Hershel “Woody” Williams fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima, and on February 25, 1945, he became a "bonafide America hero," according to the Daily Beast's Nick Shager.
"Having landed two days earlier on the Japanese island, Williams was ordered by his commander to join a squadron tasked with clearing out a series of pillboxes (concrete enemy bunkers). On their way to the first of these outposts, all of Williams’ comrades were killed, but the young Marine persevered, eliminating everyone inside the pillbox with his trusty flamethrower," Shager writes. "Over the next four hours, he refueled his weapon five more times in order to singlehandedly take out the area’s remaining collection of pillboxes."
Shager interviewed Williams this Wednesday, and asked him what he thinks about the political divide we see today as opposed to the World War II era.
"I was a Democrat simply because my dad and all my brothers were Democrats, and I didn’t even know what that meant. But I do think, during the Depression, we didn’t have a whole lot, so if we didn’t have it, we almost had to make it. That drew people together, because they helped each other out. It was a very common thing," Williams said. "I was a farm boy, and if another farmer had a field of hay down, and there was a threat of rain, everybody from one family would go help that family get their hay in. But today that wouldn’t happen, even if you paid them. We did it because we were neighbors. I think that feeling went into WWII. We still had that same thinking and feeling toward each other, and I think that drew us closer together in combat in serving our country."
Read the full interview over at the Daily Beast.
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