Before Desmond Doss saved anyone, the United States Army spent considerable effort trying to destroy him.
He was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, and his faith was not academic. He genuinely believed that it was wrong to kill another human being. He also genuinely believed that it was his duty to serve his country. These two convictions collided with the United States Army's requirement that soldiers carry rifles, and the collision was long and ugly.
His fellow soldiers in Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division called him "Holy Joe" and "Sissy" and things considerably worse. They threw their boots at him while he knelt to pray at night. His captain, Jack Glover, filed paperwork to have him discharged on psychiatric grounds. When that failed, Glover tried having him court-martialed for refusing to train with a rifle on Saturdays (his Sabbath). That failed too.
The Maeda Escarpment
By the spring of 1945, Corporal Doss and his unit were on Okinawa. The Maeda Escarpment — known to the Americans as Hacksaw Ridge — was a 400-foot plateau of volcanic rock that the Japanese had turned into an interlocking network of tunnels, bunkers, and machine gun positions. American forces had to scale it on rope nets, take the top, and hold it against Japanese counterattacks.
On May 4, 1945, the Japanese launched a massive counterattack that drove Company B off the top of the escarpment. American soldiers fell back to the edge of the cliff. In the chaos, dozens of wounded men were left behind on the plateau.
Doss did not go back down.
He crawled across the top of the escarpment alone, under fire, through smoke, to each wounded man he could find. He had no weapon. His protection was, depending on how you look at it, either none or everything.
For each man he found, he improvised a lowering system with a rope around a tree stump — what medics later described as a double half-hitch bowline — and lowered the wounded soldier over the cliff edge to the relative safety below. Then he went back for another one.
He worked through the night. Each time he reached a soldier, his unit reported hearing him praying quietly: "Lord, let me get one more. Lord, let me get one more." He lowered 75 men off that cliff. His own Medal of Honor citation would say 75. He himself always insisted it was probably more like 50. He didn't count.
The Bible on the Battlefield
Doss was wounded three times during the Okinawa campaign. A grenade went off near him, sending shrapnel into both legs. He lay in the open for five hours, treating himself, before allowing himself to be evacuated — and while waiting on a stretcher, he gave up his stretcher to a more seriously wounded man and crawled 300 yards to an aid station alone.
He was later shot by a Japanese sniper. The bullet went through his arm.
Before his final evacuation from Okinawa, Doss realized his Bible was missing — lost somewhere on the escarpment. His entire unit, the men who had once thrown shoes at him while he prayed, searched the battlefield and found it. Shell-torn, bloodstained, but intact.
Captain Jack Glover, who had tried to have Doss committed, later said publicly that Desmond Doss was the bravest man he had ever known. He also said he owed him his life. On the night of May 4th, Doss had gone back for him too.
Desmond Doss lived until 2006. He never touched a weapon.
Sources & Further Reading
Medal of Honor citation, Corporal Desmond T. Doss (approved October 12, 1945); Booton Herndon, "The Unlikeliest Hero" (Mountain View, 1967); National Archives, pension records, 307th Infantry Regiment.
