Cpl, U.S. Army — World War II
Desmond Thomas Doss was born on February 7, 1919, in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised as a devout Seventh-day Adventist. His faith taught nonviolence and Sabbath-keeping, and it shaped the whole of his life. Before the war he worked as a joiner at the shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. Although that essential war work entitled him to a deferment, Doss refused it and enlisted in the Army on April 1, 1942, determined to serve — but as a medic, because he would not carry a weapon or take a life.
Doss served with Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division. On Guam and on Leyte in the Philippines in 1944 he earned two Bronze Star Medals with “V” devices for aiding wounded men under fire. In the spring of 1945 the division landed on Okinawa.
From April 29 to May 21, 1945, on and around the Maeda Escarpment — the jagged 400-foot ridge American troops called Hacksaw Ridge — Doss repeatedly exposed himself to artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire to rescue the wounded. When an attack was driven back with some 75 men lying wounded on top of the ridge, Doss stayed behind alone, carried the casualties one by one to the cliff edge, and lowered them to safety on a rope-supported litter. In the days that followed he treated men within yards of enemy positions, and after he was himself seriously wounded by a grenade and then shot through the arm, he splinted his own shattered arm with a rifle stock and crawled 300 yards to an aid station — having first given up his own litter to a man hurt worse than he was.
President Harry S. Truman presented Doss the Medal of Honor on October 12, 1945, making him the first conscientious objector ever to receive it. Tuberculosis contracted on Leyte cost him a lung and years of treatment, and an overdose of antibiotics later left him deaf until a cochlear implant restored his hearing in 1988. He farmed in Rising Fawn, Georgia, and died on March 23, 2006, in Piedmont, Alabama. He is buried in Chattanooga National Cemetery, and his story reached a new generation through the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society