World War II Medal of Honor Winner Jacklyn Lucas
Lucas was a Private First Class in Company C, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, 5th Marine Division on February 20th, 1945 when he won his medal. But to appreciate his determination, you must first understand what he did to be on Iwo Jima that day in the first place. Born on February 14th, 1928 in Plymouth, North Carolina, Lucas lost his tobacco farmer dad when he was only ten years old. He became hard to handle and kept getting into trouble. “I was kind of shattered to lose my father,” Lucas would remember. “I guess I just resented a lot of things and that loss. I was a mean kid.”
His mother decided that perhaps a stint at Edwards Military Academy in Salemburg would help set him on the right path. He was sent there when he was eleven, and, sure enough, it turned the trick. Lucas had already earned a cadet captaincy by the time he was thirteen, but that was the year that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. “That signed and sealed the thing for me right there,” he says. “I was determined that I was going to serve in the Marine Corps and fight the enemy.” Lucas attempted to sign up, but failed to fool the recruiters.
In 1942, as resolute as before, he told his mother that no matter what she desired, he was going to sign her name to the enlistment consent papers. If she tried to stop him, he would find another way to join up. On the promise that he would finish school when he got out of the Marines, she agreed to consent to his plan to sign up. Once he was in the Marine Corps, his military school background helped him do well in basic training. He was so proficient in the Camp Lejune heavy machine-gun school that he was assigned to the training command. But all he wanted to do, in his own words “was to kill Japanese.”
While Lucas’ unit was ordered to report to San Diego, the one track mind of Lucas had other ideas. He packed his sea bag and stowed away on a military train to California. When he reached the West Coast, a sergeant discovered Lucas lacked the proper papers, but since it was more trouble than it was worth to send him back where he belonged, they kept him. Lucas soon found himself on board a ship to a staging area in Hawaii.
However, Jacklyn Lucas let the cat out of the bag at Camp Catlin on Oahu. He wrote a letter to his fifteen year old girlfriend from Swan Corner, North Carolina, mentioning his real age! This fact was picked up on by the mail censors, and Lucas was summoned before his colonel. The colonel felt that Lucas was too good of a Marine to simply get rid of for his transgressions. Lucas told the commanding officer that he would simply join the Army anyway. But the colonel deemed Lucas too young for combat. When his unit was shipped out for Tarawa, Lucas found himself staying in Honolulu.
Undeterred, he formulated a plan that would get him sent to where the action was. Marines who found themselves in frequent trouble usually could count on being sent to the front; Lucas proceeded to start picking fights. “Anything I could provoke,” he said. “I got locked up a number of times for fighting, but they let me go. But then I mashed up on some sergeant. I got two different tours of thirty days on bread and water and a lot of rock busting.”
His brawling only succeeded in getting him in the brig more and more often, to the point where he figured it wasn’t going to get him close to combat. So Jacklyn Lucas, on January 9, 1945, climbed aboard one of the troopships leaving from Pearl Harbor and stowed away, hoping it was going somewhere close to the fighting. In an incredible coincidence, his cousin Samuel Oliver Lucas was aboard the same ship. Samuel helped Jacklyn hide in landing craft and the stowaway slept on the weather deck and fed himself for twenty nine days. The day before his name would have gone from the AWOL list to the deserter list, Lucas turned himself in to a Captain Robert H. Dunlap. The captain took him to a Colonel Pollock. Pollock simply remarked, “I’d like to have a whole shipload of fellows that want to fight as bad as you.”
While anchored off of Saipan, another Marine came down with a severe case of appendicitis; Lucas was issued his weapon and gear. On February 14th, 1945, Jacklyn Lucas turned seventeen. Five days later he found himself on the beach at Iwo Jima. With the chaos of war all around him as he landed on the beach, he thought, “It was just where I wanted to be.”
Surviving the hellish landing, Lucas and his unit were making their way toward the Japanese airstrip that was located northeast of Mount Suribachi. They had halted to fire upon an enemy pillbox and had jumped for cover into one of two parallel trenches that led from the pillbox. Unfortunately, the trench next to them was full of Japanese soldiers. As the shooting erupted, Lucas shot and killed one of the enemy but then found his rifle had jammed. “I was looking down at my rifle trying to get the damned thing unjammed, and when I did I saw the grenades. I was the first to see them. I hollored ‘grenades,’ and I dove for them.”
A pair of grenades had landed in the soft volcanic soil, in the midst of Lucas and his men. What he did next, without hesitation, is still the stuff of legend in the Marine Corps today. “I smashed my rifle butt against one and drove it into the volcanic ash, and fell on it, and pulled the other one under me. I was there to fight, and we were there to win. What you have to do you do to win. It was not in me to turn to run.” Only one of the grenades exploded. “That volcanic ash and the good Lord saved me. If I’d been on hard ground that thing would have split me in two. There was just one explosion. One was all I could handle, and I had trouble handling that one. It blew me over on my back, and it punctured my right lung, but it never knocked me out.” Lucas was now on his back, with his right arm twisted underneath him; he actually though that it had been blown off. With his mouth and throat filling up with blood, he kept moving his left hand to show that he was still alive.
While a medic worked on him, a Japanese soldier came up from a hole in the trench, but the medic shot and killed the enemy. Lucas, after several close calls with disaster, was finally evacuated onto the hospital ship Samaritan. Before it sailed for Honolulu, the United States flag went up on Mount Suribachi. “I felt as jubilant as I could be,” Lucas recalled. “I’d fought for my country. I felt a great deal of pride in that. The only regret for me was that I didn’t get to stay there longer to kill more of them.”
Lucas would be treated at field hospitals before he finally arrived at San Francisco, California on March 28th. The mark of desertion he had earned for his leaving his original company was removed from his record in August while he was a patient at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Charleston, South Carolina. He was discharged from the Marine Corps Reserve because of the disability that his wounds caused, on September 18, 1945.
Lucas fulfilled the promise he made to his mother, finishing high school and college. He now lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his 92 year old mother. His three marriages have produced four sons, one who attends West Point. Jacklyn Lucas vividly recollects the day of October 5th, 1945, when President Harry Truman hung the Medal of Honor around his neck. “Truman said he’d rather be a Medal of Honor winner than President of the United States. “I said, ‘Sir, I’ll swap with you.'”
