Japanese Soldiers Couldn't Believe the Deaf Private Who Just Charged Their Machine Gun Alone скачать в хорошем качестве

Japanese Soldiers Couldn't Believe the Deaf Private Who Just Charged Their Machine Gun Alone

July 31, 1943, New Georgia Island, Solomon Islands. A Japanese Type 92 heavy machine gun had Company B's 2nd Platoon pinned down in a jungle kill zone. The fortified pillbox position was perfectly camouflaged, with interlocking fields of fire designed to shred any infantry assault. Twelve American soldiers were already wounded and dying. The platoon sergeant screamed orders to fall back—staying meant death for everyone. Then 25-year-old Private Rodger Wilton Young from Clyde, Ohio stood up. He was 5-foot-2, weighed 120 pounds, and the Army had twice declared him medically unfit for combat due to severe hearing loss and poor eyesight. He had voluntarily demoted himself from sergeant to private just to deploy with his unit to the Pacific. Now he was about to do something so tactically impossible that Japanese soldiers would refuse to believe their own eyes. Young rose from cover and charged the machine gun position alone—75 yards across open ground through Type 92 fire that could unleash 450 rounds per minute. He couldn't hear the gun clearly through his damaged eardrums. He could barely see the pillbox through his thick, mud-splattered glasses. But he could see his friends dying, and that was all that mattered. The Japanese gun crew watched in stunned paralysis as this tiny American soldier ran directly into their fire. They shot him. He fell. Then he stood back up and kept coming. They shot him again. He went down, blood soaking his uniform. Then he rose again and continued advancing, firing his M1 Garand as he charged. Captured Japanese Sergeant Yamamoto later drew a tactical diagram for interrogators, calculating they'd fired 60-70 rounds directly at Young. He wrote one word at the bottom in English: "IMPOSSIBLE." The veteran soldier, who'd survived brutal combat in Manchuria, told his interrogators: "This American was hit multiple times. We watched him fall. We watched him stand. We could not understand why he would not die." Young closed to within 10 yards of the pillbox—wounded three times, bleeding from his shoulder, ribs, and thigh. He threw a grenade through the firing slit. The explosion destroyed the Type 92 and killed three Japanese soldiers. But a final burst from a second position struck Young in the head, killing him instantly. The machine gun that had pinned down 2nd Platoon fell silent. Young's deliberate sacrifice—drawing all enemy fire onto himself—enabled his platoon to escape the kill zone. Twelve men who would have died that day walked out alive. They carried Young's body with them. For his conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, Private Rodger Wilton Young received the Medal of Honor posthumously. President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented it to Young's parents at the White House on January 6, 1944. Then songwriter Frank Loesser, working for the Army's Special Services Division, read Young's citation and composed "The Ballad of Rodger Young." The song became one of WWII's most popular military anthems, played on Armed Forces Radio across every theater of war. Millions of American servicemen heard Young's name sung in mess halls and foxholes. The lyrics captured what formal citations couldn't: "They've got no time for glory in the Infantry, but in every soldier's heart in all the Infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young." The ballad made Young one of the war's most recognized heroes—for a time. But after the war ended, as veterans came home and started families, the song faded from radio. Young's story nearly vanished with it. He had no Hollywood career like Audie Murphy. His widow chose dignified privacy over public attention. Within 20 years, few Americans outside his Ohio hometown remembered the deaf private who charged a machine gun. Then in 1976, science fiction author Robert Heinlein—a WWII Navy veteran—immortalized Young in "Starship Troopers," naming a spaceship after him and using his story as the archetype of duty over self-interest. New generations discovering Heinlein's novel asked: "Who was Rodger Young?" The U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Moore incorporated his action into leadership curriculum, asking officer candidates: "If regulations had been strictly followed, Young wouldn't have been in combat. His platoon would have been overrun. What does this teach about the limits of policy?" This documentary-style video tells Young's complete story: the impossible charge that defied Japanese comprehension, the ballad that made him famous, the decades of forgetting, and the modern rediscovery that proves courage appears where it must—carried by those who choose to bear it, regardless of who policy said they should be. Unseen Comrades brings you in-depth Medal of Honor stories and forgotten WW2 heroes whose courage shaped history. Subscribe for long-form military documentaries about extraordinary soldiers whose names deserve to be remembered.