Desmond T. Doss

Doss was the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honor, though he's not the only one. Two other men, Thomas W. Bennett and Joseph G. LaPointe, Jr. also showed tremendous valor and received the same award, though posthumously.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Vie Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. We pretty recently did
two episodes on birired Rustin, and in those episodes we

(00:21):
talked a little bit about conscience objection to military service fired.
Drustin was a Quaker, and because he was a pacifist,
his conscience objection to war also evolved to include an
objection to conscripting people into the military. So at one
point he had actually registered as a conscientious objector, which
meant that if he had been drafted, they could be

(00:42):
assigned to alternate noncombat service. But after this evolution in
his views, he instead rescinded his registration and went to
federal prison instead. Some of the response that we got
to that episode moved today's topic farther up ahead on
my short list of subjects. Shortlist is like fifty things long.

(01:02):
My shortlists has a very similar number. It's sartah, it's
the whole year whereth the podcast. Uh So it moved
this topic ahead in that in that short list, A
Desmond T. Doss was also a conscientious objector but his
choices relating to this objection took a really different form

(01:24):
from Byrod Rustens. Doss did serve in the military in
a non combat role, and he was the first conscientious
objector to be awarded the Medal of Honor. So today
we're going to talk about him, as well as a
little bit about two other conscientious objectors who have also
been awarded the same honor. Before we get into Dosson's story,

(01:44):
we're going to level set a little bit with a
look at some of the history of conscience objection in
the Western world. Doss and both of the other men
that we're going to talk about we're from the United States,
but conscience objection in general is something that exists in
a lot of other nations as well, So although the
basic idea is a whole lot older. The term conscientious

(02:05):
objector seems to have been coined sometime in the early
nineteenth century to describe a person who refuses to comply
with the requirement because doing so would violate their conscience.
So this term has been applied to all kinds of
requirements related to lots of different services and fields and circumstances.
This includes medicine and law, but today we are really

(02:26):
sticking to the context of conscience and military service. Issues
of conscience objection typically only come up when military service
is mandatory in some way. This was true of the
person typically cited as history's first conscientious objector. That was Maximilianus,
who was the son of a Roman army veteran. He

(02:46):
was required to join the military when he turned twenty one,
and this was back in the year to Maximilianus refused,
citing his Christian beliefs as his reason for refusal, and
he was beheaded for doing so. Historically, conscience objection to
military service has usually not always been connected to pacifist religions,

(03:09):
and this meant that in Europe conscious objection became a
lot more common following the Protestant Reformation. After the Reformation,
the number and focus of religious denominations became a lot
more diverse, and a lot more people began to choose
which faith to belong to, rather than following a state
sponsored or nationally consistent religion. So Mena Nites, for example,

(03:32):
were exempt from mandatory guard duties because of their pacifist beliefs.
During the Dutch Wars of Independence in the sixteenth century,
standards and rules about how how to handle conscience objections
also spread along with conscription into start standing armies in
Europe following the French Revolution. Nations saw a need to
establish and maintain a standing army, but they also saw

(03:55):
a need not to force their citizens to violate their
religious principles in doing so. It was really the twentieth
century before conscience objection sort of coalesced into an anti
war movement strategy. That was when people really started to
describe themselves as conscientious objectors rather than describing conscription or

(04:17):
military service or a specific war as something that was
against their religion. And the idea that someone could have
a conscious objection to war personally without being without it
being based in a very specific organized religion started to
become more common around the First World World War as well,
and at the start of World War One, many European

(04:38):
nations and the United States added specific conscious objection rules
to their conscription policies, in part because of advocacy on
the part of pacifist religious groups. When World War One ended,
most but not all European nations ended their conscription programs,
which temporarily tabled the issue of conscience objection. When conscriptions

(05:00):
started up again before and during World War Two, a
lot of nations again offered alternative service to conscientious objectors,
although people who felt like their conscience wouldn't allow them
to support the war in any way, even if it
were in a non combat role still usually wound up
being sentenced the time in prison. Today, many nations around
the world view conscience objection as a fundamental human right

(05:24):
protected by international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December
tenth of ninety in the wake of World War Two.
Article eighteen of that declaration reads quote, everyone has the
right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. This right

(05:44):
includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom
either alone or in a community with others, and in
public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship,
and observance. Article eighteen of the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, which was adopted in nineteen sixty six,

(06:05):
builds on this idea. Further part one of that article
we is is really similar to what Holly just read,
and then it continues to no one shall be subject
to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or
adopt a religion or belief of his choice. Three freedom
to manifest ones religion or beliefs may be subject only

(06:27):
to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are
necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or
the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. Although this Declaration
and Covenant don't specifically mention conscience objection, many nations have
interpreted conscience objection as an aspect of the freedom of thought, conscience,

(06:49):
and religion. Also, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights,
which was replaced by the Human Rights Council in two
thousand six, has issued a number of other declarations that
do specific addressed conscience objection. Although these aren't legally binding
among member states, they spell out conscience objection as being
part of the fundamental human right to freedom of thought.

(07:11):
The first of these was Resolution nine seven forty six,
which was passed in nineteen eighty seven with twenty six
votes in favor, two against, and fourteen obstentions. The following year,
the Commission on Human Rights issued Resolution seventy seven, specifying
that everyone has the right to conscience objection and calling
on states that don't have conscience objection policies to develop

(07:34):
them in a non discriminatory way. A number of other
resolutions upholding the right to conscience objection have followed since then.
Not every United Nations member state has agreed with those
resolutions or with the interpretation that conscience objection is a
fundamental human right. For example, Singapore drafted a letter to
the Commission in two thousand two that was co signed

(07:56):
by sixteen member states, does include Bangladesh, bots Wanna, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon,
me and mar Rwanda, Singapore, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Tanzania and Vietnam,
stating that they quote do not recognize the universal applicability

(08:17):
of conscientious objection to military service. And of course, not
every nation on earth is a member state of the
United Nations. There are so many nuances to all this,
and from an ethical and moral standpoint, the decision to
object or not to object is an incredibly personal one.
And if conscience objection is a fundamental human right, then

(08:38):
that means that people who do serve in the military
are fighting to protect the right not to. Whether they
agree with the existence of that right are not. And
there have also been lots of times in history when
the idea of conscience objections has become just incredibly divisive,
and the most obvious is probably during the Vietnam War.
All of that is really outside the scope of our

(09:00):
show today, but we would be remiss if we did
not at least acknowledge it. So for Desmond T. Doss,
the decision not to fight was not actually even something
he thought of as a conscience objection. He actually preferred
to be called a conscientious cooperator. And we're going to
talk about him after a brief word from one of
our sponsors. Desmond T. Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia,

(09:31):
on February seventh nine. His mother worked in a shoe
factory and his father was a carpenter, and their family
were members of the Seventh day Adventist Church. In their home,
they had a framed poster that displayed the illustrated ten
Commandments in the Lord's Prayer, and the illustration of the
sixth commandment of thou shalt not kill was of Caine

(09:52):
having just killed his brother Abel from the Book of Genesis.
This image had an almost visceral impact on the young Desmond.
He was appalled at the idea that one brother could
murder another, and he also believed that bearing arms was
a sin against God. In April of nineteen forty two,

(10:13):
Dawson enlisted an army for World War Two. Although he
was designated as a conscientious objector, he didn't actually have
an objection to serving as long as he didn't have
to kill anyone or carry a weapon and could observe
the Sabbath each Saturday. To reconcile his service with his faith,
doc Dos became a medic. Being a medic would let

(10:34):
him help people rather than harm them, and he didn't
have an objection to doing actual medical work on Saturday since,
and his words quote Christ, healed on a Sabbath. Even so,
Dosh faced harassment and derision from his peers while they
were in training. In addition to his religious refusal to
carry a weapon or do non medical work like participating

(10:55):
in drills on Saturdays, he continued his practice of devotion
in prayers. He was also a vegetarian for religious reasons.
At one point, his commanding officer attempted to have him
discharged from the army on the grounds that he was
mentally ill. Doss's response quote, I'd be a very poor
Christian if I accepted a discharge, implying that I was

(11:17):
mentally off because of my religion. In the end, though,
Dos completed his training and was deployed with the three
seventh Infantry seventy seventy seventh Infantry Division. He left for
Guam in the summer of nineteen forty four, and he
served as a medic both there and on the Island
of Laity in the Philippines, earning the Bronze Star for

(11:39):
his heroism. In the spring of nineteen forty five, Doss
was part of the Battle of Okinawa, which stretched from
April one to June twenty two of nineteen forty and
pitted the US and its allies against Japanese troops that
were deeply entrenched in caves, tunnels, and other cover. Doss's
unit was on the four hundred foot tall ridget Ada

(12:01):
escarpment when a Japanese force staged a counter attack on
Saturday May five. Doss was the only medic with them
on the escarpment, and while some of the American force
was able to retreat back down, a lot of the
men who were wounded were stranded on top of this
ridge and pinned down under fire from the Japanese force.

(12:23):
Doss remained with the wounded men, and he rigged a
sling to evacuate them one at a time down the
face of a cliff, using knots and techniques that he
had learned as a youth when working in a flood rescue.
He used a tree stump to anchor his sling, He
loaded each wounded man into it, and he lowered them
thirty five feet to safety on a protected ledge below.

(12:45):
He did this over and over while under fire, until
every man was down, and then he lowered himself. His
commanding officer wanted to credit him with saving a hundred
men's lives that day, He said it was only more
like fifty, and they eventually compromise at seventy. His heroic
efforts to save people's lives did not stop there, though.

(13:06):
He basically continued to rescue men from under fire repeatedly,
including carrying people to safety while being fired upon for
pretty much the whole next week. On May twelve, he
was injured by a grenade and had multiple shrapnel injuries
to his legs. Although another medic was nearby, Dass cared
for his injuries himself for five hours, rather than having

(13:28):
the other medic risk his own safety and come to help. Then,
when Dass was finally evacuated, he saw another soldier whose
need he thought was greater, so he got off the
litter he was being carried on and asked the medics
to take care of that other man instead. Then, while
he was waiting for them to come back for him,
he was struck in the arm by enemy fire and

(13:50):
sustained a compound fracture, And possibly the only time in
his life that he ever handled a weapon, he made
a splint for himself out of a rifle stock and
then crawl to an aid station three yards away with
one of his arms broken and splinted. Just stand in
awe of all of this. I can't even grasp the

(14:12):
fortitude a person has to have, which is why he
earned the nickname the wonder Man of Okinawa. Desmondos was
one of the men awarded the Medal of Honor by
President Harry S. Truman on October twelfth, ninety Doss had
been a private when he took these actions that led
to this recognition, and he was a corporal when it

(14:33):
was actually awarded to him. His injuries from the war, however,
were extensive and he needed ongoing medical care, and he
eventually lost a lung to tuberculosis. He spent about six
years in hospitals trying to recover, and he had planned
to go to a trade school and become a florist,
but the extent of his injuries and illnesses made that impossible.

(14:54):
He devoted most of his life instead to religious work,
and in nineteen seventy six he said only lost his
hearing in Das's first wife, Dorothy, who he had married
in nineteen forty two before leaving for the service, died
in a car accident. He remarried about three years later,
and his second wife, Francis, was still living when Doss

(15:15):
died on March twenty, two, thousand six, at the age
of eighty seven. In seven, he said in an interview quote,
I wasn't trying to be a hero. I was thinking
about it from this standpoint. In a house on fire
and a mother has a child in that house, what
prompts her to go in and get that child? Love?
I loved my men, and they loved me. I don't

(15:37):
consider myself a hero. I just couldn't give them up,
just like that mother couldn't give up the child. For
all of his life, he credited God with his survival
during the war. After another brief sponsor break, we will
talk a little bit about two other conscientious objectors who
have also been awarded the Medal of Honor. So you

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right before the break about two other conscientious objectors who

(17:46):
have also been awarded the Medal of Honor, and both
of them received that honor for work as medics in Vietnam.
The first was Thomas W. Bennett of Morgantown, West Virginia.
His military records didn't list it and on national preference,
but sources suggest that he was raised either Methodist or
Southern Baptist. Regardless, he attended the services of multiple denominations,

(18:09):
and he came to a sincerely held belief that all
life was sacred. He also vehemently objected to the United
States involvement in the Vietnam War. Specifically, Bennett was drafted
during that involvement in Vietnam, and after he lost his
student deferment due to poor grades at West Virginia University,
he wound up registering as a conscientious objector who was

(18:31):
willing to serve in a non combat role. He became
a medic and was eventually deployed to Vietnam. On February
nine of nineteen sixty nine, his his platoon there was ambushed.
In the words of his Medal of Honor citation quote,
Corporal Bennett, with complete disregard for his safety, ran through
the heavy fire to his fallen comrades, administered life saving

(18:53):
first aid under fire, and then made repeated trips carrying
the wounded men to positions of relative safety. From which
they would be medically evacuated from the battle position. Corporal
Bennett repeatedly braved the intense enemy fire, moving across open
areas to give aid and comfort to his wounded comrades.
He valiantly exposed himself to the heavy fire in order

(19:15):
to retrieve the bodies of several fallen personnel. Then, as
the whole platoon was awaiting for helicopters to rescue the
injured men, he spent the night outside the safety of
any kind of shelter, tending to wounded people who couldn't
be moved. On February eleven, a similar event happened again
when the platoon came under sniper fire, and once again

(19:37):
Bennett put himself at risk repeatedly to try to aid
the wounded, including an attempt to save a fellow soldier
who had fallen ahead of the company's position. Even though
he was warned that the fallen soldier would be impossible
to reach given where he was in the amount of
enemy fire, Bennett tried anyway, and he was mortally wounded
in the process. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of

(19:59):
Honor on April seventh of nineteen seventy, which would have
been his twenty third birthday. The third conscientious objector to
be awarded the Medal of Honor was Specialist for Joseph G. Lapointe, Jr.
And there's not as much biographical information that's publicly available
on him. Army records, though, identified him as a Baptist.
On June two of nineteen sixty nine, the patrol he

(20:21):
was on fell under heavy enemy fire. He rendered aid
while under fire to two injured soldiers, and to do
so he had to crawl directly into the line of
sight of an enemy bunker. He resorted to shielding the
two fallen men with his own body, but all three
were killed by an enemy grenade. In addition to his
Medal of Honor, Lapointe was also posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

(20:44):
He was survived by his wife, Cindy, and his son,
also named Joseph, who was unfortunately born after his father's death.
And that's a little bit about conscience objection and conscientious objectors.
Now that I'm all good and choked up, would you
like to read me solicitor mail? Sure? I do have
some listener mail. And the actually this this listener mail

(21:06):
is pretty lighthearted h to bring us up from a
lot of wartime death which I don't know. You and
I both have family members or in the service, and
some of that can be emotionally emotional. I'll just put
it that way. It can be emotional. So, uh, this
is from Charlene. Charlene wrote to us about our Harriet

(21:30):
Tubman episodes, and she says, I'm a student at Salisbury University,
which is located in Wacomico County, Maryland. Wacomico County borders
Tubman's native Dorchester County, and two thousand nine, s U
unmailed the statue of Tubman on campus that was sculpted
by one of our art professors, Dr James K. Hill.
The university's website describes it as follows quote. Hill sculpture

(21:51):
depicts Tubman walking through a Dorchester County marsh, looking behind
with her hand outstretched to those whom she is leading
to freedom with her our two companion and a sawett
owl and a rabbit looking ahead. According to Hill, they
symbolize two aspects of Tubman. One is a freedom fighter.
The wide eyed owl owl seeking slaves to liberate. The

(22:12):
saw what owl lives in the swamps, of the mid
Atlantic seaboard, but migrates to Canada each year, just as
tub mended. The other is the rabbit, which traditionally represents vigilance, intuition,
and forward progress. Despite fear, this burrowing animal goes underground,
symbolizing Tubman's role as a conductor the underground railroad. Hill's
rabbit is alert, just as Tubman was ever alert. I

(22:35):
think that is also part of the quoted material. So,
then Charlene continues, When I first saw the statue, I
had a different interpretation. Harriet is depicted with one arm outstretched,
her other hand holds her skirt. She's isn't wearing that
pair of bloomer pants. The rabbit is at her feet,
and the owl is on her shoulder. Her mouth is
open as if she is calling to someone. I looked

(22:57):
at the statue, turned to my friend and said, her
mouth is open like singing, and woodland animals have come
to her. I had no idea that Harriet Tubban was
a disney princess. Uh. And then she said some links
of bigger pictures and more of of Dr Hill's work
and an article about the statue, and says, sincerely, Charlene Okay,

(23:18):
so I want to stress this is a lovely statue.
I like it a lot. It does. It does indeed
have like a Disney princess quality, So now I kind
of want maybe it would be more like rejected princesses.
I hope our listeners are all familiar with rejected princesses.
But yes, it does have a slightly Disney heroine about

(23:41):
to burst into song look about it. We will put
a link to it from the show notes. That would
be sort of a cool Disney movie, I think, well,
especially given given the slow progression of Disney's princess heroine's
over the last several years, I could see maybe not

(24:01):
specifically Harriet Tubman, but like I could see that being
a princess role anyway. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast where History
podcasts at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash myst in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss
Industry dot tumbler dot com. We're also on panterst at

(24:21):
pentrist dot com slash mist in history, and our instagram
is at missed in history. If you would like to come,
if you would like to learn more about what we've
talked about today. We can come to our parent company's website,
which is how stuff Works dot com and put the
word draft in the search bar. You will learn about
how the US draft works, which includes some information about
conscious conscience objection and what people have to do in

(24:43):
the United States to be registered as consciences conscientious objectors.
You don't just basically walk up and say I object
and then get exempt from everything. That's not how it works.
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com, and find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have ever done. We will
have the links to the thing about the Statue and
this one. Um. There's an archive of every episode we've

(25:05):
ever done some other cool stuffs. You can do all
that and a whole lot more how stuff works dot
com or missed in History dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com