Last U.S. Medal of Honor recipient from WWII dies at 98
29/06/2022 22:01
By Rich McKay
June 29 (Reuters) - At the height of World War Two,
18-year-old Hershel "Woody" Williams tried to join the U.S.
Marine Corps, but a recruiter told the 5-foot-6 dairy farmer:
"Go home, you're too short."
The height requirement soon changed, according to a
foundation named for Williams, who joined the Marines and went
on to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor after
single-handedly taking out a series of Japanese positions in the
bloodiest battles on Iwo Jima. Williams died Wednesday at 98
years old.
Williams, the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient from
World War Two, died at a hospital in his home state of West
Virginia, according to the U.S. military and the Woody Williams
Foundation, a nonprofit serving military families.
“Today, America lost not just a valiant Marine and a Medal
of Honor recipient, but an important link to our Nation’s fight
against tyranny in the Second World War," U.S. Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement Wednesday.
In 2017, the U.S. Navy christened the USS Hershel "Woody"
Williams, an expeditionary mobile base.
The 1945 battle for the strategic island of Iwo Jima took
the lives of 7,000 Marines. When he hit Iwo Jima's black sands,
Williams crawled through piles of dead Marines wrapped in their
ponchos and the wreckage of destroyed U.S. tanks to find his
company facing the enemy with nothing but bomb craters for
cover, according to a 2021 profile of Williams in the Tennessean
newspaper.
After the war he worked for what is now the Department of
Veterans Affairs for more than 30 years and later established
his foundation. He also ran a horse farm in West Virginia.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; editing by Donna Bryson
and David Gregorio)
((rich.mckay@thomsonreuters.com;))