“The Marine They Rejected: How a 5-Foot Hero Destroyed 7 Japanese Fortresses in Just 4 Hours”
At 10:23 on the morning of February 23, 1945, Corporal Hershel “Woody” Williams lay face down in the suffocating black volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. He was 40 yards away from a Japanese pillbox that had systematically slaughtered nine Marines in the previous two hours. The air was thick with the smell of sulfur and the metallic tang of blood. Above the roar of mortar fire, his company commander’s voice echoed in his mind: “Do you think you could do anything with that flamethrower?”
Woody was 21 years old, stood 5’6” tall, and weighed barely 150 pounds. Three years earlier, a recruiting sergeant in West Virginia had laughed at him, pointing to a height chart and telling him he was too short to be a Marine. Now, that same Marine Corps was asking the “little guy” to do what Sherman tanks, artillery, and three elite demolition teams had died trying to accomplish.
The Concrete Tomb
The obstacle was a Japanese Type 92 heavy machine gun nestled inside a reinforced concrete bunker. The walls were four feet thick, and the firing slit was a mere eight inches tall—just wide enough to spit death, but too narrow for a grenade to enter. Captain Donald Beck’s company was being bled dry. He needed those pillboxes gone, or his men would become permanent fixtures of this island 660 miles from Tokyo.
Woody’s answer was simple: “I’ll try.”
He chose four riflemen to provide covering fire, including Corporal Warren Bornholz and PFC Charles Fischer. Their task was to keep the Japanese gunners’ heads down for the seconds it would take Woody to sprint across the open “killing flat.”
The Weapon of Hell
The M2-2 flamethrower was a monster of a weapon. It consisted of two tanks holding 4.5 gallons of thickened napalm and a third tank of compressed nitrogen. Fully loaded, it weighed 70 pounds—nearly half of Woody’s body weight. In boot camp, peers joked he would tip over backward. In combat, flamethrower operators were known as “four-second men,” because that was their average life expectancy once they drew the enemy’s attention.
Woody began to crawl. Bornholz and Fischer opened up with their M1 Garands. Ping. Reload. Ping. Woody covered ten yards in the pauses. Bullets kicked up ash inches from his face. A round struck his fuel tank with a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil. The tank held. The napalm didn’t ignite.
At 20 yards, Woody rose to one knee. He aimed the long metal wand at the eight-inch slit and squeezed the trigger. A jet of liquid fire, burning at 2,000 degrees, roared through the concrete opening. The screaming inside lasted three seconds. Then, silence.
One down. Six to go.
The Four-Hour Marathon
Over the next four hours, Woody Williams performed a feat of endurance that defied human logic. Because the M2 only held enough fuel for a few long bursts, Woody had to sprint 80 yards back to the supply lines, strap on a fresh 70-pound unit, and charge back into the fray. He did this six times.
The Second Bunker: Woody noticed a wisp of smoke rising from the top of the concrete—a ventilation pipe. He crawled to the side of the bunker, out of the gunner’s view, and climbed onto the roof. He inserted the flamethrower nozzle directly into the pipe and pulled the trigger. He literally burned the bunker from the inside out.
The Interlocking Fire: The fourth and fifth pillboxes were designed to protect each other. If you attacked one, the other would cut you down. Woody realized that a straight approach was suicide. He began to run in a wild, unpredictable zigzag. The Japanese gunners, trained to track linear motion, couldn’t lead their shots correctly. Woody dove into a shell crater, waited for the reload rhythm, and then sprinted to the firing slit of the fourth bunker, neutralizing it at point-blank range.
The Seventh Fortress
By 1:47 p.m., Woody was on his final tank. His shoulders were raw and bleeding where the straps had chewed through his dungarees. His vision was blurred from exhaustion and the heat of the napalm. The seventh pillbox was the command center—walls five feet thick, reinforced with steel.
The Japanese gunner inside had watched Woody all morning. He knew the “Shorty” was coming. As Woody rose to fire, the machine gun barrel swung toward his chest. Woody was faster. He unleashed the last three seconds of his fuel. The stream hit the ammunition storage at the back of the bunker. A massive secondary explosion blew the concrete roof clean off.
When the smoke cleared, Woody Williams was the only thing standing. Seven pillboxes. Four hours. One rejected Marine.
The Medal and the Ghosts
On October 5, 1945, President Harry Truman stood on the lawn of the White House and placed the Medal of Honor around Woody’s neck. Truman whispered, “I would rather have this medal than be President.”
But the victory came with a hollow core. Woody soon learned that of the four men who had covered him that morning, two—Bornholz and Fischer—had been killed later in the battle. For the rest of his life, Woody insisted the medal didn’t belong to him. “I am just the caretaker of it,” he would say. “I wear it for the boys who didn’t come home.”
The war followed him back to West Virginia. For 17 years, Woody fought the “silent war.” He woke up screaming, smelling burning diesel in his dreams. He drank to forget the faces he had seen through the firing slits.
A Legacy of Peace
Woody’s life took a turn in 1962 when he found faith and quit drinking. He spent the next 60 years serving others. He worked for the Veterans Administration, helping thousands of soldiers get the benefits they deserved. In his 80s, he founded the Woody Williams Foundation to honor “Gold Star Families”—those who lost a loved one in combat.
Even in his 90s, Woody was on the road 200 days a year, dedicating memorials across all 50 states. He wanted to ensure that the sacrifice of men like Bornholz and Fischer was never forgotten.
On June 29, 2022, Hershel “Woody” Williams died at the age of 98. He was the last living Medal of Honor recipient from World War II.
Final Reflection
The recruiting sergeant in Charleston who told Woody he was “too short to serve” was never identified. He never knew that the 5’6″ farm boy would become a legend. He never knew that the U.S. Navy would eventually name a 784-foot-long massive warship, the USS Hershel “Woody” Williams, after him.
Woody Williams proved that courage isn’t measured in inches, and a man’s worth isn’t determined by a height chart. He was a small man who cast a shadow that covered an entire nation.
