William Hudson poses in 1943 at the Marine Corps recruit training base at Parris Island, South Carolina. He is wearing a marksmanship badge on his dress blues

COMMUNITY News:

Seventy-five years ago Feb. 19, US Marines waded ashore on the black volcanic sands of Iwo Jima. Among them, in the first wave of troops, was 19-year-old Bill Hudson, ready for his first day of combat.

Unlike over 2,000 of his fellow Marines, Hudson got through that first day alive and unwounded. He would have been one of the few troops to see the entire battle that dragged on for weeks, but he was wounded in a grenade duel at the very end. 

Hudson survived and went on to become a legendary swim coach in Los Alamos, one of the first Los Alamos Living Treasures, and a friend of the daughter of the Japanese garrison commander of Iwo Jima. He was very concerned that younger generations know the history of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima has been called the signature battle of the US Marine Corps, where over a hundred thousand Japanese and Americans fought over a small lump of volcanic rock for more than thirty-six days in a contest for an airstrip for damaged B-29s.

Haggard and clad in combat fatigues, Hudson displays a Japanese flag captured in early 1945 on the island of Iwo Jima. During the Iwo Jima operation he was a member of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, Fourth Marine Division. Hudson was wounded in action March 15, 1945

In a public event sponsored by the Los Alamos Historical Society, WWII historian Nancy Bartlit presented Uncommon Valour: The Battle for Iwo Jima. This documentary features Bill Hudson and other soldiers who returned to Iwo Jima on the one day a year when Japanese and Americans meet on the island to commemorate the battle. Bartlit herself has been to Iwo Jima twice and she co-authored  Silent Voices of World War II, which tells of the fighting the U. S. Navy encountered as they progressed closer to the Japanese mainland.