Tony Stein’s Homemade Stinger at Iwo Jima: WW2 Marine Story

Name: Tony Stein’s Homemade Stinger at Iwo Jima: WW2 Marine Story
Uploaded: 2026-09-12T14:09:01+00:00
Duration: 44 min 26 s
Channel: WW2 Dispatch

00:00February 19, 1945. Two minutes past nine in the morning. Green Beach One, the southern end of

00:07Iwo Jima, in the shadow of a dead volcano called Suribachi. The ramp drops, and a 23-year-old

00:15corporal from Dayton, Ohio, steps into sand that is not sand. It is volcanic ash, black, coarse,

00:23loose as dry cement, and it takes his boot to the ankle and keeps it. The beach ahead of him

00:29does not run flat toward the island. It climbs in terraces, steps of black grit taller than a man,

00:36and to get off the water's edge, you go up them on your hands and knees while every wave of

00:41landing

00:41craft behind you unloads on top of you. His name is Tony Stein, Company A, 1st Battalion, 28th Marines.

00:50He is the first man of his unit to be on station, and the weapon in his hands does not

00:55officially

00:56exist. I want you to take that literally. There is no stock number for it. No armorer signed it out.

01:03It is not on the equipment list of his battalion, his regiment, his division, or of any infantry unit

01:10in any army anywhere in the world that morning. Its firing mechanism came out of the wing of a wrecked

01:17Navy fighter. Now it has a rifle stock bolted to the back of it, and a bipod under the front.

01:22And it

01:23has just come ashore in the first wave of the largest amphibious assault the Marine Corps had

01:28ever launched. The Marines around him call it the stinger. Here is what makes the next 20 minutes worth

01:35your full attention. What Tony Stein did on this beach was not simply that he carried an odd weapon.

01:41Plenty of men carried odd things ashore in the Pacific. What he did was stand up. Not dive.

01:48Not crawl. Not press himself into the base of a terrace with everybody else. Stand up, in the open,

01:54on a beach covered by dozens of concealed Japanese guns, deliberately, and wait to be shot at.

02:01That is not bravado. That is arithmetic. And by the end of this story, you will know exactly what he

02:07was calculating. Because it is the real reason the men in the pillboxes in front of him could not

02:12stop him. It has surprisingly little to do with the gun. But before any of that, there is the strangest

02:19part of that morning. For the first several minutes on Green Beach, almost nothing happens.

02:26Men come off the ramps into that black ash, expecting the world to end. And instead, they hear

02:32their own breathing. Scattered mortar rounds. A machine gun somewhere off to the right. Nothing

02:39like what 72 straight days of American bombing and three days of naval gunfire were supposed to have

02:45left behind. And nothing like what these men had been briefed to expect. Some of them said later they

02:51had the same thought at the same moment. We killed them all. It's over. We walked in.

02:59They had not killed them all. Not remotely. The quiet was a decision. Somebody on that island

03:06had ordered it, and had spent months making sure his men could obey it, while a battleship threw

03:11shells the size of automobiles at them. Every minute the Americans were allowed to land unopposed

03:17was another minute of Americans packed onto a strip of loose ash with nowhere to go.

03:23If you want more stories about the American Marines who fought on the Iwo Jima, press like and subscribe.

03:29That is how a story like this one finds the people who go looking for it.

03:34Back to Stein. The 28th Marines had the hardest and narrowest job on the whole island that day.

03:41At the southern tip, Iwo Jima pinches down to a neck about 750 yards wide. On the far side of

03:48that neck

03:49stands Suribachi. 550 feet of dead volcano with an entire garrison inside it.

03:56The regiment's orders were brutally simple. Go straight across. Cut the mountain off from the

04:02rest of the island in one push on the first day, so the men landing to the north would not

04:07be shot

04:08in the back by artillery firing down the length of the beaches. 750 yards. On paper, an eight-minute walk.

04:16Now hold on to a number for me, because it comes back. Nearly 70 camouflaged concrete blockhouses

04:23covered the approaches to that mountain. Another 50 were dug into the slopes within the first 100

04:29feet of elevation. Roughly 2,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors held that sector under a kernel named

04:37Kanahiko Atsuchi. And they were connected underground, so that a position you thought you had cleared

04:43could be occupied again from below an hour later. 70 blockhouses across a front that narrow.

04:50That is one every 10 yards of frontage. And here is what you need to understand about a well-built

04:57pillbox, because it is the whole problem of this story. You do not see it. Not from 50 yards,

05:04not from 20. It is sunk into the ground with only a firing slit showing, packed with sand and ash,

05:11planted over. It does not fire at the first man who walks past. It waits for a group. And the

05:18moment

05:18it does fire, the information you have just received, there it is, has already cost you two or three men,

05:26and you have received it while lying flat, in ash so soft you cannot dig a hole in it.

05:35At about 10 o'clock, all along that beach, the island opened up. Stein's platoon went down where it

05:42stood. Not pinned in the usual sense of the word. Pinned by fire coming from three directions from

05:48positions nobody could locate. And Tony Stein raised a weapon that fired 1,400 rounds a minute.

05:56Nearly three times what any other man on that beach could put out. And discovered the flaw built into

06:03his own invention. That rate of fire had a price attached to it. And the price came due about

06:09four seconds after he pulled the trigger. 9.58 in the morning. Tony Stein is lying at the base of

06:16a

06:16terrace of black ash with a weapon nobody in the United States government has ever approved. And he

06:23pulls the trigger for the first time on Iwo Jima. The sound is wrong. Everybody who heard a stinger fire

06:30said some version of the same thing. A Browning .30 caliber on a tripod, the standard machine gun of the

06:37American infantry, has a rhythm you can count. This did not have a rhythm. It was a single tearing

06:44noise, like heavy canvas being ripped in one motion. And then it stopped.

06:491,400 rounds a minute. The belt held 100 rounds. Do that division in your head.

06:58Four seconds. That is the whole tragedy and the whole genius of the thing he carried.

07:04In four seconds, Tony Stein could put more metal into a firing slit than a Browning crew could manage

07:12in 15. And he could do it while walking, from the hip, alone, with no tripod to set up and

07:20no

07:20assistant gunner to feed him. And then he was holding 18 pounds of empty steel on a beach where

07:26the nearest ammunition was behind him, downhill, in the open, under fire. Remember that number.

07:33Four seconds. It is the reason for everything he did for the rest of the day. And it is the

07:40reason

07:40this story has eight trips in it. Where the weapon came from matters only because of what it cost him.

07:47Before the war, Stein had been a toolmaker in Dayton, Ohio, a man who made the machines that make parts,

07:54who thought intolerances and fittings. Aircraft machine guns came off wrecked planes by the crate

08:00in the Pacific. They were light, they were fast, and they were useless to a rifleman,

08:06because they had no stock, no sights, no way to be carried and aimed by one man.

08:12Inside the 5th Marine Division, somebody solved that. A sergeant named Mel Grevich is generally

08:18credited with the design. Stein had the hands to finish his own. A buttstock off an M1 Garand.

08:25A bipod off a Browning automatic rifle. A trigger fabricated where no trigger had ever been. Six of

08:32them existed. Six in a division of 19,000 men. Which means no armorer on that beach had spare parts

08:40for it. No supply officer had planned belts for it. If it jammed, the man who knew how to fix

08:46it

08:46was the man holding it. And he would be fixing it in the open. Now look at what that beach

08:52had become.

08:52The 28th Marines had come ashore to cross 750 yards. They were not crossing anything. The ash was

09:01so loose that a man who tried to dig a foxhole watched the sides pour back into the bottom faster

09:06than he could throw them out. There was no cover on Green Beach. There was only the shape of the

09:12ground.

09:13Those terraces. And the terraces were exactly where the Japanese had registered their mortars.

09:18Because of course they had. They had been on that island for months with nothing else to do.

09:24And the fire was coming from nowhere.

09:27That is the detail that men who were there kept returning to for the next 50 years.

09:33Not the volume. The invisibility.

09:36A Marine would take a burst across his front from a position 60 yards away, roll up on his elbows,

09:43look straight at the ground it came from, and see a slope.

09:47Gray ash. A few scrubby plants. A low hump of earth that looked like every other hump of earth

09:53on that island. Then the slit would close, or the gun would simply stop, and the hump would go back

09:59to

10:00being a hump. Colonel Atsuchi's men had one principle governing them, and it came down from

10:06the island's commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. Do not fight at the water's edge.

10:14Do not charge. Do not reveal yourself for a target that is not worth revealing yourself for.

10:22Kill from inside the ground. And let the Americans wear themselves out trying to find you.

10:28That order is the reason the first minutes were quiet. It is also the reason that by mid-morning,

10:34the 1st Battalion was stalled with its face in the ash. I want you to sit inside Tony Stein's problem

10:41for a second. Because it is a cleaner problem than most of the ones in this war. He is holding,

10:48arguably, the highest volume of fire any single infantryman in the Pacific could deliver.

10:54He can destroy a firing position through its own slit in about 2 seconds if he can put the burst

10:59on it.

11:00He cannot see a single one of them. All that firepower is worthless without one piece of information.

11:08And the information is held exclusively by the enemy. And the enemy will only release it under

11:14one condition. When they decide to shoot at something. There was exactly one way to make them decide.

11:22Every training manual in the Marine Corps described that method. Described it as the definition of getting

11:27yourself killed. The 28th Marines would take almost 400 casualties before dark that day.

11:35At around 10 o'clock in the morning, on a beach where every living American was flat on his belly,

11:40Corporal Tony Stein got to his feet. Stop the film right there.

11:44Corporal Stein is on one knee in the ash, an empty weapon in his hands. And before he stands up,

11:49I want you to see the choice the way he had to see it. Because it is not the choice

11:54most people assume.

11:56The assumption is that staying down was the safe option and standing up was the reckless one.

12:01On Iwo Jima that was false. And every man on that beach was in the process of learning it.

12:07Staying down meant this. Your battalion is stalled 200 yards inland of the water. Behind you,

12:14the follow-on waves are still coming. Because they have to. Because the schedule does not care.

12:19And they are stacking up on a strip of ash with no cover.

12:23In front of you are firing positions you cannot see. Above you, on the mountain, are mortar and

12:30artillery observers who can see everything. And the ground you are lying on has been measured by them,

12:35at leisure, for months. Being pinned on that island was not a pause. It was a rate of loss.

12:42Men were being killed, lying perfectly still, doing everything correctly, by shells fired from

12:48positions they would never lay eyes on. Standing up meant this. For a few seconds you are the only

12:56vertical object in a field of horizontal men. Every gun with an arc that covers that ground will take

13:02you. Because you are the target their whole day has been waiting for. And that is precisely the

13:09point. Because a gun that fires at you has just told you where it is. That is the trade Tony

13:15Stein made.

13:16And I want to be exact about what he was buying. Because it is the answer to the question in

13:21the

13:22title of this video. And we are only a third of the way in. He was not buying glory. He

13:28was not buying

13:29revenge. He was buying map coordinates, with his own body as the payment, for a weapon that could act on

13:37them faster than anything else on that beach. Now put yourself on the other side of the ash for a

13:42moment. Inside the concrete. The men in those block houses were not amateurs, and they were not

13:47fanatics wasting ammunition. They were the most disciplined defensive troops the Japanese army put

13:53anywhere in the Pacific. Their standing orders were to stay hidden, to fire on fixed arcs at worthwhile

13:59targets, and to make the Americans pay for every yard while remaining invisible. That discipline was the

14:06strength of the entire island. It was also the one thing about them that could be used. Because there

14:12is exactly one target a hidden machine gun cannot ignore, and it is a man standing straight up at 60

14:18yards, in the open, firing at you. Stein got to his feet. What happened next took seconds, and it

14:26happened more than once during that morning. The ground around him began to move. Ash jumped in lines,

14:32and in the middle of it he stayed upright long enough to do the only thing that mattered. To look.

14:38Not to shoot. To look. And to fix in his head the places where the ground had winked at him.

14:45There. And there. And that low hump that is not a hump. Then he dropped. And he went. He did

14:55not walk at

14:55them from the front. A pillbox is blind outside the arc of its slit, and the entire art of killing

15:01one is

15:01getting into the ground it cannot see. He worked the angles, moving in that ash on legs that had spent

15:08two years in the paramarines, and one winner in a boxing ring in Dayton, Ohio, where he had won the

15:13City Golden Gloves title at 128 pounds. By 1945, he was carrying 60 more pounds of muscle than that.

15:22It mattered. Eighteen pounds of aircraft machine gun, fired standing, from the hip, is a load that most

15:30men cannot control for more than a burst. Then, from the flank, at close range, he put the stinger into

15:37the firing slit. Understand what a two-second burst from that weapon does to a concrete room. Forty-some

15:44rounds through an opening the size of a mail slot, and the inside of a pillbox is a sealed box

15:50of

15:50concrete and steel. What does not hit a man directly comes apart against the walls and goes looking for

15:57him. The gun stops. The position simply ceases to be part of the battle.

16:041. He was already moving to the next one before the marines behind him understood what they were

16:09watching. 2. His Medal of Honor citation, written afterward by men who had to justify every word of

16:17it to a review board, uses a phrase that is almost flat in its plainness. He boldly charged the enemy

16:24pillboxes one by one. That is the entire tactical description of an action that would end with 20

16:31enemy dead credited to one man's hands. And then the tearing noise stopped, and did not start again.

16:394 seconds a belt. He had been firing in short bursts, the way a man who built the thing himself

16:45knew he had

16:46to. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic. Somewhere in that first stretch of the assault, Tony Stein ran

16:53empty, deep inside ground that had just learned exactly who he was. The ammunition was behind him,

17:00downhill. On the beach, in the open, across ground the Japanese had ranged. He was going to have to run

17:07for it. And then run back. And then do it again. So he did two things that morning that no

17:13marine had

17:14ever been trained to do. He took off his helmet. Then he took off his boots. Ash is not sand.

17:21That is

17:22the first thing every man on Iwo Jima learned, and the last thing anyone remembered about the place.

17:28It is ground volcanic glass, coarse and gray-black, and it behaves like nothing on an American beach.

17:34It does not pack. A boot sinks and then slides back half the distance it gained. And it pours,

17:41over the tops of leggings, down into the boot itself, until a man is running with two or three

17:47pounds of grit riding on each foot, ankles rubbed raw, every stride shortened.

17:53There is one more thing about that ground that the newsreels never conveyed. Iwo Jima was not a dead

17:59island. It was a live volcano with a lid on it. In places, the ash was warm to the hand,

18:05and sulfur steam leaked out of cracks in the earth. Men later warmed their rations by digging a hole.

18:11The whole island smelled faintly of rotten eggs. That was the surface Tony Stein now proposed to cross

18:18at a dead run, in his socks. The helmet went for the same reason as the boots, weight and speed.

18:25Nothing more romantic than that. His citation puts it in 11 words. He removed his helmet and shoes to

18:31expedite his movements. He was about to trade every scrap of protection he had for seconds,

18:37and he knew the exchange rate, because he had spent the last half hour finding out precisely what those

18:42seconds were worth. Then he ran for the beach. Now I want you to hold two numbers side by side

18:49for the

18:49rest of this video, because the entire day lives in the gap between them. 20 enemy dead. 8 trips.

18:59Every American who has ever heard of Tony Stein knows the first number. The second one is the one

19:05that should stop you. 20 is what the gun did. 8 is what the man did. And he did it

19:12after the gun was

19:13empty, when he had nothing in his hands worth pointing at anybody. Because here is the part that

19:19changes the shape of this story. He did not come back alone from a single one of those trips. Eight

19:25times he crossed that open ground to the shoreline, filled his arms with linked .30 caliber belts,

19:31and eight times he came back up carrying or dragging a wounded Marine with him. Not once. Not as a

19:39gesture

19:39on the last run when the shooting had died down. Every time. Think about what a wounded man on Green

19:46Beach was that morning. There was no cover to move him to. Corpsmen were working in the open, kneeling,

19:52because you cannot treat a man lying flat and there was nothing to kneel behind. Aid stations were holes

19:59scraped in ash that filled themselves back in. A Marine hit in the legs at the base of a terrace

20:05could not crawl out. He could only lie there and wait while the mortars walked back and forth

20:10across ground the Japanese had measured in advance. Half the men killed on that beach on the first day

20:16were hit by fire from positions no American ever saw. So each of Stein's runs had two purposes stacked

20:23on top of each other. One was ammunition, which is to say the ability to keep killing pillboxes.

20:29The other was a specific man with a name and a hometown who was going to die where he lay

20:35if nobody

20:35carried him. And the second purpose is what made the runs so much more dangerous than they had to be.

20:42A man sprinting alone is a hard target. A man coming back uphill through loose ash with belts of

20:49ammunition over his shoulders and another human being under his arm is not a hard target. He is slow,

20:56he is upright, and he is predictable. Which brings us to the counter move,

21:01because there was one. Remember that the mountain was watching. Sotibachi rose 550 feet directly over

21:09that beach, and it was hollow with observation posts. Japanese observers up there had the entire landing

21:16spread beneath them like a table. They were not aiming rifles. They were calling numbers into

21:21telephones. Corrections for mortars and artillery emplaced behind the ridge where no American ship

21:27could reach them. A man who runs the same line twice on ground like that is doing the observer's

21:33work for him. By the third or fourth trip, the route Tony Stein had to use was no longer a

21:40secret

21:40from anybody. And the fire that met him on it was no longer general fire falling on a beach. It

21:47was

21:47fire meant for him. So he changed. Different lines. Different pauses. Different starts. There is a reason

21:55the citation says under intense fire and not under fire. And there is a reason it says eight and does

22:03not

22:03say ten, or twelve, or as many as necessary. Somebody was counting, from cover, in disbelief. And that

22:11count made it into the paperwork. Twice that morning, the weapon he had built with his own hands was shot

22:18out of them. Not damaged. Not dropped. Struck by enemy fire and torn away while he was holding it. And

22:26the

22:26second time it happened, he was not attacking anything. He was standing in one place, on purpose,

22:32doing the single most dangerous job in infantry warfare. The one job that removes your ability

22:38to move at all. His platoon had been ordered to pull back. Covering a withdrawal is the job nobody

22:45volunteers for twice. Everything else in infantry combat lets you move. You rush, you drop, you crawl,

22:52you use the ground. Covering a withdrawal removes all of it. Your own men are getting up out of the

22:58ash

22:59behind you and going the other way, with their backs to the enemy, which is the most vulnerable

23:03thing a body of infantry can do. The only thing keeping the Japanese heads down while that happens

23:09is the volume of fire you personally are putting out. The moment you stop firing to relocate,

23:15you have stopped being useful. So you do not relocate. You stay exactly where you are,

23:22in a place the enemy has already found, and you keep firing until the last man is clear.

23:28Now remember the four seconds. A hundred round belt at 1,400 rounds a minute. In the assault,

23:36that arithmetic was survivable, because he was moving between bursts and the enemy had to keep

23:40refinding him. Standing still, feeding belt after belt into a weapon that ate them at that rate,

23:47from a position the mountain could see, is something else entirely. That is when it happened. Enemy fire

23:56struck the stinger and tore it out of his hands. Read that again slowly. Not a wound. Not a jam.

24:04A round or a burst hit the weapon he was holding, and 18 pounds of aircraft machine gun went out

24:12of his

24:13grip and into the ash. There is a version of the story where that is the end of it. Where

24:20a man who

24:21has already stood up under fire, killed 20 of the enemy, and made repeated runs across open ground,

24:27now discovers that he has no weapon, and God has finally given him permission to lie down. He ran back

24:35to the beach, got another weapon, and returned to the same position. Then it happened a second time.

24:42And he did it again. His citation records this in one line, the way it records everything else,

24:48as if it were a routine matter of supply. Twice his weapon was shot from his hands,

24:53and each time he went back for another, and returned to cover his men.

24:58The marines who wrote that sentence knew exactly how it would read to a board in Washington,

25:03which is why they kept it flat. So now, let us answer the question this whole story has been

25:09circling. Why couldn't they stop him? The easy answer is the gun, and the easy answer is wrong.

25:17Volume of fire did not break Japanese pillboxes on Iwo Jima.

25:21American ships had thrown 14-inch shells at that island for three days, and 8-inch, and 5-inch,

25:28and the pillboxes at the base of Suribachi were still shooting at 9.58 in the morning.

25:34If concrete could be beaten by weight of metal, Iwo Jima would have been over before the ramps went down.

25:40The real answer is that Kuribayashi's defense was not built against American firepower. It was built

25:46against American procedure. Every one of those blockhouses was cited on the assumption that

25:51Americans attack a strongpoint the same way, every time, because it is the correct way.

25:57Step 1. A crew-served weapon sets up and suppresses the slit. A machine gun on a tripod, a gunner

26:03and an

26:04assistant, and a load of ammunition. 30-60 seconds to get into position and firing, and a very obvious

26:10silhouette while doing it. Step 2. A squad works around to the flank under that suppression.

26:17Step 3. The demolition and flame men come up and finish it. That chain is slow, and it is visible,

26:24and the whole genius of the island was aimed at the seams inside it. The pillboxes were mutually

26:30supporting, which means the flanking route into one of them was covered by the guns of another.

26:34The setup time for the American machine gun was time enough for a mortar to be called down on it.

26:40The system worked. It worked all over Iwo Jima on that first day, and it kept working for five more

26:46weeks, and it inflicted more American casualties than any battle in the history of the Marine Corps.

26:53What Tony Stein did was collapse the entire chain into one body,

26:57the enemy. Locating the enemy, suppressing him, and assaulting him were three separate functions

27:04performed by three separate groups of men on three separate clocks. Stein performed all three,

27:10himself, on one clock with no setup time at all. And he performed the first one, the locating,

27:17by using the only thing that could not be jammed, ranged, or predicted. Himself standing upright.

27:25A pillbox crew looking out of a slit at a beach full of prone Americans has all the time in

27:30the world.

27:31A pillbox crew that opens fire and finds that the man it fired at is not dead, is not pinned,

27:38and is already moving into the blind arc at a speed nobody has ever moved at in that ash.

27:44That crew has about 11 seconds of life remaining, and no procedure for any of it.

27:49I want to be honest with you about the scale of this, because it matters. One man with a homemade

27:55machine gun did not break the defense of Iwo Jima. Nothing broke the defense of Iwo Jima. It had to

28:01be

28:01dug out, position by position, for 36 days, at a cost of more than 26,000 American casualties.

28:09What Stein broke was a seam, on one narrow front, for a few hours, on the morning everything depended on.

28:15And what he was actually producing out there all morning was not dead Japanese. It was something else.

28:21And the men who needed it most were carrying something on their backs that could not be fired.

28:25Picture a man on that beach carrying 70 pounds of pressurized tanks on his back.

28:30He is a flamethrower operator. And he is the most important human being on Iwo Jima.

28:36And the shortest lived.

28:385th Division assault teams were built around him.

28:41Riflemen to shield him. A demolition man with a satchel charge of high explosive.

28:46And the operator, with the tanks and the wand.

28:50Against a concrete blockhouse, that team was the answer. Not naval gunfire. Not aircraft.

28:57Four or five men crawling up on a position from an angle it could not see.

29:02And then flame through the aperture. Or 20 pounds of explosive against the door.

29:08But look at what that team requires before it can do anything at all.

29:12It requires somebody to point.

29:15The operator cannot search for the pillbox.

29:18He is slow. He is enormous.

29:21And the tanks on his back are the most conspicuous object in the American arsenal.

29:25He has to be walked to a specific piece of ground and told.

29:29That hump. 60 yards. 11 o'clock. The slit faces left.

29:35Without that sentence, he is a very heavy man crawling around a beach, hoping to find a doorway that has

29:42been engineered not to be found.

29:45That sentence is what Tony Stein made all morning. That is the answer.

29:50Every time he stood up and drew fire, and every time he went in and silenced a position from its

29:55blind side, he was converting invisible ground into targets.

30:00For himself in that moment, and for everyone around him for the rest of the day.

30:05He was a one-man reconnaissance, conducted with his own body as the instrument, feeding a machine that could not

30:12start without him.

30:1520 enemy dead was not the achievement. 20 enemy dead was the receipt.

30:21At about 10.35 in the morning, roughly 90 minutes after the ramps dropped, a small group of marines from

30:28the 28th waded into water on the far side of Iwo Jima.

30:31They had crossed the island. 750 yards, and it had taken an hour and a half and cost more men

30:39than most battalions lose in a week.

30:41But the thing was done, and it was done on schedule, on the first morning, which almost nothing else in

30:47that battle would be.

30:49Mount Suribachi, and Colonel Atsuchi, and roughly 2,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors inside it, were now cut off from

30:57the rest of the Japanese army on that island.

30:59They would fight for four more days as a garrison with no reinforcement, no resupply, and no line of retreat.

31:07And here I have to be exact about how thin the achievement was.

31:12Because the line the marines had drawn across the neck was a line on a map, not a cleared corridor.

31:19The ground behind them was still full of live positions, connected underground, reoccupied from below.

31:26Men who had walked past a hump of ash at 10 o'clock were shot from behind it at noon.

31:31The 28th marines took almost 400 casualties on the first day.

31:36The next morning, February 20th, in cold rain, the regiment turned left and began pushing into the base of the

31:42mountain itself.

31:42They overran about 40 separate Japanese strong points that day and gained roughly 200 yards.

31:49200 yards, 40 strong points, and a casualty for every yard.

31:56Sit with that ratio for a moment, because it tells you what a Japanese blockhouse on Iwo Jima cost when

32:02nobody was standing up to find it for you.

32:04That was the market price.

32:06That was the number Tony Stein had been holding down on Green Beach the day before, one position at a

32:12time, in his socks.

32:16Somewhere in that fighting, a Japanese mortar round killed Colonel Atsuchi at the mouth of a cave.

32:21And the Suribachi garrison lost its commander and kept fighting anyway, because the positions did not need a commander.

32:28That was the point of them.

32:30On February 23rd, four days after the landing, Marines of the 28th stood on the summit of the volcano and

32:37raised an American flag.

32:38And a photographer took a picture that would outlive every man in this story.

32:43Tony Stein was not in it.

32:45He was still down on the rocks, at the base of the mountain, doing the same work.

32:50And by then, he had been on that island for four days, without a helmet, without boots, with a weapon

32:57he had been shot out of twice.

33:00Now here's where this story stops being about a machine gun.

33:04Because a man who has done what he did on the 19th has, by any reasonable accounting, finished.

33:12He has done more than the Marine Corps could ask, more than his citation could comfortably describe, and every survivor

33:19of that beach would have said so.

33:21Whatever comes next, he owes nobody anything.

33:25What comes next is that Tony Stein was wounded and taken off Iwo Jima and put aboard a hospital ship

33:32with clean sheets and a doctor and a bunk.

33:35500 yards of water between himself and the worst place on earth.

33:41That should be the end of it.

33:42It is not the end of it.

33:44Nine days after he landed, he would do the exact same thing he had done on the beach.

33:49Make himself the target, so that other men could see what was shooting at them.

33:53And this time, he would do it without the gun.

33:56A hospital ship offshore was a strange kind of country.

33:59Clean sheets, electric light, a doctor who wanted to know where it hurt.

34:05Iwo Jima was 500 yards away across the water, and you could still hear it.

34:10The naval guns firing over the beach.

34:13The crump of the mortars coming back the other way.

34:16And the men in those bunks lay listening to their own regiments being fed into it.

34:22The wounded kept coming aboard all week, and wounded men talk.

34:27That is how the news reached Tony Stein.

34:30The 28th Marines had finished with Suribachi.

34:33After the flag went up on the 23rd, the regiment was pulled out of the south,

34:38moved to the other end of the island, and put into the line facing north,

34:42into the part of Iwo Jima that the survivors would spend the rest of their lives trying not to describe.

34:48Broken volcanic rock.

34:50Ravines.

34:51Ridges honeycombed with caves and concrete.

34:54All of it under Kuribayashi's personal command,

34:57and all of it built on the same principle as the beach.

35:00You will not see us.

35:03In front of them was a ridge the maps called Hill 362A.

35:08The regiment was being taken apart on it.

35:11And a 23-year-old corporal, with a wound in him, lying in a clean bunk on a ship,

35:16listened to that news,

35:17and made the decision that tells you more about him than the beach does.

35:22He got up and left.

35:24Understand what that involves.

35:26You do not check out of a hospital ship.

35:29There is no procedure for a wounded man to release himself and return to a battle.

35:35He went over the side, got himself back across that water,

35:39walked into the north of Iwo Jima,

35:41and reported to Company A, 1st Battalion, 28th Marines,

35:45which by then was a company in name and not much else.

35:50Nobody made him.

35:52Nobody would have known.

35:53His war was over, and he had a receipt for it.

35:56March 1st, 1945.

35:58Ten days after he had come ashore barefoot,

36:02Company A is pinned.

36:03Again.

36:04There is a Japanese machine gun emplacement somewhere in the rocks ahead,

36:08and it is doing to that company what the blockhouses did to his platoon on the beach,

36:12killing men who cannot see what is killing them,

36:15from a position that only exists in the instant it fires.

36:19The same problem.

36:21The identical problem, in different ground.

36:24And Tony Stein, who had solved that problem once with his own body as the instrument,

36:29took 19 men out to solve it again.

36:32Now I have to tell you why it did not work.

36:34Because the difference between February 19th and March 1st is precise,

36:38and it is not luck.

36:40On the beach, the enemy Stein baited was a crew.

36:44Two or three men behind a fixed weapon in a fixed box,

36:47on an assigned arc, under orders to hold a sector.

36:51When a target stood up in their arc, they were not permitted to let it walk past.

36:55That obligation is what he had been exploiting all morning.

36:58He had found the one lever in Koribayashi's system that discipline itself provided.

37:04A disciplined gun crew must fire, and a gun that fires has told you where it is.

37:10A sniper has no such obligation.

37:13A single rifleman in the rocks with one shot to spend is the exact inverse of a machine gun in

37:20a blockhouse.

37:21He does not have to answer movement.

37:23He does not have to hold ground.

37:26He can watch a patrol come on for ten minutes and take only the man he wants.

37:31And then there is nothing to charge, nothing to flank,

37:35no slit to put a burst through.

37:37Only rocks.

37:39And a sound that came from everywhere.

37:42There is a bitter symmetry in it that the men who knew him felt immediately.

37:47On Bougainville, in the paramarines,

37:50Tony Stein's reputation had been built on hunting exactly that kind of enemy.

37:54The men who served with him said he took five Japanese snipers in a single day,

37:59and they gave him a nickname for it.

38:01A Japanese sniper killed him on March 1st, 1945, while he was leading that patrol.

38:08He was 23 years old.

38:10He had been married for one year, seven months, and nine days,

38:15to a young woman named Joan Strominger.

38:18They were married in San Diego on the 21st of July, 1943,

38:23and he shipped out three days later.

38:25Three days.

38:27That is the entire marriage.

38:29Three days.

38:30And then the Pacific.

38:32And then a beach made of volcanic ash.

38:36Here is what I want you to hold now.

38:38Because everything left in this story hangs on it.

38:42Every American who had watched what happened on Green Beach knew what they had seen.

38:47The problem was that the man who did it was dead.

38:50The weapon he did it with was one of six improvised machine guns that did not officially exist.

38:56And the tactical situation he had exploited

38:58required a written explanation that sounded, on paper, like fiction.

39:04He stood up on purpose so the enemy would shoot at him.

39:08He took off his helmet and his shoes.

39:10He went back eight times.

39:12So a piece of paper began moving up the chain of command.

39:16And it started as a recommendation for the Navy Cross.

39:19What happened to that piece of paper is, by the count of the historian who examined the file most closely,

39:27without parallel.

39:28It gathered fifteen separate endorsements, more than any other case he had ever studied.

39:35Fifteen officers, each of whom had to sign his name to a story that no board in Washington was going

39:42to believe.

39:42The recommendation went up as a Navy Cross.

39:45It came back as the Medal of Honor.

39:49On February 19th, 1946, in the office of the Governor of Ohio, Frank Lausch placed that medal in the hands

39:56of Joan Stein.

39:57Look at the date, February 19th, one year, to the day, from the morning the ramp went down on Green

40:06Beach 1.

40:07Whether anyone in that room said it out loud, we do not know.

40:11But somebody chose that date, and somebody knew exactly what they were choosing.

40:16Now go back to the beginning with me.

40:18Two minutes past nine in the morning.

40:21Black ash that will not hold a boot print.

40:24Terraces climbing away from the water.

40:26A 23-year-old toolmaker from Dayton, Ohio, stepping off a ramp with a weapon in his hands that no

40:33army in the world had issued to anybody.

40:35Into a quiet that has been arranged on purpose by a general who knows precisely what he is doing.

40:42Everything that video titles and museum placards say about Tony Stein is about that weapon.

40:48The homemade gun.

40:49The stinger.

40:51The aircraft Browning with a Garand stock and a bar bipod, and a trigger fabricated by a man who thought

40:57intolerances.

40:58Here is the thing about that gun.

41:00It does not exist.

41:02Six were built inside the 5th Marine Division.

41:05Six in the entire war.

41:07The Marine Corps never adopted the idea, never manufactured one, never wrote it into any table of equipment.

41:14Not a single original survives anywhere on Earth.

41:17The weapon in the photographs and the reconstructions you may have seen is a reproduction, built decades later by people

41:24working from descriptions.

41:25The most famous improvised weapon of the Pacific War is a rumor with a name, which is fitting because the

41:32gun was never the answer to the question in the title, and we have spent this whole story finding that

41:37out.

41:38The Japanese on that beach were not beaten by rate of fire.

41:41They had absorbed three days of naval bombardment and 72 days of bombing, and were still shooting when the first

41:48wave landed.

41:49What defeated them at that one scene on that one morning was something their entire defensive system had no category

41:56for.

41:57An enemy who decided that the information was worth his body, and who put himself in the open, on purpose,

42:04to buy it.

42:05That is the whole of it.

42:08Twenty enemy dead was the receipt.

42:10Eight trips with a wounded Marine under his arm each time was the man.

42:15Tony Stein came home in 1948.

42:17On December 17th of that year, after a funeral at Our Lady of the Rosary Church, he was buried with

42:24military honors in Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio, the only man from that city to receive the Medal of Honor

42:31in the Second World War.

42:32In 1972, the Navy commissioned a frigate named USS Stein.

42:38And in 1989, at Camp Pendleton in California, the Marine Corps dedicated a building to him.

42:44It is the Moving Target Simulator, the place where Marines are taught to hit something that will not hold still.

42:51They named it after the man who made himself one.

42:55There is one last piece of arithmetic, and it belongs to the eight.

43:00Eight times Tony Stein crossed open ground under fire to bring back ammunition.

43:05And eight times he brought back a wounded American Marine who could not have moved himself.

43:12We do not have all their names.

43:15We know what happens to a man left in the ash on Green Beach on the morning of February 19th.

43:21And we know that eight of them did not have that happen, and that some of them went home and

43:27married and had children who are alive right now and may be watching this.

43:33They came off that beach because a corporal from Dayton, Ohio, kept going back for them after his gun was

43:39empty.

43:41Thank you for staying to the end of this one.

43:43If it held you, press the like button.

43:45It genuinely helps a story like this reach the people who go looking for it.

43:49And there are more of them than the numbers suggest.

43:52Subscribe and turn on the bell, and you will not miss what comes next.

43:56And tell me where you are watching from.

43:59The United States?

44:00The United Kingdom?

44:02Canada?

44:03Australia?

44:04One more thing I always want to know.

44:06If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, put his name and his unit

44:14in the comments.

44:15We read them.

44:16That is how a name like Corporal Tony Stein, Company A, 1st Battalion, 28th Marines, does not disappear into silence.

Tony Stein’s Homemade Stinger at Iwo Jima: WW2 Marine Story

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