Eutrusca
13-02-2005, 19:29
NOTE: Long post, but well worth it. Incredible story, just incredible!
By Basil Penny
Retired Associate Editor
02-13-2005
PIEDMONT — Sightless eyes rob him of the pleasure of looking again at his mementoes from half-a-world away.
But Desmond Thomas Doss has a front-row seat of it all — the good and the not so good — in his mind’s eye. That vision hasn’t dimmed in the least after 60 years.
Desmond Thomas Doss.
Read his name again and wonder if you’ve seen it before. You may have. If you’re a rapt aficionado of World War II lore, you probably have.
All you need to know is that he owns a Medal of Honor. So what, hundreds of other soldiers do, too. However, he is the only so-called conscientious objector ever adorned with the nation’s highest honor.
So now meet Desmond T. Doss, 86, of Valley Creek Road in Vigo, a rural community that spills east of Piedmont a few miles toward Dugger Mountain. He’s not homebred and raised, but how he got to Calhoun County is fodder for another story.
Most who know him probably agree that Doss is a bona fide American hero of World War II. He doesn’t necessarily think so, though.
To his reckoning, his battlefield heroics just came second nature to the lad who grew up dirt poor during the roaring ’20s and ’30s in Lynchburg, Va. Other than his strict church upbringing, maybe he could be akin to most Southerners of that era.
But back then — gosh, 63 years in the rearview mirror — he took a stance that rankled a good many folks. After being drafted into the Army on April 1, 1942 — no April fool’s joke, mind you — he agreed to serve. However, he steadfastly refused to carry a weapon or fight, not with guns and bullets.
He was dubbed a conscientious objector. Doss disagreed. He said he was only a noncombatant. He tried to make it clear he didn’t object to serving in the armed forces, just that he could not, would not take another person’s life. He clung strongly to the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.
“I could have been deferred (from draft) because of my job,” said Doss, speaking in a gravelly voice tainted by his near-total deafness. He hears only what little filters through a cochlear implant.
“I had a job in shipbuilding at Newport News. I walked away from a better-paying job for $21 a month (Army pay) to serve my country, which to me was an honor.”
But he’d have no direct part in spilling anybody’s blood.
Moreover, he held fast to his belief that God rested on the seventh day of creation, Saturday, and admonished His followers to keep it holy. That was an outgrowth of his early lessons growing up a Seventh-day Adventist, a faith he embraces to this day.
On Oct. 12, 1945, President Harry S Truman presents Cpl. Desmond T. Doss America’s highest tribute: a Medal of Honor. Courtesy photo
So, he wouldn’t train or do any duty on Saturday, his Sabbath. Not even for Uncle Sam.But the big deal came back to a framed document that hung in his childhood home: the Ten Commandments. He’d always been mesmerized and saddened by a picture of Cain, with a club in hand, standing over the dead body of his brother, Abel.
Of course that picture accompanied the Sixth Commandment and left him seared with a lifelong image. No, he couldn’t take another person’s life. It became the foundation of his life from which he never wavered.
For his rigid religious stand, he endured ridicule and criticism from some fellow soldiers and officers. At night when he knelt in his barracks for prayer, some threw boots at him. Others vowed not to go into war with him, saying they’d shoot him themselves.
His story has also made it onto film in The Conscientious Objector, an award-winning documentary on Doss filmed by Terry Benedict, released last year.
He had to overcome seemingly endless roadblocks in his weekly efforts to get passes from the Army to attend church on Saturday. His superiors didn’t understand why he didn’t go to church on Sundays like many others.
After a while, it took a toll. He was called before a group of officers who proposed to discharge him from the Army on a Section Eight for mental instability. The officers’ plan had been fostered because he repeatedly refused to train on Saturdays.
Doss answered them:
“I know that if I keep God’s commandments, He will give me wisdom and understanding equal to those who receive training on His holy day,” Doss is quoted in The Unlikeliest Hero, by Booton Herndon (1967).
“I’d be a very poor Christian if I accepted a discharge implying that I was mentally off because of my religion. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I can’t accept that kind of a discharge,” Doss is quoted in wife Frances Doss’ book, In God’s Care (2000).
With Doss’ answer, the efforts at the Section Eight discharge fizzled in the stifling dust of an Arizona desert where he was training.
This didn’t raise his popularity with the brass one iota. Officers soon told him he was to turn in his medical gear, that he was being transferred from the medics to the infantry. He’d have to bear arms and fight.
He was dumbfounded. That flew in the face of signed letters Doss had from higher-ups that he wouldn’t have to carry a weapon or fight.
Pushed into a corner, Doss needed help fast and turned to Dr. Mom. He called her and related his distress at the prospects of being made a gun-toting soldier.
Mother Doss made a phone call. Her soldier son was back in the medics in short order, after his church’s war service commission in Washington, D.C., interceded.
Doss had asked to be a combat medic, telling his superiors that he was willing to go to the front lines unarmed to save lives, but not to take them. He was agreeing to take on a job as dangerous as kicking a Bengal tiger.
Fast-forward to the South Pacific and Maeda Escarpment, an invincible cliff on Okinawa held by the Japanese.
Along the southern width of the island, the 400-foot-high cliff — also known as Hacksaw Ridge — afforded a fine view and defensive posture for the enemy. He was well fortified in concrete and steel pillboxes and other emplacements at the top of the cliff.
Nothing moved or breathed without the Japanese seeing it. There was no alternative. American soldiers had to capture the strategic position.
Doss was a medic in 1st Bn., Co. B, 307th Regiment of the 77th Infantry Division, aka the Statue of Liberty Division.
On one of his unit’s initial attempts to take the ridge, Doss told his commander that he believed prayer was the best lifesaver.
“Fellows,” called the lieutenant, “come over here and gather around. Doss wants to pray for us.” —In God’s Care
Put on the spot, that wasn’t exactly what Doss had in mind. Rather, he’d thought that each man individually should say a prayer. Nevertheless, he offered one:
“Dear Lord, bless us today. Be with the lieutenant and help him to give the right orders for our lives are in his hands. Help each one of us to use safety precautions so that we all might come back alive. And, Lord, help all of us to make our peace with Thee before we go up the net (improvised ship’s cargo covering hung to the top of the precipice). Thank you. Amen.” —In God’s Care
Company B met massive and brutal resistant from the enemy, but still knocked out several pillboxes. Miraculously, not a soldier in Doss’ unit was killed and only one man was slightly injured when a piece of flying rock hit his hand.
Word of that injury-free battle spread to headquarters and even back to the states. The question on everybody’s lips: “How did that happen?” The men of Company B had a simple answer, “Because Doss prayed.” —In God’s Care
The decisive battle for the cliff came May 5, 1945, a Saturday — Doss’ Sabbath and his Medal of Honor Day, as it turned out. He sat leaned against a rock reading his Bible, his usual practice on the Sabbath.
Asked to go on this mission, the medic said he would but wanted first to finish his Sabbath school lesson taken from Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths."
As to his willingness to go on the mission on the Sabbath, he reasoned he could treat wounds of fellow soldiers, just as Jesus administered to those in need on the Sabbath.
After the Americans climbed to the top, they again met fierce resistance from the dug-in Japanese. One writer wrote that enemy bullets were so thick they would — and did — cut men in two.
After Company B hurled cans of gasoline into the enemy’s tunneling positions, terrifying explosions sent the Japanese swarming out like yellow jackets rousted from their nest. They ran and fired weapons pell-mell.
A hasty retreat, turned panic, was ordered for Company B. The top of the ridge and behind it lay littered with wounded GIs. Doss felt he couldn’t leave them. As bullets whined about him, the dedicated medic crawled, squirmed, crouched and scooted for hours to rescue the fallen troops, just as he had done on Guam and Leyte earlier.
He worked alone with a length of rope anchored to a tree stump. Using a bowline knot he had perfected, he lowered man after man from the cliff top to an outcropping 35 feet below, praying as he worked, “Lord, just let me get one more.” —Unlikeliest Hero
Officers said the final count was 100 rescued. Doss protested that was too many. There was a compromise. His captain said let the official record state that Pfc. Doss had saved 75 men. And so it was.
His olive drab fatigue uniform was turned brown and stiff with the dried blood of those he had aided. He got new fatigues.
Some soldiers, who once scoffed at Doss’ simple faith and refusal to carry a weapon, owed their lives to him. He came face to face with one who had threatened to shoot him. With meekness and a guilty countenance, that soldier asked Doss to pray for him instead.
In another battle at another place, Doss scampered across the battlefield to care for the wounded and came in the crosshairs of a Japanese sniper. The enemy made every effort to kill anyone with a Red Cross emblem on his helmet. GIs later told how they had watched in horror but couldn’t shoot at the sniper, because other Americans were in their line of fire.
The sniper never fired. Years later a missionary in Japan told this story. After the service, a Japanese man told the missionary the sniper could have been him. He remembered having an American in his gun sight, but inexplicably couldn’t pull the trigger.
“I should have been killed any number of times,” Doss allowed the other day. “But I never felt I would be, because of the Fifth Commandment, which I tried to keep.”
It reads: Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
“But (God) didn’t promise I wouldn’t be wounded,” he added.
Like a farm boy stomping on a burning pine knot, Doss immediately stepped on a grenade thrown into a shallow shell hole occupied by him and two others, who wisely bailed out. That was just split-second, knee-jerk reaction on everybody’s part.
The blast ejected Doss into the air. He took severe shrapnel wounds to his leg up to and including his hip. He lost a lot of blood.
Being carried on a poncho litter stretcher, he rolled off at one point and told the soldiers carrying him to take instead another GI wounded more seriously than he was. They did.
A short time later, as he was being helped to hobble along by another Virginian, an enemy sniper zeroed in on Doss again. This one pulled the trigger, and the bullet shattered a bone in Doss’ arm, finally putting him out of action.
While being loaded onto a hospital ship, Doss suddenly realized he had lost the Bible his first wife, Dorothy, had given him. He had carried it all through training and combat in his left shirt pocket. He was devastated.
Men from his company scoured the badly scarred battlefield for weeks, finally finding the small Bible, plenty dirty and soggy. A sergeant dried it and forwarded it to the grateful Doss.
On Oct. 12, 1945, the 26-year-old medic and 15 other soldiers received their Medals of Honor on the White House lawn. Doss was one of 431 given the medals for World War II service.
When President Harry S Truman slipped the medal over Doss’ head, Truman whispered, “I’m proud of you. You really deserve this. I consider this a greater honor than being president.” —Unlikeliest Hero
While his bony fingers brushed his Medal of Honor a few days ago at his Vigo home, no one there doubted what his mind was seeing.
As Desmond T. Doss stood on the White House lawn Oct. 12, 1945, to accept his nation’s top honor, he cut a dashing figure, his uniform replete with: Stripes of a corporal, freshly affixed to his sleeves. Statue of Liberty patch of the 77th Division. Two small gold horizontal stripes for two six-month periods overseas. A diagonal hash mark for three years in the service. Ribbons signifying the Bronze Star for valor, with cluster. The Purple Heart with two Oak Leaves. The Good Conduct Medal. The American Defense Campaign. The Asiatic-Pacific Campaign: Guam, Leyte (with beachhead arrowhead), Okinawa, Victory medal. The Philippine Liberation with one star. Over this Christmas tree was the combat medic badge. A blue ribbon for the presidential citation given the 1st Bn., 307th Infantry “for assaulting, capturing and securing the Escarpment.” And, of course, the big one around his neck: the Medal of Honor, the highest award given by his country.
—Basil Penny
By Basil Penny
Retired Associate Editor
02-13-2005
PIEDMONT — Sightless eyes rob him of the pleasure of looking again at his mementoes from half-a-world away.
But Desmond Thomas Doss has a front-row seat of it all — the good and the not so good — in his mind’s eye. That vision hasn’t dimmed in the least after 60 years.
Desmond Thomas Doss.
Read his name again and wonder if you’ve seen it before. You may have. If you’re a rapt aficionado of World War II lore, you probably have.
All you need to know is that he owns a Medal of Honor. So what, hundreds of other soldiers do, too. However, he is the only so-called conscientious objector ever adorned with the nation’s highest honor.
So now meet Desmond T. Doss, 86, of Valley Creek Road in Vigo, a rural community that spills east of Piedmont a few miles toward Dugger Mountain. He’s not homebred and raised, but how he got to Calhoun County is fodder for another story.
Most who know him probably agree that Doss is a bona fide American hero of World War II. He doesn’t necessarily think so, though.
To his reckoning, his battlefield heroics just came second nature to the lad who grew up dirt poor during the roaring ’20s and ’30s in Lynchburg, Va. Other than his strict church upbringing, maybe he could be akin to most Southerners of that era.
But back then — gosh, 63 years in the rearview mirror — he took a stance that rankled a good many folks. After being drafted into the Army on April 1, 1942 — no April fool’s joke, mind you — he agreed to serve. However, he steadfastly refused to carry a weapon or fight, not with guns and bullets.
He was dubbed a conscientious objector. Doss disagreed. He said he was only a noncombatant. He tried to make it clear he didn’t object to serving in the armed forces, just that he could not, would not take another person’s life. He clung strongly to the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.
“I could have been deferred (from draft) because of my job,” said Doss, speaking in a gravelly voice tainted by his near-total deafness. He hears only what little filters through a cochlear implant.
“I had a job in shipbuilding at Newport News. I walked away from a better-paying job for $21 a month (Army pay) to serve my country, which to me was an honor.”
But he’d have no direct part in spilling anybody’s blood.
Moreover, he held fast to his belief that God rested on the seventh day of creation, Saturday, and admonished His followers to keep it holy. That was an outgrowth of his early lessons growing up a Seventh-day Adventist, a faith he embraces to this day.
On Oct. 12, 1945, President Harry S Truman presents Cpl. Desmond T. Doss America’s highest tribute: a Medal of Honor. Courtesy photo
So, he wouldn’t train or do any duty on Saturday, his Sabbath. Not even for Uncle Sam.But the big deal came back to a framed document that hung in his childhood home: the Ten Commandments. He’d always been mesmerized and saddened by a picture of Cain, with a club in hand, standing over the dead body of his brother, Abel.
Of course that picture accompanied the Sixth Commandment and left him seared with a lifelong image. No, he couldn’t take another person’s life. It became the foundation of his life from which he never wavered.
For his rigid religious stand, he endured ridicule and criticism from some fellow soldiers and officers. At night when he knelt in his barracks for prayer, some threw boots at him. Others vowed not to go into war with him, saying they’d shoot him themselves.
His story has also made it onto film in The Conscientious Objector, an award-winning documentary on Doss filmed by Terry Benedict, released last year.
He had to overcome seemingly endless roadblocks in his weekly efforts to get passes from the Army to attend church on Saturday. His superiors didn’t understand why he didn’t go to church on Sundays like many others.
After a while, it took a toll. He was called before a group of officers who proposed to discharge him from the Army on a Section Eight for mental instability. The officers’ plan had been fostered because he repeatedly refused to train on Saturdays.
Doss answered them:
“I know that if I keep God’s commandments, He will give me wisdom and understanding equal to those who receive training on His holy day,” Doss is quoted in The Unlikeliest Hero, by Booton Herndon (1967).
“I’d be a very poor Christian if I accepted a discharge implying that I was mentally off because of my religion. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I can’t accept that kind of a discharge,” Doss is quoted in wife Frances Doss’ book, In God’s Care (2000).
With Doss’ answer, the efforts at the Section Eight discharge fizzled in the stifling dust of an Arizona desert where he was training.
This didn’t raise his popularity with the brass one iota. Officers soon told him he was to turn in his medical gear, that he was being transferred from the medics to the infantry. He’d have to bear arms and fight.
He was dumbfounded. That flew in the face of signed letters Doss had from higher-ups that he wouldn’t have to carry a weapon or fight.
Pushed into a corner, Doss needed help fast and turned to Dr. Mom. He called her and related his distress at the prospects of being made a gun-toting soldier.
Mother Doss made a phone call. Her soldier son was back in the medics in short order, after his church’s war service commission in Washington, D.C., interceded.
Doss had asked to be a combat medic, telling his superiors that he was willing to go to the front lines unarmed to save lives, but not to take them. He was agreeing to take on a job as dangerous as kicking a Bengal tiger.
Fast-forward to the South Pacific and Maeda Escarpment, an invincible cliff on Okinawa held by the Japanese.
Along the southern width of the island, the 400-foot-high cliff — also known as Hacksaw Ridge — afforded a fine view and defensive posture for the enemy. He was well fortified in concrete and steel pillboxes and other emplacements at the top of the cliff.
Nothing moved or breathed without the Japanese seeing it. There was no alternative. American soldiers had to capture the strategic position.
Doss was a medic in 1st Bn., Co. B, 307th Regiment of the 77th Infantry Division, aka the Statue of Liberty Division.
On one of his unit’s initial attempts to take the ridge, Doss told his commander that he believed prayer was the best lifesaver.
“Fellows,” called the lieutenant, “come over here and gather around. Doss wants to pray for us.” —In God’s Care
Put on the spot, that wasn’t exactly what Doss had in mind. Rather, he’d thought that each man individually should say a prayer. Nevertheless, he offered one:
“Dear Lord, bless us today. Be with the lieutenant and help him to give the right orders for our lives are in his hands. Help each one of us to use safety precautions so that we all might come back alive. And, Lord, help all of us to make our peace with Thee before we go up the net (improvised ship’s cargo covering hung to the top of the precipice). Thank you. Amen.” —In God’s Care
Company B met massive and brutal resistant from the enemy, but still knocked out several pillboxes. Miraculously, not a soldier in Doss’ unit was killed and only one man was slightly injured when a piece of flying rock hit his hand.
Word of that injury-free battle spread to headquarters and even back to the states. The question on everybody’s lips: “How did that happen?” The men of Company B had a simple answer, “Because Doss prayed.” —In God’s Care
The decisive battle for the cliff came May 5, 1945, a Saturday — Doss’ Sabbath and his Medal of Honor Day, as it turned out. He sat leaned against a rock reading his Bible, his usual practice on the Sabbath.
Asked to go on this mission, the medic said he would but wanted first to finish his Sabbath school lesson taken from Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths."
As to his willingness to go on the mission on the Sabbath, he reasoned he could treat wounds of fellow soldiers, just as Jesus administered to those in need on the Sabbath.
After the Americans climbed to the top, they again met fierce resistance from the dug-in Japanese. One writer wrote that enemy bullets were so thick they would — and did — cut men in two.
After Company B hurled cans of gasoline into the enemy’s tunneling positions, terrifying explosions sent the Japanese swarming out like yellow jackets rousted from their nest. They ran and fired weapons pell-mell.
A hasty retreat, turned panic, was ordered for Company B. The top of the ridge and behind it lay littered with wounded GIs. Doss felt he couldn’t leave them. As bullets whined about him, the dedicated medic crawled, squirmed, crouched and scooted for hours to rescue the fallen troops, just as he had done on Guam and Leyte earlier.
He worked alone with a length of rope anchored to a tree stump. Using a bowline knot he had perfected, he lowered man after man from the cliff top to an outcropping 35 feet below, praying as he worked, “Lord, just let me get one more.” —Unlikeliest Hero
Officers said the final count was 100 rescued. Doss protested that was too many. There was a compromise. His captain said let the official record state that Pfc. Doss had saved 75 men. And so it was.
His olive drab fatigue uniform was turned brown and stiff with the dried blood of those he had aided. He got new fatigues.
Some soldiers, who once scoffed at Doss’ simple faith and refusal to carry a weapon, owed their lives to him. He came face to face with one who had threatened to shoot him. With meekness and a guilty countenance, that soldier asked Doss to pray for him instead.
In another battle at another place, Doss scampered across the battlefield to care for the wounded and came in the crosshairs of a Japanese sniper. The enemy made every effort to kill anyone with a Red Cross emblem on his helmet. GIs later told how they had watched in horror but couldn’t shoot at the sniper, because other Americans were in their line of fire.
The sniper never fired. Years later a missionary in Japan told this story. After the service, a Japanese man told the missionary the sniper could have been him. He remembered having an American in his gun sight, but inexplicably couldn’t pull the trigger.
“I should have been killed any number of times,” Doss allowed the other day. “But I never felt I would be, because of the Fifth Commandment, which I tried to keep.”
It reads: Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
“But (God) didn’t promise I wouldn’t be wounded,” he added.
Like a farm boy stomping on a burning pine knot, Doss immediately stepped on a grenade thrown into a shallow shell hole occupied by him and two others, who wisely bailed out. That was just split-second, knee-jerk reaction on everybody’s part.
The blast ejected Doss into the air. He took severe shrapnel wounds to his leg up to and including his hip. He lost a lot of blood.
Being carried on a poncho litter stretcher, he rolled off at one point and told the soldiers carrying him to take instead another GI wounded more seriously than he was. They did.
A short time later, as he was being helped to hobble along by another Virginian, an enemy sniper zeroed in on Doss again. This one pulled the trigger, and the bullet shattered a bone in Doss’ arm, finally putting him out of action.
While being loaded onto a hospital ship, Doss suddenly realized he had lost the Bible his first wife, Dorothy, had given him. He had carried it all through training and combat in his left shirt pocket. He was devastated.
Men from his company scoured the badly scarred battlefield for weeks, finally finding the small Bible, plenty dirty and soggy. A sergeant dried it and forwarded it to the grateful Doss.
On Oct. 12, 1945, the 26-year-old medic and 15 other soldiers received their Medals of Honor on the White House lawn. Doss was one of 431 given the medals for World War II service.
When President Harry S Truman slipped the medal over Doss’ head, Truman whispered, “I’m proud of you. You really deserve this. I consider this a greater honor than being president.” —Unlikeliest Hero
While his bony fingers brushed his Medal of Honor a few days ago at his Vigo home, no one there doubted what his mind was seeing.
As Desmond T. Doss stood on the White House lawn Oct. 12, 1945, to accept his nation’s top honor, he cut a dashing figure, his uniform replete with: Stripes of a corporal, freshly affixed to his sleeves. Statue of Liberty patch of the 77th Division. Two small gold horizontal stripes for two six-month periods overseas. A diagonal hash mark for three years in the service. Ribbons signifying the Bronze Star for valor, with cluster. The Purple Heart with two Oak Leaves. The Good Conduct Medal. The American Defense Campaign. The Asiatic-Pacific Campaign: Guam, Leyte (with beachhead arrowhead), Okinawa, Victory medal. The Philippine Liberation with one star. Over this Christmas tree was the combat medic badge. A blue ribbon for the presidential citation given the 1st Bn., 307th Infantry “for assaulting, capturing and securing the Escarpment.” And, of course, the big one around his neck: the Medal of Honor, the highest award given by his country.
—Basil Penny