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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

27. The Fourteen-Year-Old Marine

Jack Lucas with his Medal of Honor. Wikimedia

At age fourteen, Jacklyn Harrell “Jack” Lucas (1928 – 2008) lied about his age to join the US Marine Corps during WWII. At age seventeen, he displayed such extraordinary heroism during the Battle of Iwo Jima to save the lives of fellow Marines, that he earned the Medal of Honor. It made Lucas the youngest Marine to ever receive the country’s highest award for valor.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Lucas, of Plymouth, North Carolina, was a thirteen-year-old cadet captain in a military academy, and captain of the school’s football team. Eager to join the action, when Lucas was fourteen, he forged his mother’s signature on a form that granted permission for her “seventeen-year-old” son to enlist and used that to join the Marine Corps Reserves.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.