When 3 Japanese Charged This American With Bayonets — He Burned Them All in 7 Seconds JJ

At 0815 on February 23rd, 1945, machine gunfire rad the black volcanic sand of Eoima. Corporal Hershel Williams pressed flat against it. 70 lb of pressurized fuel on his back, rounds splitting the air a foot above his helmet. 21 years old, 5’6, trained on Guadal Canal with a weapon most Marines refused to carry. 21,000 Japanese soldiers were entrenched in 11 mi of concrete tunnels beneath the island. 4 days earlier, 30,000 Marines had stormed the beaches. By nightfall, 2400 were dead or wounded. The black volcanic sand

swallowed boots and tank treads. Men sank kneedeep trying to advance. Sherman tanks ground to a halt on terraces too steep to climb. Progress across the island was measured in yards, and every yard caused blood. Lieutenant General Tatamichi Kuribayashi had spent 12 months turning 8 square miles of volcanic rock into a fortress. His engineers poured concrete pill boxes with walls 4 ft thick, connected them through tunnels, and positioned machine guns in interlocking fields of fire. Every meter of open ground fell inside

overlapping kill zones. Mortar spotters on Mount Surbachi’s 550 ft summit called fire onto anything that moved. The standard American tactic was Sherman tanks against fortified positions. On Ewima, it failed. Black sand bogged down 33ton Shermans. Buried mines shattered their treads. When a tank did reach a pillbox, its 75mm gun cracked the concrete but could not collapse the structure. Japanese gunners inside survived, waited for the tank to roll past, and reopened fire on the infantry behind it. Eight flamethrower tanks,

modified Shermans, the Marines called Zippos, had landed on the first day. The same terrain that stopped regular armor stopped the Zippos. Volcanic sand, mines, and grades too steep for treads kept them from closing the distance. That left one weapon, a man with a portable M2-2 flamethrower. 7 seconds of continuous flame. Effective range 20 to 40 m. The operator had to cross open ground under direct fire, reach the pillbox, find an aperture, and squeeze the trigger before those 7 seconds ran dry. The Japanese targeted flamethrower

operators on site. One round through the pressurized nitrogen tank could rupture it and send the operator flying. On Euima, flamethrower men measured their survival in minutes, not hours. By that morning, the same morning six Marines raised the American flag on Mount Surbachi a thousand yards to the south. Williams company had ground to a complete stop. A network of mutually supporting pill boxes poured machine gunfire from every angle. Infantry pinned, tanks stuck. Five members of William’s six-man demolition team were

dead or wounded. His company commander needed someone to go forward with a flamethrower and burn those positions out one by one. Williams volunteered. Two years earlier, a Marine recruiter in West Virginia had looked at Williams, 5’6, a dairy farmer’s youngest son from Quiet Dell, and rejected him. Too short. The core had a minimum height requirement. Williams went back to driving taxis and hauling lumber. In 1943, the Marines lowered the standard. Williams enlisted the same month. They

trained him at San Diego, shipped him to Guadal Canal, then assigned him to demolitions and flamethrowers with the 21st Marines, Third Marine Division. He saw his first combat on Guam in the summer of 44. Now he was the last flamethrower operator his company had left. Seven reinforced concrete pill boxes stood between his unit and their objective. Seven bunkers, four riflemen, one flamethrower operator with 7 seconds of fuel. If you want to know how this ends, please like this video. It helps more people find these stories. Please

subscribe. Back to Williams. Williams strapped a fully loaded M2-2 onto his back just before 0900. Four riflemen stepped forward to cover him. Between Williams and the first pillbox lay 40 m of open volcanic sand, zero cover. a Japanese machine gun crew that had been killing Marines since dawn. He had 7 seconds of flame, six more flamethrowers waiting back at the company line, and four hours of daylight ahead. If his fuel reached the firing slit, the men inside would die. If it fell short, Williams would never make it back to

reload. The M2-2 flamethrower was not a precision weapon. Two steel cylinders on the operator’s back held thickened gasoline, a crude napal mix of fuel and gel. A smaller bottle between them contained compressed nitrogen at 300 lb per square in. When the operator squeezed the rear trigger, nitrogen forced fuel through a rubber hose into the flame gun. A spring-loaded igniter cartridge at the nozzle sparked the stream. What came out was a rope of burning gel that stuck to concrete, steel, and skin. It burned at nearly

2,000°. It consumed all available oxygen inside an enclosed space within seconds. But the weapon had a critical flaw. The operator had to be close. Not 50 m, not 30. He needed to reach the aperture of a pillbox, the narrow firing slit where the machine gun protruded, and pushed the nozzle almost inside before pulling the trigger. At that distance, every Japanese defender behind that slit could see his face. Williams four-man cover team consisted of riflemen armed with M1 Garands. Their job was simple and nearly suicidal. They

would fire at the pillbox apertures to force the Japanese gunners to duck. Each burst of suppressive fire bought Williams one to two seconds of movement. He would advance in short rushes, dropping flat between bursts, crawling the final stretch on his stomach with the fuel tanks grinding against volcanic rock above him. The terrain offered nothing. No trees, no craters deep enough to shelter a man with twin fuel tanks rising above his shoulders. Between the company line and the first Japanese position lay a field of loose

black cinder, it absorbed sound, swallowed footing, and radiated heat that shimmered the air at ground level. The pillboxes sat in a staggered pattern, each covering the approaches to the others. Knock out one, and the next had a clear shot at anyone still standing in the open. Williams could not attack them in a straight line. He would need to circle wide, approach from the flanks or rear where the firing slits could not track him, and find the ventilation pipes or rear openings that every bunker required to prevent its own

gunm smoke from suffocating the crew inside. Each approach meant crossing a different stretch of open ground. Each return to the company line for a fresh flamethrower meant crossing it again. The four riflemen spread into a loose arc ahead of him, two positioned on the left, two on the right. They began firing into the nearest aperture at a cycled rate, eight rounds per clip. Reload eight more. The noise was constant. Brass casings clinkedked against the volcanic sand. Williams rose from the shell crater and ran. The first

10 m were the worst. His boots broke through the top crust of cinder and sank 3 in with every step. The fuel tanks shifted on his back, pulling his center of gravity high and rearward. A burst of machine gun fire kicked sand two feet to his left. He dropped flat. The rifleman poured another volley into the slit. Williams pushed forward on elbows and knees, dragging the flame gun beside him. At 15 m, he could see the aperture clearly. A dark horizontal slot in gray concrete, no wider than a man’s forearm.

Muzzle flash flickered inside. Sand sprayed across his helmet. He kept crawling. At 0914, roughly 10 meters from the slit, he rose to one knee, braced the flame gun against his hip, and aimed the nozzle at the dark opening. Nitrogen hissed through the valve. The igniter cartridge cracked. A jet of burning napal arked across the remaining distance and hit the concrete face of the pillbox just below the aperture. Gel splashed upward, curled over the lip, and poured inside. The machine gun went silent in under 3

seconds. The first pillbox was dead. It was 0919. Williams had used nearly a full tank on a single position. Six remained, and his cover team had already taken fire from the next imp placement, 80 m to the northeast. Williams crawled back to the company line with an empty flamethrower on his back. The return trip covered the same 40 m of open ground, but now the Japanese knew exactly where he was. Machine gun fire from the second pillbox tracked his movement. His cover team shifted fire to the new aperture. Two of

the four riflemen were already bleeding from shrapnel wounds. They kept shooting. At the company line, Williams unstrapped the spent M2-2 and grabbed a freshly serviced unit. A demolition man from another squad had prepared it. Fuel tanks topped off, nitrogen pressurized, igniter cartridge loaded. The swap took less than 90 seconds. Williams buckled the straps, adjusted the hip belt to balance the weight across his shoulders, and turned back toward the second pillbox. This one sat 80 m northeast of

the first. Its firing slit faced south, directly at the route Williams had used minutes earlier. A frontal approach was suicide. He needed the blind side. Williams circled wide to the right, moving in a low crouch across a shallow depression in the volcanic field. The depression gave him perhaps 18 in of cover, enough to hide his body, but not the fuel tanks rising above his back. He moved fast. Rifle fire cracked overhead. His cover team was engaging from a different angle now, trying to draw the

gunner’s attention away from William’s flanking route. He reached the rear of the second pillbox and found what he was looking for. A vertical pipe 4 in in diameter protruding from the concrete roof. Every Japanese bunker on Euoima needed ventilation. Gunm smoke, carbon monoxide, and heat from sustained firing would kill the crew faster than any American weapon if the air inside went stagnant. The vent pipe was the bunker’s lung. At 0941, Williams climbed onto the low concrete roof. The structure rose

barely 3 ft above ground level. The Japanese had buried most of it beneath volcanic sand and rubble. He positioned himself beside the vent pipe, tilted the nozzle downward, and inserted it directly into the opening. One squeeze of the trigger sent burning nap straight into the interior. The vent pipe became a chimney in reverse. Flame and superheated gas filled the space below in seconds. No one inside survived. Two down, five to go. Williams slid off the roof and started back for his third flamethrower. The pattern was

establishing itself. cross open ground, find the blind spot, burn, return, reload, cross again. Each round trip cost him roughly 25 minutes. Five to reach the position, seconds to fire, five to return, 90 seconds to swap equipment, and the rest navigating terrain and suppressive fire. The math was relentless. Seven pill boxes at this rate meant nearly 4 hours under continuous enemy fire. The third pillbox sat 40 m west of the second, dug into a low ridge. Its aperture covered a wide arc of the company’s front. Williams

approached from the left flank this time, using a shallow fold in the ground that angled toward the position’s blind side. Halfway there, a burst of fire from a position he had not yet identified, a fourth pillbox further north ripped across the sand in front of him. He dropped flat. The rounds passed close enough to spray volcanic grit across his face and arms. His cover team could not suppress two positions simultaneously. Four riflemen, two of them wounded, could keep one aperture busy. They could not keep two. Williams

lay motionless in the open. It was 10:08. Survivors later estimated he stayed there for nearly 2 minutes. The northern pillbox shifted fire toward the riflemen. The instant its tracers swung away, Williams pushed forward on his elbows, reached the third bunker’s flank, and fired a full burst into the rear opening. Three bunkers silenced, three flamethrowers spent. His cover team was down to three effective rifles. Four Japanese positions still poured fire across the company’s front, and

Williams was beginning to understand something about the layout. Each pillbox he destroyed revealed the next one’s location by the direction of its fire. The fourth pillbox was the one that had nearly killed him minutes earlier. It sat on a slight rise 70 m north of the third with a firing arc that covered nearly 180° of open ground. Its machine gun crew had been engaging Marines along the entire company front for hours. This was the position that had pinned the advance since morning. Williams

collected his fourth flamethrower. By now, the routine at the company line had its own grim rhythm. Unstrap, drop the spent unit, grab the fresh one, check the nitrogen gauge, confirm the igniter cartridge, buckle in, and go. The men servicing the flamethrowers worked fast. They knew every minute Williams spent reloading was a minute the company stayed pinned. The approach to the fourth bunker offered no flanking route. The rise it sat on gave the Japanese gunners clear sightelines in every direction. No shallow depressions, no

folds in the terrain. Williams would have to go nearly straight at it. His three remaining cover riflemen opened fire from different positions this time, spreading out to create the illusion of a larger force. Williams moved in short bursts. 3 seconds upright, then flat on the sand, then three more seconds. Machine gun rounds cut the air at knee height. The Japanese crew was firing low, trying to catch him in the gaps between rushes. At roughly 20 m, Williams found a slight dip in the ground, barely a foot deep, just enough

to shelter behind if he pressed his face into the sand. He paused there, calculating. The aperture was narrow, facing him directly. No vent pipe was visible from his angle. He would have to put the flame stream straight through the firing slit from the front. He rose, ran 5 m, dropped to one knee, and fired. The burning gel hit the left edge of the aperture, splashed inward. A second burst followed immediately. Williams held the trigger longer than usual, spending nearly the full tank in two sustained streams. The machine gun fell

silent. Smoke poured from the slit. Four down. Williams turned back toward the company line. He had been under fire for over two hours. At 11:06, on the way back, it happened. Three Japanese riflemen emerged from a concealed position to his right, a spider hole camouflaged with sand and debris. They came at him with fixed bayonets. No warning, no gunfire, just three men sprinting across 15 meters of open ground with steel blades pointed at a man who could not run. Williams swung the flame gun and pulled the trigger.

The M2-2 was nearly empty, but enough fuel remained for one short burst. The stream caught all three soldiers at close range. The napalm gel ignited their uniforms and consumed the oxygen around them before they could close the distance. They fell within 5 m of Williams. He reached the company line, swapped to his fifth flamethrower, and went back out. The fifth pill box sat southeast of the fourth, partially buried under a mound of volcanic rubble. Its aperture was barely visible, a slit no wider than a hand angled downward to

cover approaching infantry at ground level. William circled to the rear, located the vent pipe, and repeated the technique that had worked on the second bunker. Nozzle into the pipe. Trigger. Fire poured downward into the sealed space. Five positions neutralized. two remained. Williams had used five of his six flamethrowers. His cover team was down to two unwounded riflemen. Other Marines from adjacent squads had begun watching from shell craters and foxholes along the company line. Word was spreading through the battalion that a

single flamethrower operator was dismantling the Japanese defensive network one bunker at a time. It was 11:53, 3 hours since Williams first left the company line. He had one fresh flamethrower left and the final two pill boxes were the deepest in the Japanese network. The ones every other position had been built to protect volcanic sand. The Japanese defensive system on Euima relied on one principle, mutual support. Each pillbox covered the approaches to its neighbors. Knock one out and the others adjusted fire to compensate.

Knock out two and the remaining positions concentrated on a narrower front. but knock out five and the geometry of the entire network collapsed. Positions that had once been shielded by overlapping fields of fire now sat exposed, their flanks open, their blind spots uncovered. Williams company commander could see it from the rear. The pattern of incoming fire had shifted. Earlier that morning, machine gun tracers had crisscrossed the company front from six directions. Now only two streams remained and both came from

positions whose flanks Williams had already stripped bare by eliminating the bunkers that had protected them. The sixth pillbox sat 35 m north of the fifth, connected to it by a shallow communications trench. The trench was partially collapsed. Days of naval bombardment had caved in sections, but it still offered the Japanese a route to reposition between bunkers without crossing open ground. Williams could not approach from the trench side. Anyone moving through that corridor would be visible to the sixth

pillbox crew at point blank range. He collected his sixth and final flamethrower. The nitrogen bottle hissed when the valve was tested. Full pressure. The igniter cartridge was fresh. This was the last tank of fuel his company could provide. If it ran dry before both remaining positions were neutralized, Williams would have to switch to demolition charges. blocks of TNT on the end of a wooden pole shoved into an aperture by hand. The range for that weapon was measured in inches, not meters. Williams moved north in a wide

arc, keeping the destroyed fifth pillbox between himself and the sixth. The smoking ruin of the bunker he had burned minutes earlier served as partial concealment, not cover, but enough visual obstruction to mask his movement from the gunslit. He reached the northeast corner of the sixth position where the concrete wall met a bank of piled volcanic rock. No vent pipe was accessible from this angle. The rear entrance, a narrow passage the Japanese used for resupply, was sealed with a steel plate. Williams pressed the nozzle

against the edge of the plate where it met the concrete frame. The gap was barely 2 in wide. He pulled the trigger. Burning gel forced through the seam, spraying liquid fire into the interior along the floor. Screams lasted seconds. The gun stopped. Six flamethrowers used. Six pill boxes destroyed. One remained. Williams was out of fuel. The M2-2 on his back was empty, but the company demolition supply still held prepared charges. cylindrical TNT packs wired to wooden poles designed to be inserted

into bunker openings and detonated. At 12:22, Williams unstrapped the spent flamethrower, grabbed a demolition charge, and moved toward the seventh position. This final pillbox was the anchor of the entire network. It sat deeper than the others, dug into a natural depression with reinforced concrete on three sides and volcanic rock on the fourth. Its aperture pointed south, covering the main avenue of approach that the company needed to advance. Every pillbox Williams had destroyed that day had been positioned

to protect this one. Without the surrounding network, the seventh bunker was alone. Its flanks were exposed. Williams approached from the west, a direction that 3 hours earlier would have put him in the crossfire of at least two other positions. Now those positions were smoking ruins. He reached the bunker’s blind side, climbed onto the low roof, and located the ventilation shaft. He lowered the demolition charge into the pipe, released it, and rolled off the structure. The detonation blew the

concrete roof inward. Dust and debris erupted from every opening. The last machine gun on the company’s front went silent. Seven pill boxes, six flamethrowers, one demolition charge. 4 hours. Williams walked back to the company line under his own power. His uniform was scorched. His hands were blistered from the heat of six consecutive flame gun discharges. Two of his four cover riflemen had been killed protecting him. Two of his four cover riflemen had been killed protecting him. At 12:31, the seventh pillbox went

silent. The company’s front opened. Marines who had been pinned flat behind volcanic ridges and in shallow craters since dawn began to move forward. The lane Williams had burned through the Japanese defensive network was narrow, barely 200 m wide, but it was enough. Infantry poured through the gap and pushed north toward the next line of enemy positions. What one marine had done on his stomach, Sherman tanks and naval bombardment had failed to achieve in 4 days. The reinforced concrete network that had stopped an entire

company was broken. His company reached its objective that afternoon for the first time since landing on the island. But Ewima was not finished with Williams. The battle lasted 36 days. Williams fought for 34 of them. Hundreds more pillboxes, tunnels, and fortified caves lay beyond the seven Williams had destroyed. On February 23rd, the Third Marine Division pushed north through terrain that grew worse with every yard. The volcanic interior was a maze of ravines, sulfur vents, and collapsed tunnels. Japanese defenders emerged from

underground passages behind American lines, attacked, and disappeared again. Every night brought infiltration. Every morning brought the same grinding advance. 50 m forward. Dig in, take fire, call for flamethrowers or demolition teams. Repeat. The same day Williams burned through seven pill boxes, Joe Rosenthal photographed six Marines from Easy Company, 28th Marines, raising the American flag on Mount Surabbachi. That image became the most reproduced photograph of the war. But the capture of Surabbachi did not end

the battle. It secured one end of the island while the deadliest fighting still lay ahead in the north. Before the war ended, more than 24,000 airmen would owe their lives to emergency landings on the island’s captured airfields. 27 medals of honor were awarded for actions on Euima, more than any other single battle in American history. 22 went to Marines. Nearly 7,000 Americans died on the island. Another 20,000 were wounded. Fewer than 220 Japanese defenders survived to become prisoners. The rest

died in their tunnels, in their pillboxes, or in the open ground between them. Williams kept fighting through all of it. On March 6th, 11 days after his one-man assault on the pillbox network, a Japanese mortar round detonated near his position. Shrapnel tore into his legs and body. Corman evacuated him to a field hospital on the beach, then to a hospital ship offshore. His war on Euima was over. He had spent 34 days on an island where the average infantrymen’s combat life expectancy was measured in

hours. Of the more than 300 flamethrower operators, the Marines deployed on Euoima, fewer than 20 survived the battle. Williams had carried the weapon for 34 days. The men who replaced his fallen teammates carried it for hours, sometimes minutes, before they too were hit. The wounds earned him a Purple Heart, but by the time he was evacuated, a different process had already begun. Williams company commander had filed an eyewitness report detailing the 4-hour assault on seven pillboxes. The surviving riflemen from his cover team

had corroborated every detail. The report moved up the chain, battalion, regiment, division, and at each level, officers recognized that what Williams had done exceeded the threshold for every decoration below the highest. The paperwork for a Medal of Honor nomination began working its way from the Third Marine Division headquarters on Guam toward Washington. Williams, recovering in a hospital bed, knew nothing about the nomination. He was not thinking about medals. He was thinking about the two riflemen. 4 hours beside

him, and he had never learned their names. That question, who were they, would follow him home from the Pacific. Williams was still recovering from his shrapna wounds on Guam when Japan surrendered in August 1945. The invasion of the Japanese home islands, the operation his unit had been training for, never happened. Two atomic bombs ended the war before the Third Marine Division could be deployed again. On October 5th, 1945, Corporal Hershel Williams stood in the East Room of the White House. President Harry Truman

placed the Medal of Honor around his neck. Williams was 22 years old. He was one of only four recipients from the battle who were alive to accept it in person. The other 18 had been awarded postumously. 12 days later, Williams married Ruby Meredith in West Virginia. The farm boy from Quietell was now the most decorated living Marine from the bloodiest battle in core history. To everyone around him, Williams looked like a man who had come home. He held a job. He showed up. He said the right things. No one saw what was underneath.

The recognition should have been a turning point. Instead, it became a wait. Williams spent the next 17 years trapped in a cycle that thousands of returning veterans experienced, but few could describe. He suffered from what military doctors now diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder. Nightmares, flashbacks. For years, he spent evenings at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, drinking to keep the memories quiet. He could not forgive himself for the lives he had taken at close range with a weapon that left

nothing recognizable behind. The killing method haunted him as much as the killing itself. The sound of pressurized nitrogen hissing through a valve, a noise identical to the M2-2 flamethrower’s firing mechanism could paralyze him in the middle of an ordinary day. The guilt was worse than the fear. Every decoration, every handshake from a general, every newspaper headline reminded him that he was alive because other men were not. He wore the Medal of Honor to every public event, but privately he carried it as

evidence of a debt he could never repay. In 1962, 17 years after Euima, Williams experienced what he later described as a religious awakening. He found the Methodist Church in Huntington, West Virginia. And for the first time since the war, the nightmares stopped. Faith did not erase the memories. It gave him a framework to carry them. He later served as national chaplain of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society for 35 years. Williams retired from the Marine Corps Reserve in 1969 with the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 4 after 20

years of total service. He spent 33 years as a veteran service representative with the Department of Veterans Affairs, counseling other combat veterans through the same darkness he had survived. He understood what they carried because he had carried it himself. The question that had haunted him since February 23rd, 1945, the names of the two riflemen killed while covering his assault was eventually answered. Williams learned their identities years after the war through Marine Corps casualty records.

He never spoke their names publicly. But from that point forward, whenever anyone asked him about the Medal of Honor, his answer never changed. The medal did not belong to him. He wore it for the Marines who never came home, especially those two. He had entered the war as a man the Marine Corps did not want. He left it as the holder of a distinction that would grow with time. Williams would eventually become the last living Medal of Honor recipient from the war. That fact would not become clear for

decades, but the road toward it through public service, gold star families, and a nation that slowly forgot the war he fought had already begun. In 2010, at the age of 87, Williams founded the Hershel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation. Its mission was singular. Build memorials honoring gold star families, the relatives of service members who had died in combat. The man who had spent decades carrying guilt for surviving when others did not now dedicated his remaining years to ensuring those others were never

forgotten. By the time of his death, the foundation had erected over 100 Gold Star family’s memorial monuments across the United States with dozens more in progress. In January 2016, the United States Navy named Expeditionary Sea Base ship 4 the USNS Hershel Woody Williams. The vessel, a floating forward staging platform displacing 90,000 tons, was commissioned in 2020 at Naval Station Norfolk. The Marine, who had been rejected for being 5’6 in tall, now had a warship bearing his name. In 2018, the

Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Huntington, West Virginia, the same facility where Williams had counseledled veterans for decades, was officially renamed the Hershel Woody Williams 5A Medical Center. That same year, William stood at midfield in Minneapolis and tossed the coin before Super Bowl 52. 14 other Medal of Honor recipients stood beside him. The youngest of 11 children from a dairy farm in Quiet Dell was 84 years old. The Medal of Honor hanging from his neck on national television. In

June 2021, Williams made his final visit to Marine Corps recruit depot Paris Island, South Carolina. He wore his dress blues. He served as honorary official for a graduation parade of 350 new Marines. Among them marching in formation was private first class Cedar Ross, his greatgrandson. Ross had earned a meritorious promotion during training. When drill instructors discovered whose blood ran in the young recruit, the chief drill instructor had told Ross he would have big shoes to fill. The shoes

belonged to a man who stood 5’6. On June 29th, 2022, Hershel Woodro Williams died at the medical center that bore his name. He was 98 years old. He was the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, the last of 473. On July 14th, his remains lay in honor at the United States Capital Rotunda. The speaker of the house noted that Williams had never been the tallest marine, but he had been a force of nature. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff attended the ceremony. His father had served as a Navy corman on

Ewima. Williams was buried in Huntington, West Virginia. His medal of honor is displayed at the Pritsker Military Museum and Library in Chicago. The Gold Star monuments he built still stand in parks and veteran cemeteries across 49 states. And somewhere in the Marine Corps casualty records from February 1945, two names remain. the riflemen who gave their lives so that one man too short for the core could burn seven pill boxes and open a path through hell. Williams wore that medal for 60 years, not for himself, for the

men who never made it off the island. If his story matters to you, hit the like button. One click tells YouTube to put this in front of someone who has never heard his name. Subscribe and turn on notifications. Every week we dig through service records and military archives looking for stories like this one. Men who carried weapons half their weight into places no tank could reach. There are more of them than you think. Drop a comment and tell us where you are watching from. United States, United

Kingdom, Canada, Australia, somewhere we have never heard of. We read every single one. If someone in your family served, tell us about them. That is what this comment section is for. Williams spent his last years building monuments so gold star families would never be forgotten. The least we can do is keep his name loud. Thank you for watching. Thank you for being here.