Herschel Williams, the last of 472 servicemen to be awarded the Medal of Honor for Outstanding Bravery in World War II and the oldest living medalist, died Wednesday in Huntington, Virginia. He was 98 years old.
His death at the Huntington Veterans Medical Center was announced by the Woody Williams Foundation.
Corporal Williams lay reclining on the black volcanic ash of Ivo Jima on the morning of February 23, 1945, when he was startled by the sounds of applause. “Suddenly the Marines around me started jumping up and down, firing their weapons in the air,” he told the Marine History Department long after. “My head was buried in the sand. Then I looked up and saw Old Glory at the top of Mount Suribachi.
The raising of a large American flag by six Marines on top of Ivo Jima, photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, became a lasting image of the American fighter in World War II.
But the battle for this Japanese-administered island and its airports about 750 miles south of Tokyo, needed by the military air force to support long-range bombing missions over Japan, was only on its fifth day when the flag was raised. The battle was just beginning for Corporal Williams, a 21-year-old Marine from West Virginia.
That afternoon, he destroyed seven Japanese pilots with flamethrowers, opening a gap that allowed Marine tanks and battleships to break through the enemy’s defenses. He moved from one chicken box to another, miraculously untouched by the intense Japanese machine-gun fire that bounced off his equipment — it sounded, as he said, like a hammer.
During his four-hour raid, in which he received supporting fire from several fellow Marines, two of whom were killed during the mission, Corporal Williams returned five times to his headquarters to receive new flamethrowers when he was supplied with diesel fuel and high octane gasoline Out of stock.
He received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for bravery, from President Harry S. Truman in October 1945. The quote states that his “unwavering determination and extraordinary heroism in the face of the enemy’s relentless resistance are a direct tool for neutralizing one of the most fanatically defended Japanese strengths encountered by his regiment.
A total of 27 Marines and Navy personnel received the medal, 14 of them posthumously, for heroism in the 36-day battle for Ivo Jima.
Decades after World War II, the Medal of Honor was awarded to more than two dozen African-American and Asian-American servicemen who took part in extraordinary military exploits but were neglected, probably as a result of racial prejudice, leading to the total number of recipients is 472.
The Medal of Honor was also awarded to an unidentified serviceman who died in World War II and another who died in the Korean War when their remains were reburied in the tomb of an unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in 1958, joining an unidentified serviceman from the First World War. world War .
Herschel Woodrow Williams, known as Woody, was born on October 2, 1923, in a small community in Quiet Dell, Virginia, of at least 11 children by Lloyd and Luren Williams. Six of his siblings died during the flu pandemic of 1918-1919.
He helped his parents run his small dairy farm; after his father died of a heart attack when Woody was 11, his brother Lloyd Jr. took over the farm with the help of the other children. He later left high school to join the Civil Corps for the Preservation of the Depression, working on projects in Montana.
As a young man, he was impressed by the blue uniforms and the keeping of some boys from his hometown on leave by the Marines. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in May 1943. He was only 5 feet and 6 inches tall, the minimum height requirement for service, and weighed only 135 pounds, but was well muscular from his work on the farm.
Corporal Williams took part in the battles of Guam a year later, after which he arrived at Ivo Jima with the 21st Marines of the Third Marine Division. When the Marines’ armored vehicles sank in an attempt to penetrate the network of Japanese defensive positions, his commander asked him if there was anything he could do to support them.
Thus began his one-man raid with flames.
He told Larry Smith about the oral story “Ivo Jima” (2008) that “you had to get closer to 20 yards from a can of boxes, with machine gun bullets kicking up.”
“Once the men came out in a pill box,” he recalls. “As they ran towards me with rifles and bayonets, they rushed straight into the fire from my flamethrower. It’s as if they just fell at a slow pace. “
Corporal Williams received a shrapnel leg wound 11 days later, but he remained with Ivo Jima until the end of the battle.
Ivo Jima was halfway to the Air Force’s B-29 bombers, which left their bases in the Mariana Islands to bomb Japan. The takeover of its summer runways gave the United States a base for fighter jets escorting bombers and provided emergency landing sites for crippled B-29s returning from their missions.
But retrieving this eight-square-mile hatching of volcanic debris was extremely expensive. More than a third of the 70,000 Marines who invaded Ivo Jima of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Marine Divisions were killed or wounded. All but one in 20,000 Japanese defenders were killed in the battle.
Mr. Williams left active military service in November 1945 and returned to his native West Virginia, where he was an adviser to the Veterans Administration. He remained in the Marine Corps as a reservist and retired as Chief Warrant Officer in 1969. His foundation raised money to provide scholarships for children who lost a parent during the war.
In March 2020, he attended a ceremony in Norfolk, Virginia, for the commissioning of the warship Hershel “Woody” Williams.
Mr. Williams’ wife, Ruby (Meredith) Williams, whom he married in 1945, died in 2007. They had two daughters, Travi Jane and Tracy Jean, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Full information about the survivors was not immediately available.
In February 2011, Mr. Williams spoke aboard the landing ship Iwo Jima in Norfolk on the 66th anniversary of the battle. “I claim to be just a medal keeper,” he said. “27 medals were awarded, but there were countless others who did so much, if not more.
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