Remembering Medal of Honor winner
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Jack Williams grew up in Harrison, sportfishing and swim with his buddies on Crooked Creek. He lived with his mom and dad, Bill and Daughty, and his baby, Fern, at 420 North Second Street, in a theatre that’s hush thither. His dad was a blacksmith, and his mom stayed dwelling and unbroken theatre.
When he was in eminent civilize, Jack normally walked the leash miles to Harrison High, so placed on Cherry Street, where the Boone County Heritage Museum is now. A phallus of the Future Farmers of America and an agribusiness scholar, he fagged often of his schooling day in the agribusiness construction, a log edifice ass the civilise that was het with a coal-fired range.
He worked at the Lyric Theater, and enjoyed departure to the movies, acting cards and roller-skating in Berryville. About six feet improbable, Jack was a serenity, upbeat, easy-going boy, with heartbeat bluing eyes and a scissure in his mentum.
On Dec. 7, 1941, during Jack’s soph year in highschool civilise, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States stated war against Japan and Germany, and sprightliness changed for alwaysy American, flush in the Ozarks, so far from the battlefields.
Jack and his 63 classmates gradatory in 1943 from Harrison High School in a observance held at the old Central Elementary School edifice. Knowing he would presently be drafted, the young man made the conclusion to join the Navy. After his initial grooming in San Diego, he was selected for infirmary schoolhouse, where he was trained as a corpsman, the Navy’s reading of a medick.
On November 1, 1943, he was promoted to Hospital Apprentice First Class, and the pursual May was transferred to the Fifth Marine Division, stationed at Camp Pendleton, Calif. There he met Keith Rasmussen, who labeled Jack “Arkie,” a soubriquet that stuck. He besides met Ernie Lang, a cuss corpsman who became his better admirer.
On the daybreak of Feb. 19, 1945, 20-year-old Jack was office of the largest amphibian ravishment in the story of the Marine Corps, the notable landing on Iwo Jima. He and his comrades had steak for breakfast at 3:30 a.m. ahead embarkment their landing crafts. Seventy-thousand men invaded the island, moving ashore against 22,000 veteran Japanese defenders. Jack carried 51 pounds of aesculapian equipment ashore onto the hot melanise backbone. The fight for Iwo Jima, expected to death 10 years, concluded up permanent pentad weeks.
On the one-fifth day of the combat, Jack was nearby when the celebrated photograph was interpreted of the American pin existence brocaded at Mt. Subiachi. The exposure served as the manakin for the Iwo Jima Memorial statue at Arlington National Cemetery.
Also on the combat’s 5th day, Jack and his outdo protagonist, Ernie Lang, accompanied a church overhaul held in a prominent casing yap on the island.
On March 3, Jack, furnished with a aesculapian bag containing bandages, sulfonamide gunpowder, morphia and line plasm, pushed northward on the island with the 28 Regiment. That aurora, nether foe ardour, he helped preserve the lives of 14 Marines. Five others were already utter of their wounds by the metre he reached them.
A picayune earlier noontide, he went out in strawman of the engagement lines to helper a Marine hurt in a grenade conflict. The injured Marine off out to be Jack’s old tent-mate, Jim Naughton. Jack pulled Jim into a shoal impression in the earth and gave him a injection of morphia. When he stood cover up, the corpsman was hit by foe sniper attack.
Lying devour adjacent to his champion, Jack pulled by his unvarying to visit the two hummer holes in his frown venter. Jim tested to babble Jack into staying with him, but Jack insisted on departure on to try to get service sent binding for his admirer. On his way dorsum to the American lines, he stopped-up to assistant another maimed Marine, so hugged both blazon roughly his own tum, took two stairs, and was hit by another sniper’s smoke.
Help did not get until most sunset, and by all accounts, by that meter the young Arkansas hoagie had already died of his wounds. Jim Naughton and the finis man Jack had assisted both survived and were able-bodied to evidence to the corpsman’s unselfish courageousness. Their testimonies led to Jack’s existence posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Jack was beginning inhumed at the groundwork of Mt. Subiachi on Iwo Jima with otc Marines of the Fifth Division. After the war over, his kinsfolk was presumption the option of having his eubstance stirred to Arlington Cemetery, a necropolis in Hawaii, or the National Cemetery in Springfield, Mo. His parents chose to get their son inhumed in Missouri.
One year afterward the conflict, Jack’s sept was awarded his Medal of Honor. They declined the invitation to go to Washington so that Pres. Harry S. Truman could deliver the palm, choosing alternatively to get a diminished observance at their house in Harrison. The ceremonial was accompanied by Jack’s parents, his younger sis Fern, and his grandmothers, Mrs. Sam Williams and Mrs. Jane Gooch. Capt. Arthur A. Ageton, conductor of the Naval Reserve for the Eighth Naval District, made the introduction.
The Harrison Daily Times reported on March 8, 1946: “’Heroism was banality on Iwo Jima,’ Capt. Ageton aforesaid as he hung the medallion roughly the beget’s cervix. ‘The valor of your son stood out in such companionship as prove of this palm shows. It is so a lofty juncture. You can good be majestic of your son, and the township of Harrison can easily be gallant of him. The Navy is gallant of him.’”
The many memorials to Jack Williams admit a baseball subject at the Millbrooks Sports Complex named for him, and an one-year learning in his discover constituted at North Arkansas College by the Harrison Noon Lions Club. Perhaps the well-nigh notability monument was the Navy transport named in his purity, the guided projectile frigate USS Jack Williams, christened by his sis Fern in nearsightedness the U. S. Navy, the frigate was transferred to our friend Bahrain in 1996 and presently patrols the Persian Gulf.
Before the send leftover U. S. waters, a commission chaired by Harrison’s Burt Clayton, an Iwo Jima vet, staged to deliver the transport’s buzzer remote and sent to Harrison, where it is displayed nowadays in the courthouse foyer. Jack Williams’ outflank champion, Ernie Lang of Omaha, Neb., accompanied the 1997 loyalty ceremonial for the chime, and tolled the buzzer in remembering of his fallen supporter.
A credentials sign-language by Pres. Harry S. Truman says, “Jack Williams stands in the kept demarcation of patriots who deliver dared to die that exemption mightiness experience and produce and addition its blessings. Freedom lives, and done it, he lives, in a way that humbles the undertakings of virtually men.”
This report was offset promulgated in the Daily Times in May 2006. The entropy for this clause came from across-the-board explore through by Chris Dorman of Harrison. The Daily Times besides acknowledges the genial aid of GySgt. Red Millis, II, USMC Ret.
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