrant officer in 1969. His foundation raises money to provide scholarships for children who had lost a parent in war.
In March 2020, he attended a ceremony in Norfolk, Va., for the commissioning of the warship Hershel “Woody” Williams.