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After each successful delivery, he reportedly said, "Dear God, let me get just one more man." By nightfall, he had rescued 75 soldiers, including many of the men who had berated him earlier in his military career.
Doss is credited with saving at least 75 soldiers that night, but his son estimates it was well over 100. In addition, Doss was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration awarded to service members. The 2016 film “Hacksaw Ridge” was about Doss' early life and his actions that night in Okinawa.
As fighting surged back and forth over the ridge for several days, about 2,500 Americans lost their lives and nearly twice as many Japanese troops, said Chris Majewski, a former marine who, as director of the island's battle of Okinawa museum, leads regular battlefield tours of the site.
The Most Deadly Battle In History: Stalingrad
The figures for the Battle of Stalingrad battle are shocking even by the standards of the other campaigns on this list. Running from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943, Stalingrad led to 633,000 battle deaths.
Desmond Thomas Doss (February 7, 1919 – March 23, 2006) was a United States Army corporal who served as a combat medic with an infantry company in World War II. Lynchburg, Virginia, U.S. Piedmont, Alabama, U.S. He was twice awarded the Bronze Star Medal for actions on Guam and in the Philippines.
The japanese didn't cut the rope because that was the only entrance to the battlefield.
He had a lung and five ribs removed, and later, in 1976, he lost his hearing suddenly. Doss moved to Lookout Mountain in northwestern Georgia in the 1950s and built a house in the town of Rising Fawn, where he lived with his wife and their son. She died on 17 November 1991 following a car accident.
However, there were some “fallen stars” as well. Nearly 1,100 U.S. Army generals served at some point during World War II, and of those about 40 died during or immediately following the war. Not all were in combat units, and some were not in enemy territory when they died.
Desmond Doss was not your average hero. He would become a Medal of Honor recipient, the United States of America's highest and most prestigious military award, as a combat medic who saved many of his comrades lives in battle without firing a single shot.
Seventy-nine medical personnel have been awarded the Medal of Honor, our nation's highest award for valor in combat. One of these is combat medic, SP5 Clarence Sasser. Clarence Sasser was born in a small rural community in south Texas in 1947.
Among historians the verdict is mixed. While it is acknowledged that Soviet soldiers contributed the most on the battlefield and endured much higher casualties, American and British air campaigns were also key, as was the supply of arms and equipment by the US under lend-lease.
Axis powers. The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
On May 4, 1945 during the Battle of Okinawa, Doss helped rescue at least 75 wounded men, including some Japanese soldiers, by lowering them down a cliff and treating their injuries.
After receiving word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Desmond T. Doss felt that God was calling him to serve his country. Heeding this call, Desmond enlisted in the Army Medical Corps as a noncombatant in 1942.
A quiet, skinny kid from Lynchburg, Va., Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist who wouldn't touch a weapon or work on the Sabbath. He enlisted in the Army as a combat medic because he believed in the cause, but had vowed not to kill. The Army wanted nothing to do with him.
Upwards of 3,000 Japanese were estimated killed.
HACKSAW RIDGE is the extraordinary true story of WWII medic Desmond Doss, played by Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spiderman), who, in Okinawa during the bloodiest battle of WWII, miraculously saved 75 men in a matter of hours without firing or carrying a gun.
Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat and particularly ruthless. The Americans finally took Hacksaw Ridge on May 6.
If the medic didn't do the job right and fast, he lost the patient. And sometimes he had to deliver his first aid while under aimed enemy fire, because occasionally Germans would fire on a medic at work between the lines.
Unlike their predecessors in previous wars, medics and corpsmen in Vietnam fought alongside their fellow soldiers and Marines — many carried rifles, sidearms, even hand grenades along with their medical kits.
Medics were sometimes chosen for their medical expertise; more often they had to be trained from scratch. Some were conscientious objectors who opposed the taking of life and were assigned this role as an alternative to a combat role.