I had been in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
That was my first experience, pre-military, if you will.
They were a little bit military.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was regulated by the Army,
but we worked in civilian jobs off the Army base.
And I had been in there for about a year and a half when Pearl Harbor happened.
And I, along with a lot of other Americans,
thought, "Well, if our country is threatened, and we're going to lose our freedom...
--then we're going to go fight."
So I requested my release from the Civilian Conservation Corps
and went home to enlist in the Marine Corps.
NARRATOR: To a young man, eager to defend his country,
the bitter fighting against the Japanese on the island of Iwo Jima...
--must have seemed a hell out of all proportion to duty.
But as a Marine demolition operator,
Corporal Hershel Williams carried with him a hell of his own:
--a terrible weapon capable of evening the odds
in one of the war's bloodiest engagements.
When we got to Iwo Jima...
--they told us that we probably would never even get off ship,
because we were a reserve division.
The other two divisions...
--had roughly 20,000 people in each, making 40,000 Marines
that were going to be on that wee, little island.
So they had no idea they would ever need us.
After they lost something like 5,000 on the first day,
they decided they were going to have more people.
One of the reasons that Iwo was so terrible...
--was the Japanese had airfields there that they had built,
and the airfields had been protected
by reinforced concrete pillboxes.
And they had used a lot of steel in those
so that bombs could not break them up.
They had piled a lot of sand on each top...
--so that when the bomb hit, or the artillery hit or whatever,
it'd blow a lot of sand in a lot of directions, but it didn't do much...
--for the pillbox.
So the pillboxes had us stalled.
And as we were trying to get across that airfield...
--we were losing Marines very rapidly.
And sometimes even commanding officers get desperate.
So, losing men rapidly...
--he asked me if I thought I could do anything about those pillboxes
that were out there.
Somebody in my unit said that I said, "I'll try."
Now maybe I did say that. Sounds like me... you know?
But I don't know whether I said that or not.
But anyway, he assigned me four rifle people...
--and they were to give me protection
while I was out there trying to knock out some of those pillboxes.
I hadn't been out there very long.
And as I have said many, many times,
it's almost like a dream...
--like it's really not real.
Two of those men-- the automatic riflemen-- of course, were like me.
They were good targets.
If a guy is shooting with an automatic weapon...
--the enemy would like to get him first.
In the early part of the four hours that I was trying to do this job...
...I lost them.
But the other two guys, they kept working with me.
And one of them, particularly, he kept pretty close to me...
--to try to keep these Japanese off of me.
And one of the pillboxes I'd been trying to reach,
I saw where they had been firing their weapons.
They didn't have any smokeless ammunition.
Ours wasn't total, but it was better than theirs.
So smoke was curling up out of the top of it,
and I sort of figured they had a breathing hole up there, or something.
So I crawled around to the side...
--where they couldn't see me, because one side of the pillbox was solid...
--and got up on top. And they had an air vent pipe up there,
and it was just the right size that my flamethrower nozzle...
--fit down in it.
So I was ready to fire.
And they knew that, I guess, because they came charging out of that pillbox,
I don't know... four, five of them.
I don't know.
A bunch, anyway...
--with their weapons and bayonets-- to get me.
And...
I got them first.
I was just reading recently...
--that the flamethrower goes all the way back to the Roman Empire.
They didn't work quite like ours, but they had them.
And they were just as vicious then as they are... or were then.
Its effectiveness was...
--that once it hit its target, it burned all the oxygen out of the air...
...lungs collapsed...
--and people were gone.
It was a terrible, terrible weapon.
Don't ask me how I did it. I don't know how I did it.
But in four hours I knocked out seven of those things.
Much of it, I don't remember.
And I attribute that to fear.
Absolutely.
Once you got in behind the pillboxes,
why, then we had the advantage.
So in getting those seven pillboxes out of the way...
--that, according to my citation...
--opened the lane that enabled us to go on through.
When I received the Medal of Honor...
--the day after President Truman presented it,
I went into the office of the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps.
And I can't tell you...
--which place I was more frightened:
standing before the President...
...or facing the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Because he was almost God in the Marine Corps.
He was also a Medal of Honor recipient from Guadalcanal,
so he knew what we were facing.
But he said to me...
--as I stood there, very sternly:
"That Medal does not belong to you."
He said, "It belongs to all the Marines who did not get to come home.
And don't ever do anything...
--that would tarnish that Medal."
The Medal represents...
--what the country has always stood for:
Sacrifice.
The day I was born, on October 2, 1923,
I was handed a gem...
--that is absolutely impossible to buy.
That was my freedom.
You can't pay for it.
There's not enough money in the world.
So this Medal...
...to me...
--stands for sacrifice.
And service.