WWII Medal of Honor Recipient, Woody William, and His Last Duty Station

Attached here is a picture of the last Medal of Honor from WWII to die, Woody Williams, about to leave the U.S. Capitol after having laid there in the rotunda in honor for six hours on 14 July 2022. For those of you interested in seeing the video of him leaving, see my facebook post at: (1) Bryan Mark Rigg, author and historian | Facebook

I have written a lot about Woody Williams during the past seven years. The past two weeks, he has been honored in West Virginia's capitol and then on the 14th of July, as already mentioned, he laid in honor in the rotunda of our nation's capitol, a rare honor for an American who has not been a major leader in the military or government. On this day, the nation’s eyes were focused on Woody, but few people know his story. This especially became clear as I gave numerous radio and newspaper interviews about the man the past two weeks. Even when I was in DC for the ceremony to pay my respects at this most solemn and profound event, I was surprised by the lack of information people knew about Woody, even from the likes of Senator Manchin (a key person who helped get Woody this honor). When speaking with him, he did not know much about Woody's heroics and even claimed Woody did not remember much himself which all my research showed to not be the case. I ask many who were leaving the rotunda after paying their respects to Woody about what they knew of the man, and shockingly, many just said they heard about a WWII hero being there and they wanted to see what it was all about. Woody is indeed a hero, but one would think they would want to know more about what made him a hero besides the general, and somewhat superficial, knowledge that he had received the Medal of Honor (Yes, having the Medal of Honor is indeed an amazing achievement, but learning how and why someone had received it is even more important, in my opinion). I even met a fairly well known retired USMC colonel in the Dallas area at the DFW airport the morning of this event as we were on the same flight and he even revealed his ignorance about Woody's story even though he was flying up to DC to pay his respects with his son. As a result of these events, I thought it fitting to write up a short biography below of Woody Williams for those who might be interested in learning more about him since he became even more famous since passing away on 29 June 2022. To my knowledge, I know more about Woody and his past than anyone else since I am the only one to write up a historical treatment of his life. The historical narrative will take one about ten 7-8 minutes to read below, but one would think that is a small amount of time to give to learn more about one of America's most famous and distinguished military personalities.

Childhood

Woody was born on 2 October 1923 in Quiet Dell, West Virginia. He was born prematurely, reportedly weighing only three pounds, so the doctor and family members doubted he would survive. Woody said, “I was so tiny my mother was either very tired since she had given birth to so many or my father had run out of juice.”

As was common in the early 20th century, Woody was delivered by a neighborhood midwife. Woody’s mother was no stranger to heartache—of the eleven children to whom she gave birth, Woody claims six died. Woody believes they died from complications during childbirth or the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19.

He was named Hershel Woodrow Williams. His first name came from Dr. Hershel Yost who visited his mother to check on him three days after he was born. His middle name came from the U.S. president his father admired, Woodrow Wilson. Woody’s mother called him Hershel, but everyone else called him Woody.

During his childhood, Woody’s family made a modest living in good times, working a dairy farm with 36 cows. Like most family farms of the period, the family rose with the sun and worked all day—children included. The man of the house had the crucial role in the heavy work like planting and harvesting crops, tending animals, mending fences, and repairing the barn and other buildings. As a consequence, on 5 December 1934, the family suffered tragedy when Woody’s father, Lloyd Dennis Williams, died of a heart attack at the age of 46. Lloyd was buried in the E.T. Vincent graveyard next to three of his children who had been buried there between 1912-1915.

Running a dairy farm and raising five kids was toilsome, but Mama Williams worked hard and organized her remaining children to provide for the family. Fortunately, the boys were old enough to do the milking, churn butter, feed cattle and muck out the barn.

Not all of Woody’s life was hard. As he came of age he swam in rivers and lakes with his friends, played Cowboys and Indians, or joined a baseball game. As a teenager, he often went to the dance halls on weekends. This was where boys showed off their strength to prove who was the toughest. “Almost every night, there was a fight outside the dance hall. When this happened, someone would yell— ‘FIGHT!’—and we would all exit to watch who was going to fisticuff it out with each other,” Woody said. Although shy, he liked the ladies and the occasional drink. He also enjoyed performing musically, and learned to play the guitar while he sang, Don’t Fence Me In (made famous by Bing Crosby in 1943), the Yellow Rose of Texas, John Henry, and Lonesome Valley.

By 1940, Woody joined one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which more than 3,000,000 served from 1933 until 1941. Reserve Army officers were put in charge of CCC camps and military discipline was enforced.

It may have been his salvation. Woody admitted he was “headed for reform school.” His life was not going in the right direction. From a 1956 interview with Woody, journalist George Lawless wrote, “his reckless behavior and young devil-may-care attitude made him a thorn in the side of authorities…He quit high school in his freshman year—and school officials breathed a sigh of relief.”

He served in the CCC for almost two years, and he worked on projects in West Virginia and Montana. On December 7, 1941, Woody’s entire world changed.

WAR

The bombing of Pearl Harbor forced Americans to look beyond their borders and engage totalitarian regimes in war.

Woody left the CCC and returned home to work as a Taxi driver in Fairmont, West Virginia. Unlike other boys who immediately volunteered for service, Woody did not know what he should do. He registered with the draft board and then waited. When his draft card was pulled in May 1943, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps.

When he entered boot camp in San Diego in August of 1943, records show he was 65.25 inches tall (5’5?”) and weighed 165 pounds. Soon after boot camp in December, his unit left for New Caledonia (a South Pacific island 2,000 miles east of Australia). While there, he joined the 3rd Marine Division and left for Guadalcanal in January 1944. For the next few months, he and his fellow Marines trained to recapture the American territory known as Guam.

He also trained as a flamethrower operator with C Company, 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 3rd Marine Division. The flamethrower the Marines used in 1944 and 1945, especially the improved M2-2, had two tanks the size of scuba tanks, full of flammable fuel (4.5 gallons) plus a slightly smaller center tank of compressed air or nitrogen (nitrogen was preferred because it was not flammable). All three tanks were welded together onto a backpack with shoulder straps. The compressed air canister pushed air through the hose connected to the three-foot wand or gun which delivered burning fuel on a target. When fired with full force, the weapon blew fuel at a “rate of one-half gallon per second” around 30 yards to the front and around 10 yards in width. It was heavy and awkward machinery, but deadly. The flame’s temperature was around 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and anyone hit with it would die almost instantly. For those in cramped quarters, such as pillboxes, if they were not burned alive, they often suffocated because the flames would suck up all the available oxygen.

In July 1944, Woody joined the operation to retake Guam. He landed on the island on 21 July 1944 and fought until hostilities ceased on 10 August. On 25 July, he fought through one of the biggest Banzai attacks of the Pacific War when his lines were charged by more than 5,000 Japanese. At several points, the Japanese penetrated Marine lines and made it back to the landing beaches. Luckily for Woody, his area was not taken over. He fought like the devil all night, repulsing wave upon wave of berserk Japanese trying to drive the Marines back into the sea.

After Guam, Woody and his 3d Marine Division (MarDiv), started training for another island held by Japan. Unbeknownst to him, they were headed for Iwo Jima. For months, they trained on Guam, practicing disembarking from Higgins boats and amtracs on several beaches, learning their weapons and working on how best to operate together in small units. Eventually, on 12 February, the division left Guam headed for Iwo. Most Marines in the invasion fleet had no idea where they were headed. Moreover, the 3rd MarDiv was to remain in reserve while the 4th and 5th Marine divisions would invade on 19 February. Many 3rd MarDiv Marines were told that they would never step foot on the next island because the 4th and the 5th would quickly take it over. They were very wrong in this prediction.

After the battle started on 19 February 1945, things went from bad to worse for the 4th and the 5th MarDivs. So much so, that the generals in charge decided to land the 3rd MarDiv on 21 February. Woody was in this wave. As soon as he hit the beach, it was chaos. He noticed a stack of dead bodies piled high and destroyed landing craft everywhere. His company slowly but surely made their way to the first airfield. By 23 February, a line of Japanese defense stopped his unit dead in its tracks: “[T]he defending positions were so extensive that as soon as one center of resistance was penetrated, the attacker was forced to face another,” he said.

Some tanks tried to enter the battle but had a difficult time maneuvering because of the ash (it was a volcanic island after all). In short order, direct hits knocked out five that C Company’s commander, Capt. Donald Beck, had requested to support his men. According to Correspondent Dick Dashiell, “Marines lay grotesquely on what had become their biers" and the cry for corpsman rang out over the battle’s chaos. Woody’s platoon leader, Lt. Howard F. Chambers, reported to his company commander, Capt. Beck, that his unit had been reduced by 50%. While the men in the 21st Regiment discussed what to do, the Japanese rained down mortar, rocket, and artillery fire on Woody’s outfit causing many casualties. Woody’s regiment of 3,006 suffered 427 casualties in two days. Witnessing all this violent death put an icy chill through Woody’s veins.

Capt. Beck described the scene: “Large pillboxes, constructed from concrete, thickly cut clay blocks and pieces of scrap aircraft, covered over with four to five feet of sand, were located among sandy ridges where tanks could not maneuver and where supporting overhead fire had proven ineffective.” Against this terrain, Beck had to move forward and attack. But it troubled Beck exactly how he was to do so. When discussing this situation, the leader of 1st Platoon, 2nd Lt. Chambers told Beck, “Every time my men try to move forward they’re hacked to pieces.”

Even in this murderous environment, the day before, Beck’s company had taken out 25 pillboxes “after it had walked into a trap of crisscrossing fire. A less hardy band probably would have been destroyed, but under the leadership of…Beck, the Marines fought frantically and not only escaped the trap but exterminated more men than they lost.”

That morning, Woody’s company confronted some Japanese with grenades. “It was sort of like a baseball game,” said 2nd Lt. Charles (Mike) Henning, “only we weren’t trying to catch what the Japs threw.” In several hours of combat, led by Woody and Sgt. Lyman Southwell who Henning described as “crack shots” with grenades, they took out 50 Japanese. Henning said, “I don’t know how many Nips they got, but it was plenty.” It was deadly combat and Woody’s company lost an additional 18 men.

With the cool calculation of a scientist, Beck gathered the facts about his situation. The area “was clearly one of the most bitterly defended and best fortified sectors of the entire despicable island.” Chambers and numerous men tried for hours that morning to break the Japanese lines, but failed, suffering casualties. Beck felt uneasy asking “anybody to do the job [to attack positions in their front]. It was murder.”

They debated their options while crowded in a shell crater. So many officers had become casualties or were dead that only two other officers of C Company were there. By mistake, First Sgt. William R. “Hose Nose” Elder ordered Woody to attend the meeting since he thought non-commissioned officers like Woody were supposed to be there too, especially because he was a demolition and flamethrower expert. The highly valued new flamethrower M2-2 was considered the perfect weapon for Iwo. Knowing Woody was trained with the flamethrower, Woody recalls Beck asking him whether he thought he could use it to take out the pillboxes. Woody reports he was heard to say he would try. “I figured, what the hell, I might as well join [my comrades] wherever they were.”

“I wanted to eliminate those pillboxes because they had interlocking fields of fire, meaning if you tried to escape from one, another one would get you. I stayed focused on my job. I needed to concentrate on that if I wanted to live,” Woody said. Over the next four hours, Woody would secure a small victory against one of the toughest defenses the Marines ever faced.

After volunteering to attack the pillboxes, Woody went to the supply depot at company headquarters and obtained a flamethrower and demolition charges. Knowing what he had to do, Woody was “nervous and scared. But I couldn’t let my Marines down.”

Woody was assigned two men armed with Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR men), two M1 riflemen and one demolition man. There was also a Marine with a bazooka who, if he could, would try to blow the concrete structures with a clear shot, which would enable Woody to move in to deliver the coup de grace.

After Beck and Chambers briefed Woody on his mission, Woody in turn explained to the men in his charge how they should provide cover while he worked his way into position to attack. While the enemy inside a pillbox could shoot at a wide range of targets from the protection of the pillbox, the Marines only had a small aperture on each pillbox to target. The pillbox fortification gave the defenders a distinct advantage over the attacking Marines who fought in the open, exposing their entire bodies to enemy fire.

Woody, who had fought through many tough situations, felt more foreboding when confronted with taking out the pillboxes than he had during other engagements. He loved and hated the flamethrower weapon. He loved it because it was effective, but he hated it because it was horrible way of killing a person: “There is nothing more horrible than the smell of burning human flesh,” Woody said.

During the attack on 23 February 1945, events occurred quickly and Woody needed strength, skill and laser-like focus to accomplish his mission while the enemy tried to kill him. After Beck’s briefing, Woody, lost no time starting his mission. He went to the depot and hoisted the flamethrower’s 70-pound tanks onto his back and picked up the 15-pound wand or gun attached to the tanks. All in all, with his pistol, helmet and other gear, Woody entered battle with at least 100 pounds of equipment.

The Japanese fired at Woody’s unit from inside the pillboxes, including the one he was about to attack. In this theater of death, Woody crawled toward the concrete structure and his BAR and riflemen fired at the pillbox’s opening. “But their fire against the concrete and steel emplacements were like BB shot on a cement sidewalk.”

He crept toward a point that was slightly higher in elevation so he could approach the pillbox on a gradual slope. Near where Woody and his comrades hid, a mortar round exploded, sending a cascade of sand down the sides of the embankment, “loosed by the shock waves of the explosion” according to Correspondent Dashiell. The men trying to protect Woody could do nothing, Dashiell continued, “about the homicidal mortar shells which continued to plumb down.” The environment baffled and intoxicated Woody. He had entered a region of human emotions nobody wanted to explore, and few survive.

As the Marines approached those pillboxes, trenches and spider holes, the gunners inside the first pillbox tried to “depress the muzzle of their machine gun” to get Woody into their crosshairs. They missed him, hitting the sand just in front of his face, sending sharp particles into his cheeks with stinging force. The Marines behind him unleashed fire at the slit where the machinegun was shooting, forcing the Japanese to take cover.

As Woody edged forward, an enemy soldier suddenly materialized, apparently out of a buried oil drum. Woody said, “I could see the surprise in his eyes. We were so close.” Before the enemy could aim his rifle, Woody turned his nozzle and engulfed him in a circle of flame: “Pluff! He was gone.”

The effect of a flamethrower hit is gruesome. Engulfed in intense heat many bodies lost their moisture and ignited—3,500 degrees Fahrenheit does a lot of damage. Flesh quickly incinerates “revealing glistening bones” according to historian Dan King.

Flamethrower fire was spotted instantly, attracting counterfire since the Japanese targeted men with “special equipment” such as radios, fully automatic weapons, crew-served weapons, or demolitions equipment—they especially hated flamethrowers, whether operated by a Marine or shot from a tank. A mortar round exploded outside the trench Woody used for protection. He was approximately 40 yards from the pillbox and taking small arms fire. Bullets careened off the fuel tanks on his back “with whining sounds” according to Woody. Yet he kept moving. He capered closer to the structure, “cutting all manner of fantastical steps.”

When Woody got close to the first pillbox, he placed his fingers on the triggers ready to fire. He rose on one knee, hit the forward trigger to light a match with his left hand and then pulled the rear trigger with the other, releasing the compressed air that would push the mixture of fuels out through the nozzle of the wand, igniting as it left his weapon. The distinctive Whomp! Whoosh! sounds ushered from the flamethrower as the crackle and roar of the fire left his weapon. He rolled his flame toward the aperture moving his wand from pointing toward the ground to pushing it up level with his hip. The fiery serpent of flame fell hissing to the ground as Woody moved closer to the position.

He moved toward the first pillbox pumping the flame toward the front of the structure. Sometimes 50 feet of sand covered the top of the pillbox, so direct hits from above would not do much—only the flame could silence it. As soon as he took up his position, his protection force diverted their fire from the pillbox to avoid hitting Woody. They refocused firing at other emplacements to the right and left of the assaulted pillbox in order to suppress the enfilading fire from those positions that could kill Woody. Each man knew his role and followed through. “We were Marines,” Woody said, “and thus, we simply told each other what we needed to get done and then we got it done. Although I didn’t know the men sent with me… I knew I could depend on them.”

When he “got up to within a dozen yards of the first one,” he “emptied his flamethrower.” As Woody turned the first pillbox into a burning oven, the acrid smell of burnt flesh and spent ammunition filled the air. Some Marines hated the Japanese so much they described the smell of “roasting flesh” as “the sweetest that they had ever smelled.”

Ignited ammunition in the pillbox created a raucous noise from multiple small explosions. According to one report, Woody blew up at least two pillboxes with demolition charges, so in this case, he would have had to remove his tanks, take up a pole charge that he had brought with him and return to the pillbox he had torched and then stick the C2 explosives on the end of the long wooden pole into the pillbox’s opening and blow it sky high. Woody stuck pole-charges “through narrow openings of emplacements” of the pillboxes he attacked on four occasions. During two of them, two of the charges failed to explode, so he worked his way back to the pillboxes and “squirted flame into [them],” meaning he had to again strap the tanks that still had enough mixture remaining or obtain new tanks and then re-engage the structure.

Woody emptied his tanks on the first bunker, which probably held two to four men, and then used his pole-charge against it, leaving it a smoking, crumbled structure. He then most likely hit the ground and crawled back to his lines, all while his protection force covered his escape. Once past his lines and in a secure zone, Woody stood up and ran back to his supply area. He checked his gear and then hoisted a new flamethrower onto his back to go out yet again for the second enemy position, accompanied by his security detail. While resupplying, his security men remained in place on the line, awaiting his return.

After gearing back up, Woody and his Marines neared the second target, and as they did so, the Japanese sprayed the area with machinegun and rifle fire. Around the pillboxes, Japanese popped up from tunnels or oil drums hidden in the earth and fired or lobbed grenades at the surprised Marines. It was a haunted house-like defense, with enemy around the pillboxes appearing suddenly from nowhere. Woody said, “the Japanese would disappear as soon as you thought you had them. They were fighting a totally different way than on Guam. There I could see my enemy, here they were phantoms. At least I knew if I could get close to the pillbox, there were enemy in there to kill because they never stopped firing at us.” Like mist on a mirror, often the Marines got a glimpse of Japanese soldiers before they vanished underground, using caves and tunnels like gophers or prairie dogs.

“The defender” here clearly had the “advantage: [T]he ground he” occupied was “better known to him” than it was to the attacking Marines “in the same way as a man can find his way around his own room in the dark more easily than can a stranger. He can find and round up all the component parts of his forces more quickly than can his assailant” as military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz notes. Regardless, the Marines continued to move forward, often stumbling.

When Woody crawled into position to take out the second pillbox, he said a group conducted a Banzai, targeting him. They knew why he was there and were determined to kill him before he took out another emplacement. They probably witnessed what had happened to their comrades in the first pillbox and wanted to spare their remaining comrades a similar fate. Seeing them charge, Woody turned his flamethrower, spraying fire on them. They were unable to fire a single bullet at Woody before the flame hit. Woody remembers, “They went from running full speed at me to almost slow motion. Once that flame lapped them up, they seemed to freeze. Their clothes were on fire and they just fell.” In 1966, Woody claimed there were three men in this charge, but in interviews with the WWII Museum and with this study, he has often claimed there were five to six. Even if only three screaming, determined Japanese charged him, that charge was sufficient to make anyone’s hair stand on end. Woody responded to this counterattack of men who probably had escaped their bunker through sally ports. Dashiell reported Woody having explained that his “flamethrower stopped frantic Japs who ran out of their hiding places and tried to get him with rifles, bayonets, and grenades.”

In this chaos, as the dead Japanese lay in a haze of blazing fluid, Woody returned his attention to the second pillbox and pumped his flame into it until once again the familiar nauseating smell of burning flesh permeated the air.

The third fortification he had to take out was far larger than the first and second pillboxes he had just destroyed. It was a sizable concrete structure with several Japanese manning it. Discarding his fuel tanks after destroying the second complex (and possibly also blowing it up with a pole-charge), Woody returned to headquarters’ supply to get another flamethrower.

Was Woody scared? “At first! After that you don’t care anymore. You don’t give a darn whether you get hit or not. Just keep moving… or rather stumbling forward….” Fatalism and indifference replaced his fear, allowing cool thinking and quick reaction.

Hatred of the enemy was also a motivator. A lot of Japanese soldiers tried to kill Woody; he had fought off Banzai attacks, witnessed the Japanese desecration of corpses and, most importantly, had seen his buddies wounded or killed. Woody said, “I suppose the only thing that kept us going was the incentive to avenge the loss of our buddies [who] were killed. After a while you’d feel there was only one thing you wanted to do in the world. To get the guy [who] got your buddy.”

In the midst of this chaos, Woody strapped on his third backpack of tanks, grabbed his 15-pound wand, turned toward the pillboxes, and returned to the storm of battle. In this section of the island, there was no solid ground, it had been pulverized into gravel and sand. It made for unsteady footing as he ran. Everywhere, the growl of missiles, mortars and shells pierced the air.

Nearing the large blockhouse, which was probably around 300- to 500-square feet and buried in a sand dune, Woody could not get a good line of fire. Destroyed and badly damaged large and small vegetation lay everywhere, obstructing his approach. He preserved. This enemy blockhouse was Woody’s main objective because it was the “one really giving us fits.” Supporting Marines fired away at the eight-inch-wide slits sitting four feet high along the face of the pillbox. The Japanese inside laid down murderous fire against those in sight, and Woody, with large metal tanks strapped to his body, was their obvious focus.

Woody studied the Japanese fortification and looked around the area to see what approach he should take, when he noticed smoke curling out of a pipe on top of the structure, most likely coming from weapons smoke or debris being drawn in by the suction of air caused by the explosions.

Woody saw several rifles and one Nambu machinegun firing from the pillbox’s frontal slit. He remembers rounds striking his fuel tanks and ricocheting off the metal skin as he tried to approach the structure. “The bullets coming off my tanks sounded like a jackhammer.” He moved forward with an oddly crab-like gait and the Japanese gunner could not depress his machinegun any lower to hit him. Woody had maneuvered himself out of the field of fire. “Had I gone the other way, he would’ve zeroed in on me and killed me.” Also, while here, “a number of grenades thrown by the enemy” landed near Woody but did not reach him.

According to some reports, Woody tried several times to get flames into the pillbox, perhaps using the wall of fire he projected partly as a screen and partly as an offensive weapon. The larger structures the Japanese had built often had burn alleys inside the structures to divert the flame away from the men and to house defensive chambers to protect them when hit by fire. The Japanese knew the Marines attacked with flamethrowers, so they engineered responses to this weapon and this pillbox probably had such characteristics, making Woody’s job even more challenging. According to one witness, Woody used two, possibly three flamethrowers since he “had a hell of a time with” this massive bunker. In the initial attack, Woody did not have success. He had worked himself into a fury trying to dispose of the threat. Frustrated and determined, Woody decided to perform a maneuver for which he had never trained and that most people would never attempt.

As the Japanese directed massive fire against the lines where Woody fought, Woody zigzagged toward the pillbox. In response, the Japanese threw grenades to push him back. He worked his way to the rear of the pillbox. Then, to the amazement of everyone, Woody climbed up the side of the pillbox onto its roof. Once on top, Woody found the ventilation pipe he had spotted earlier. The aperture was the same circumference as the nozzle on his wand, so he stuck the tip into the pipe and pulled the trigger, unleashing a firestorm into the bunker. He said he heard “the flames rushing down the pipe and spilling out with a roar as they reached the greater air volume inside.” The whole structure erupted into flames as tongues of fire shot out from inside the compound. Those not killed by the searing heat died soon thereafter due to the inferno sucking up the oxygen, suffocating them.

While Woody stood atop the bunker pumping the structure with the flaming diesel and gas mixture, it seemed like the whole battlefield reached a fever pitch of violence and gunfire, yet somehow no bullet hit him. After he was sure everyone in the bunker was dead, Woody crawled off its roof, and worked his way back to retrieve another flamethrower. As he left the structure, a mortar round landed and exploded near him, but Woody escaped harm again. He was constantly moving so that the Japanese could not home in on him. The mortars landing around him were probably intended to bracket Woody so they could kill him, yet they failed to do so.

To appreciate Woody’s heroism, one must consider the environment in which he found himself. While attacking this structure, he heard thousands of rounds of gun fire, much of it directed at him. Every few seconds, artillery or mortar rounds exploded. Airplanes dropped their ordnance on and strafed enemy positions. Ships fired at targets far enough from the Marines that the shells would not hit them. Antiaircraft guns defended the fleet from attacking Kamikazes, sending columns of fire to the heavens. Wounded screamed in pain calling for corpsmen, friends, God, and mothers. The howls of desperation rebounded throughout the landscape. Others passed information by yelling instructions over the din of battle. As Woody explained, “Few can truly comprehend the absolute terror and chaos of war.” As any combat veteran knows, the sound of even a small group firing weapons and taking fire with mortars and artillery in the background is overpowering. The movies and TV never get this right. In such an unforgiving environment with the loudest tumult one can imagine, Woody remained focused for hours while he strategized the best way to silence concrete monsters blocking his company’s advance. Unlike situations where a combatant goes into a fervid rage or focused trance, Woody’s feats manifested an ability to think clearly under protracted and acute stress.

By now, Woody’s uniform was dripping with sweat, his legs burned from exhaustion, and he became almost blinded from the flames that spewed from his weapon. He was moving and crawling to his next targets based solely on second-nature impulses. Woody had already spent hours with the flamethrower in hazardous duty, but he never allowed himself to think he would not survive. He was lucky, because the life expectancy of most flamethrowers was measured in minutes, not hours or days. The after-action report for Battalion Landing Team 2/21 stated that the casualty rate for flamethrower operators was 92%, but there was no question the weapon was valuable and necessary to destroy emplacements and neutralize caves.

Through all of this, Woody persevered. He tempted fate and won. He would fight on for almost 30 more days and was one of the few in his company who would survive without any major wounds. President Harry S. Truman would reward him the Medal of Honor for the day when he took out pillboxes for his unit. Interestingly, the Medal of Honor was almost not given to him because Woody's chain of command at some of the highest levels; namely, Fleet Marine Force commander, Lt. General Roy S. Geiger, and Pacific Theatre commander, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and both their boards, had troubles with the evidence submitted. They had a difficult time verifying many of Woody's acts. Even Woody's own platoon commander, Lt. Howard Chambers, refused to endorse Woody causing further complications. In the end, under political pressure from the White House, the medal package was shockingly pulled away from Geiger and Nimitz and fast tracked through the halls of power and the rest is history as they say. To learn more about Woody, the Pacific War and Iwo Jima, see: Flamethrower: Iwo Jima Medal of Honor Recipient and U.S. Marine Woody Williams and His Controversial Award, Japan's Holocaust and the Pacific War: Bryan Mark Rigg: 9781734534108: Amazon.com: Books

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