Medal of Honor recipient Woody Williams dies

Jun. 30—Somebody's gotta take out those pillboxes.

That's what the officer said, as he spied the smoke from the machine-gunners dug into the rock and sand.

See 'em ? They're right there. We gotta get 'em.

It was Feb. 23, 1945, on a jut of volcanic land poking out of the ocean some 600 miles south of Tokyo. Iwo Jima. "Sulphur Island, " in Japanese.

The machine-gunners hunkered down in those boxes, carved into the rock of the very island, were deadly with their aim.

If a Marine so much as twitched, bullets would burst from that rock and American blood would stain the sand.

Again.

The battle for Iwo Jima would turn out to be one of the bloodiest of World War II. It would also generate of the most enduring, iconic images of the war.

A couple of hours before that officer pointed out that pillbox and said, "We gotta get 'em, " Joe Rosenthal was getting five Marines and a medic into his viewfinder.

He was the Associated Press photographer who snapped that image of the above-quintet raising the American flag on the island.

The War Department quickly co-opted that snap, making it the ultimate photo-op for the battle of hearts and minds in the war effort—both for the people back home and the soldiers still mired in the fighting, from Europe to the Pacific.

Won't be long now, that photograph seemed to say.

But nobody bothered telling the other side.

With their bullets doing the talking, the original occupiers of the island, it could be said, didn't give a rip about Rosenthal's photograph.

We gotta get 'em.

After a beat or two, Herschel "Woody " Williams, a little Marine from Quiet Dell, Marion County, who was initially told he was too short for war, shouldered the 70-pound flamethrower he carried to the island.

"I'll try."

He would be recognized with the Medal of Honor for what happened next.

Life of service Williams died Wednesday morning at the age of 98 in a Huntington VA hospital that bears his name.

He made a career with the Veterans Administration after hanging up his uniform. He helped soldiers and their families with benefits, widow pensions and the like.

He knew who to call and how to fill out the paperwork. It was the least he could do, he said.

He grew up on his family's dairy farm. He was like a lot of Depression-era kids—he worked for everything he got.

When the war broke out, Williams wasn't in the Mountain State. He was in Montana as a worker in Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, which was a pretty heady journey for a kid who hardly ever got out of north-central West Virginia.

In 1942, the first time he tried to enlist, he was told his 5-foot-6 frame was too short for the military. So he drove a taxi in Fairmont and kept time with a pretty girl named Ruby Meredith.

He had just asked her marry him when the Marines reduced the height requirement.

"I didn't want to marry with the war on, " he said. "Sometimes guys who go don't come back."

When he came back, he didn't let Ruby know he was in town. He knocked on her door. She didn't say anything. She blinked back tears and opened her arms for an embrace. They stayed that way for a long time. When she died in 1984, Woody and his daughters sprinkled her ashes on their farm in Cabell County.

One of those daughters, Tracie Williams, always wondered why her dad was so popular at parades. Everybody wanted to shake his hand, it seemed.

"We always thought he was big deal for being our dad, " she said. "We never knew he was a war hero. He never talked about it."

'Greatest' roll call Meanwhile, the battle for Iwo Jima shows the sheer magnitude of the war and the staggering numbers attached to its campaigns.

Some 70, 000 Marines and 22, 000 Japanese soldiers pummeled each other on the island for 36-straight days.

That's a lot of humanity on a relatively small expanse. Morgantown is comprised of 10.1 square miles. Iwo Jima has eight.

The island can also serve as a reminder that war really is hell. Close to 7, 000 Marines died in the fighting there, and more than 19, 000 were wounded.

Just 216 Japanese soldiers lived to tell about it. Accounts of ritual suicides, however, quickly became known, as the original occupying soldiers realized the island was going to be lost to the Americans after all.

"Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, " wrote Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, who commanded the Pacific fleet, "uncommon valor was a common virtue."

Williams was the last-surviving Medal of Honor recipient from World War II.

President Harry Truman bestowed the medal in a somber ceremony in the Rose Garden, just scant weeks after the Marines secured the island.

Williams wore it for parades and other military observances, and if anyone asked, he politely directed them to online sites carrying the citation for his actions of Feb. 23, 1945.

Then, he'd talk about his fellow Marines.

Especially his buddy, Doral Lee, a big kid from Minnesota.

That day on Iwo "I'll try."

Two other Marines quickly volunteered to flank him as he charged the pillboxes. With two tanks of jellied gasoline resting on both shoulder blades, Woody's war was fought standing straight up. He couldn't maneuver otherwise.

The first two Marines were shot dead in the seconds it took for them to dig their heels into the porous sand.

Just as quickly, Doral and another stepped up.

"Stay with me, Woody, " Doral said, as the trio zigzagged the mountain.

Bullets pinging off the flamethrower's tanks. If they go—that's it.

A sideway-shimmy to the blind spot of the first pillbox. Laying on the trigger and not letting up until the machine gun inside is silenced.

Doral, yelling something Woody can't hear, in this movie that's sped-up, and in slow motion, all at once.

Heart pounding like the pistons of a V-8 Ford, mixed with muffled screams from within, as he jams the flamethrower's nozzle down an air vent of another pillbox.

Wrenching eye contact as he opens up on the four or five enemy soldiers who charged, incinerating them instantly.

War and Peace He was on the side of that mountain four hours that day.

A lot of the details, he can't really remember.

He knows them only from the citation, which, according to military protocol, is written by an overseeing officer from eyewitness accounts.

Like all those shell casings in the black sand there, his brain buried most of his memories from Iwo Jima.

That's what he said on a sunny afternoon in Fairmont in 2012 when a person with a notebook asked him about it.

Williams was in town to help the state National Guard dedicate a new armory in his name.

He spoke Doral's name that day, while acknowledging all the soldiers from his generation. He thanked the men and women now wearing the uniform for their service in America's war on terror.

And he asked that people not to refer to the recognition he received as "his " medal.

"This doesn't belong to me, " he said. "It belongs to all of them. I'm just the caretaker."

His brain, he said, did him a favor by burying the emotional trauma.

"I can tell you I was scared the whole time, " he said.

"I used to read that citation and say, 'Who was that guy ? Was that me ?'"

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