Corporal Hershel “Woody” Williams U.S.M.C.

Corporal Hershel “Woody” Williams U.S.M.C.

With the passing of Hershel “Woody” Williams, only sixty-one Medal of Honor recipients are still living. Chief Warrant Officer Williams passed away on June 29, 2022. He was ninety-eight and the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipient. Born to a dairy farmer in West Virginia, Woody was only three and a half pounds at birth and was the youngest of eleven children. His mother didn’t think he’d survive. She named him after the doctor, who showed up several days after his birth. By the time Woody turned eleven, his father had died of a heart attack.

This letter written by Hershel “Woody” Williams was passed to me by my good friends at the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

Medal of Honor – Purple Heart – World War II

Well, just before going into the Marine Corps, I’d already quit my job. Because I thought when I enlisted, I’d just go. But there were so many people wanting into the Marine Corps, we had a waiting time, we had a waiting list of about three months. So, we were only taking back at that time something like two Marines, or two people in the Marine Corps, from a county in West Virginia. So that’s why this group that I was in was six. We were taken from three different counties, and before going in, since I quit my job, I needed something to do to earn some money because I didn’t have any. And I began driving a taxi cab. I had a school friend that he and I go into grade school together, and he was a dispatcher for a cab company. And he got me a job driving a taxi from 6:00 in the evening till 6:00 in the morning.

And at that time, the country was beginning to receive notices of those being sacrificed in the combat. And the only way we had of telling the families at that time, was the war department would send a notice to the Western Union office. The Western Union office would put it on a telegram, and they would call the cab company for a cab driver to deliver that telegram to the family. So I’m working evenings, I’ve begun getting some of those telephone calls, and they’d call me in and say, “We got a telegram to be delivered to so-and-so.” They didn’t know what it was when they told me to deliver it, I didn’t know what it was when I received it. It was an envelope, and it had a War Department address on it. But that didn’t mean any particular thing to me until I delivered some of those. And they were the notice to the families that their loved one had been killed. Actually, I’m only 18 years old and very shy, very bashful.

And in my day, you would never dare try to comfort a lady that you didn’t know, that was something you just didn’t do. I wouldn’t have done it anyway, because I was so shy. But there had been enough of those being received that the community in which I lived, when they saw the telegram, they already knew what it was. So you were supposed to get a signature that they’d gotten the telegram. So I’d knock on the door and ring the bell, and they’d come to the door, and I’d hand them the telegram with something to sign. And very often they’d break down, they knew what it was. That had a tremendous impact on me. It was so emotional and so sad. So that blasted forever.

And then I had a friend that he and I went to school together for seven years, walked back and forth every school day for seven straight years. He lived past my house, so he had to walk by my house, so we could get to the school. And Leonard Brown, he and I were very close, actually, I think closer than probably my own brothers because we hung out together more. And I wanted Leonard to go in the Marine Corps with me, and he said no, he wanted to go in the Army Air Forces. He liked the airplanes. So he went in his direction, and I went in mine, we never corresponded, didn’t know where each other was.

I didn’t know anything about him. But he became a nose gunner on a B-24 over the Philippines, and got hit with some [?], and severely wounded, and died four days later, and was buried in the Philippines. I didn’t know any of that until I got home. When I got home, Mr. And Mrs. Brown, Mr. Brown particularly was a surrogate father to me because my father died, as I said, at 11. So I talked to Mr. Brown more than I talked to my brothers. They wouldn’t pay attention to me, but Mr. Brown would listen to me. And so I went to see them shortly after I got home, and hanging in their window was a blue star and a gold star. I didn’t know what they were, so I asked what they were. And one of them was for Leonard’s brother Brian, who was still in the army. And the gold star was for Leonard, who never got to come home. So that left an impact.

And of course, Mrs. Brown was still grieving. This happened in 44, but she was still grieving in 45, hadn’t gone away. And she couldn’t hard talk about without crying. So that left an impact.

And then, in later years, our country began recognizing to some small degree Gold Star mothers, and some organization was formed, and some communities erected something in tribute, or honor, of Gold Star mothers. And working with the Veterans Administration as a veterans’ counselor after the war, and then during the Korean War, and during the Vietnam War. I was dealing with those families that lost a loved one in the Armed forces, combat or otherwise. So that was something that was almost constant during the war periods. So, that certainly left an impact upon my mind.

But I finally realized that our country, as great as we are, as compassionate as we are as a people, we have never done anything to honor the families of all of those who have sacrificed their lives in the armed forces. Now, we’ve done a great job in honoring veterans. We’ve got veterans memorials for veterans all over this country, and every form you can think of. But we did not have anything that honored the families, the extended families, the armed forces only deal with the immediate family. They don’t deal with anybody else. So the aunts, and the uncles, and the grandmas and grandpas and cousins, and those people were never really involved in these losses because it was strictly immediate family.

And it finally came to me that we needed to do something in this country to honor those families. In West Virginia, we’ve got a memorial on our capital grounds that has better than 11,000 names on them, every one of those sacrificed their life in the armed forces in some fashion. And we had never done anything, never said anything, never paid any tribute, or nothing for those families.

And I decided we needed something to do that. And I was on a committee, we were working on a veteran’s cemetery at the time, trying to figure out where to put what. I suggested that we do something like that in the cemetery, and they said, “Well, the committee said it’s a great idea, come up with something.” So I came up with a memorial, took it back, and they approved it. And we did the first Gold Star families memorial in the Donald C. Kinnard Vietnam Veteran Seven Purple Hearts in the whole United States of America. And we thought we were done, because we thought we had done for our people what we should have done a long time ago. But other places began to figure out, “Well, we haven’t done anything either. We’ve never done anything, paid any tribute, said anything about all these sacrifices.” So it began to grow, and other communities throughout the country began to saying, “Well, we need one of those in our community too.”

So, we formed a foundation to guide the thing along. And West Virginia right now has seven, in seven communities. We’ve got five more in the process someplace in West Virginia. Ohio has 10 and more coming. Texas had a bunch. So, they’re scattered all over the country from Hawaii to California, Florida to New York, and all over. So right now, we have 60 communities in this country that have erected a memorial, Gold Star Family Memorial Monument to honor those loved ones, and to pay tribute to those families. There’s 68 more of them in process somewhere in this country. And we’re in 46 states, which says the American people have a big heart. They are a compassionate group of people, which goes back to our beginning, back to our days when that’s what everybody was talking about in the early times of forming our country.