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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

26. Discovery and Desertion… to Combat

Marines training in Parris Island, 1941. Life Magazine

Jack Lucas completed boot camp, but when his true age was discovered, he was restricted to driving a truck in Hawaii while the Marines decided what to do with him. Facing the threat of being sent back home, he stowed aboard a troop transport headed for combat.

Once the ship was underway, he turned himself in to avoid a charge of desertion, and volunteered for combat – without disclosing his true age. The ship was part of the task force headed for Iwo Jima, and Lucas was duly assigned to a rifle company and placed on its roster.

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.