On the morning of February 23, 1945, Corporal Hershel Williams lay on his stomach in the black volcanic ash on Iwo Jima as he heard the cheers of his comrades.

Suddenly the marines around him started jumping around and shooting in the air, he once said.

His head was still buried in the sand.

When he looked up, he saw "Old Glory" on Mount Suribachi.

Majid Sattar

Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.

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The raising of the American flag on the small island, 1200 kilometers south of Tokyo, was later repeated in a larger version of the Stars and Stripes newspaper and captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal.

The image became one of the most famous wartime photographs, iconographic for the Pacific War against Japan.

Hershel Williams, the last recipient of the Medal of Honor for service in World War II, died Wednesday in Huntington, West Virginia, at the age of 98.

The Veterans Hospital where he died was named after him while he was still alive.

The capture of the island, measuring only 24 square kilometers, by an amphibious landing operation is one of the most famous battles of World War II.

The island's runways were needed for the air raids on Tokyo.

The operation was costly - the Japanese had entrenched themselves in a complex system of trenches and tunnels.

Nearly 7,000 American soldiers and about 20,000 Japanese were killed in the battle.

27 American soldiers were later honored for their service with the Medal of Honor, the highest award for bravery in the United States.

The then 21-year-old Marine Williams had destroyed seven bunkers with his flamethrower that day in the Battle of Iwo Jima, thus enabling the advance of the tanks.

He scurried from one bunker to the next and escaped the Japanese machine gun fire.

In the four-hour operation, he had returned to headquarters five times to get new flamethrowers.

When President Harry S. Truman presented him with the award in October 1945, he praised William's "unyielding determination" and his "extraordinary heroism."

Hershel Woodrow Williams, known as "Woody", was born in 1923 in a small town called Quiet Dell in West Virginia.

He was the youngest of eleven children.

His parents ran a small dairy farm.

Six of his siblings had died during the years of the Spanish flu.

When Woody was eleven, his father died.

The boy soon dropped out of school, helped out on the farm, and earned some money on a job-creation scheme in Montana during the Great Depression.

Williams wanted to join the Marines when he was 17, but his mother refused.

In May 1943 he was accepted into the "United States Marine Corps" - he just reached the minimum height of 1.68 meters.

He made his first combat experience on the Pacific island of Guam.

Then it was on to Iwo Jima.

Later he often spoke about his action in battle.

As a flamethrower, you had to approach the bunkers to within 20 meters.

Once Japanese soldiers rushed out with their rifles and bayonets and ran towards him.

They ran straight into the flames and fell over in slow motion.

Williams was wounded in the leg eleven days after that sortie, but stayed on the island until the end of March, when the battle was over.

In November 1945, a month after his award, he retired from active duty and worked for the Veterans Administration.

Williams established a foundation that awards scholarships to children whose parents died in the war.

In the spring of 2020, he attended a ceremony in Norfolk, Virginia, where a warship was named after him.