Desmond Doss: the unarmed hero of Hacksaw Ridge

Desmond Doss went to war without a weapon. A devout Seventh-day Adventist, he refused to carry a rifle, and many of his fellow soldiers despised him for it; some threatened him openly. On a cliff on Okinawa in 1945 he saved the lives of dozens of them, and became the first conscientious objector of World War II to receive the Medal of Honor. He himself disliked the label of conscientious objector and called himself a "conscientious cooperator."²

A man of faith

Doss was born on 7 February 1919 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church. He held particularly strong convictions against killing and against working on the Sabbath, which Adventists keep on Saturday. When the United States entered the war he was working at the Newport News naval shipyard, a job that could easily have earned him a deferment.³

He did not take it. Doss believed the war was just and wanted to do his part, but for him that meant saving lives, not taking them. He went into the army in the spring of 1942 and was assigned as a medic. In World War II more than 70,000 men were classed as conscientious objectors; some refused to serve at all, but about 25,000 served in the armed forces in noncombat roles, as medics and chaplains.⁴

Boot camp

The army excused Doss from weapons training and even gave him passes to attend church on Saturdays, but it could not make his comrades accept him. He was harassed and called a coward; men threw boots at him while he knelt to pray at night, and one warned that he would make sure Doss did not come back alive from combat. His officers tried to have him discharged on grounds of mental illness, which he refused to accept, and another officer tried to have him court-martialed for refusing to hold a rifle. Both attempts failed.⁵

Among the men who wanted him out was Captain Jack Glover. After the war Glover called him "one of the bravest persons alive," and said the irony was that Doss ended up saving his life.⁶

Guam and Leyte

In 1944 Doss shipped out to the Pacific with the medical detachment of the 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. The division landed on Guam in July 1944, and the soldiers who had once threatened him soon learned what a Bible-carrying medic was worth. For treating wounded men under fire on Guam he received the Bronze Star for valor. After Guam the regiment fought on Leyte in the Philippines, and Doss earned a second Bronze Star. On Leyte he also caught the tuberculosis that would trouble him for years.⁷

The Maeda Escarpment

By late April 1945 the American advance on Okinawa had stalled before the Japanese defenses around Shuri, and the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment barred the way. Its eastern part, a sheer cliff above the village of Maeda, was called the Maeda Escarpment by the 96th Division and also "Hacksaw Ridge" and the "Big Escarpment." The Japanese had spent years honeycombing the ridge with caves and tunnels, and they fought from its reverse slope with grenades and mortars.⁸ › The Battle of Okinawa, 1945

The 307th Infantry moved into the line at the escarpment on 29 April, taking over that part of the line from the 381st Infantry of the exhausted 96th Division. The cliff rose about 400 feet, and its top 35 feet formed an overhang that the men could climb only on cargo nets hung down the face. Fighting on top was so fierce that men came back across the narrow crest swearing and crying that they would not go back, and then went back minutes later, throwing grenades as fast as they could pull the pins.⁹

One more man

Doss was the aid man of Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry. Unarmed, he treated the wounded under fire, having removed his medic's markings because the Japanese targeted medics. On 2 May, as the remnants of Company A and Company B climbed the nets to the top, he went 200 yards ahead of the lines under rifle and mortar fire to bring back a wounded man.¹⁰

The rescue that made him famous came when the battalion reached the summit and was hit by a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. His citation records approximately 75 casualties and says the rest were driven back. Doss refused to take cover. He stayed in the fire-swept area with the wounded, carried them one by one to the edge of the escarpment, and lowered them on a rope-supported litter down the cliff to friendly hands. He tied them in with a special knot he knew, and after each man, he reportedly said, "Dear God, let me get just one more man." The National WWII Museum dates the order to withdraw to 5 May and says Doss rescued 75 men.¹¹

The Army's official history of Okinawa, written soon after the war, singled him out as "one of the most remarkable incidents" of the battle: a Seventh-day Adventist who would not touch a gun, who time after time remained on top of the escarpment after the others had been driven off, lowering the wounded over the side in a rope litter.¹²

The days that followed

The citation lists more. On 4 May he treated four men cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within eight yards of the cave mouth, then made four trips under fire to carry them out. On 5 May he gave plasma to a wounded artillery officer while shells fell around them, and later that day crawled to a man who had fallen 25 feet from a Japanese position and carried him 100 yards to safety.¹³

The escarpment fell on 6 May. The cost was terrible: the 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry, went up the escarpment on 29 April about 800 strong and came down on 7 May with 324 men, and in one 36-hour period it lost eight company commanders wounded. The 77th Division estimated that it had killed more than 3,000 Japanese in the seven-day battle.¹⁴

Wounded near Shuri

On the night of 21 May, in an attack on high ground near Shuri, Doss stayed in the open with the wounded while the rest of his company took cover, at the risk of being mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese soldier, until a grenade exploded and wounded him badly in the legs. Rather than call another aid man out of cover, he treated himself and waited five hours for the litter bearers.¹⁵

As they carried him back, the party was caught in a tank attack. Seeing a more badly wounded man nearby, Doss crawled off the litter and told the bearers to take the other man first. While he waited for them, a sniper's bullet shattered his arm. He bound a rifle stock to the arm as a splint and crawled 300 yards over rough ground to the aid station. He was evacuated at the end of May, and for a time he was even reported dead in his hometown newspaper.¹⁶

The Medal of Honor

On 12 October 1945, on the White House lawn, President Harry Truman placed the Medal of Honor around the neck of Doss, by then a corporal. According to the National WWII Museum, Truman told him, "I'm proud of you. You really deserve this. I consider this a greater honor than being president." Doss was the first conscientious objector of World War II to receive the medal, and the only one in that war; the National Archives notes that he was one of the few conscientious objectors ever to earn it.¹⁷

Doss himself said he received the medal because he had kept the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12. The citation ends by saying that his name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.¹⁸

Legacy

The war stayed with him. Doss spent years recovering from his wounds and from tuberculosis, and he died on 23 March 2006 in Piedmont, Alabama, aged 87. He is buried in the Chattanooga National Cemetery in Tennessee. His story reached a worldwide audience in the film Hacksaw Ridge, which won Oscars at the 2017 Academy Awards.¹⁹

Read the full story of the Battle of Okinawa, meet America's greatest military heroes and the most decorated soldiers in history, or explore the World War II. See what else happened on 5 May, the day the museum gives for his rescue.