Seven Pillboxes? The Citation Never Gives a Number

Blue smoke curled out of a pipe on a buried pillbox on Iwo Jima. Corporal Woody Williams crawled onto the roof with about 70 pounds of flamethrower on his back. The weapon held fuel for roughly nine seconds of fire, and the fight lasted four hours. How does one corporal get through a pillbox line that a company could not pass? The film goes back to the citation, the official histories and the court papers to find out. On 23 February 1945, Cpl. Hershel "Woody" Williams of the 21st Marines, 3rd Marine Division, went forward against the Japanese pillbox belt between the airfields of Iwo Jima. The Medal of Honor citation gives four hours and four riflemen covering him, and no count of pillboxes at all. The famous number, seven, comes from retellings. Williams himself said most of those hours were "just a blank". Two of his four riflemen, Cpl. Warren Bornholz and Pfc. Charles Fischer, were killed that day and were identified only decades later. The Marine Corps' official history records no gain for the regiment on 23 February; the line fell the next day. Williams called himself the caretaker of the medal, which he said belongs to the men who did not come home. Honest wording: there are no photographs of Williams in action on 23 February 1945. The flamethrower, pillbox and beach photographs in the film show other Marines, other units and other days on Iwo Jima. In this film: Cpl. Hershel Woodrow "Woody" Williams · Capt. Donald M. Beck · Cpl. Warren Harding Bornholz · Pfc. Charles G. Fischer · Cpl. Vernon H. Waters · President Harry S. Truman · 21st Marines · 3rd Marine Division · Battle of Iwo Jima · Iwo Jima · Quiet Dell, West Virginia · Mount Suribachi · 23 February 1945 CHAPTERS 0:00 Blue Smoke 3:24 The Last Flamethrower in Charlie Company 5:38 A Wall You Could Not See 9:13 Nine Seconds of Fire 12:50 "I'll Try" 15:59 The Pipe on the Roof 19:15 The Line That Did Not Move 22:41 The Men Beside Him 26:02 The Medal That Was Not His 28:42 The Historian and the Lawsuit 31:49 The Caretaker LINKS Medal of Honor citation, Cpl. Hershel W. Williams https://woodywilliams.org/woody-citat... Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic (Bartley, USMC, 1954) https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC... TM 3-376A, Portable Flame Thrower M2-2 (War Department, 1944) https://archive.org/details/TM3-376A SOURCES Medal of Honor citation, Cpl. Hershel W. Williams — U.S. Navy / USMC (1945) Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic — LtCol Whitman S. Bartley, USMC (1954) Western Pacific Operations — Garand & Strobridge, HQMC (1971) Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima — Col. J. H. Alexander, USMC (1994) TM 3-376A, Portable Flame Thrower M2-2 — War Department (1944) Hershel "Woody" Williams interviews — American Veterans Center; HistoryNet (2022) Williams v. Rigg, No. 3:19-cv-00423 (S.D. W.Va.), orders of 2021 CREDITS Medal of Honor, 1861-1949, The Navy (Navy Department, 1949), p. 279, citation of Cpl. Williams: public domain, via archive.org / Digital Library of India U.S. Marine Corps History Division and USMC Archives (Flickr / Wikimedia Commons), CC BY 2.0 Naval History and Heritage Command, CC BY 2.0 Eric Tessmer, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Punchbowl aerial view) Tracy Lewis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Quiet Dell School) Public domain: U.S. Marine Corps, Signal Corps / NARA, U.S. Navy (incl. DVIDS, MC1 Michael B. Zingaro), U.S. Coast Guard, USAF, USSF, DoD, White House (Shealah Craighead), HABS / Library of Congress, LBJ Library, National Park Service; maps and pages from Bartley (1954, via HyperWar), TM 3-376A (1944, via archive.org), Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection, Natural Earth Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... — "Dark Walk", "Deep Haze", "Dreamy Flashback", "Eastern Thought", "Floating Cities", "Frozen Star", "Gymnopedie No 1", "Healing", "Long Note Four", "Long Note One", "Long Note Three", "Silver Blue Light", "Sincerely", "Thinking Music" #MedalOfHonor #IwoJima #WorldWar2