Last U.S. Medal of Honor recipient from WWII dies at 98
By Wealthy McKay
(Reuters) – On the peak of World Struggle Two, 18-year-old Hershel “Woody” Williams tried to affix the U.S. Marine Corps, however a recruiter informed the 5-foot-6 dairy farmer: “Go house, you are too brief.”
The peak requirement quickly modified, in accordance with a basis named for Williams, who joined the Marines and went on to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor after single-handedly taking out a collection of Japanese positions within the bloodiest battles on Iwo Jima. Williams died Wednesday at 98 years previous.
Williams, the final surviving Medal of Honor recipient from World Struggle Two, died at a hospital in his house state of West Virginia, in accordance with the U.S. army and the Woody Williams Basis, a nonprofit serving army households.
“Immediately, America misplaced not only a valiant Marine and a Medal of Honor recipient, however an essential hyperlink to our Nation’s combat towards tyranny within the Second World Struggle,” U.S. Secretary of Protection Lloyd Austin stated in a press release Wednesday.
In 2017, the U.S. Navy christened the usHershel “Woody” Williams, an expeditionary cell base.
The 1945 battle for the strategic island of Iwo Jima took the lives of seven,000 Marines. When he hit Iwo Jima’s black sands, Williams crawled via piles of lifeless Marines wrapped of their ponchos and the wreckage of destroyed U.S. tanks to seek out his firm dealing with the enemy with nothing however bomb craters for canopy, in accordance with a 2021 profile of Williams within the Tennessean newspaper.
After the struggle he labored for what’s now the Division of Veterans Affairs for greater than 30 years and later established his basis. He additionally ran a horse farm in West Virginia.
(Reporting by Wealthy McKay in Atlanta; enhancing by Donna Bryson and David Gregorio)
