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The Tragic History of the U.S. Child Warriors

Khalid Elhassan June 9, 2020 34 min

25. Fleeing to Join the Fight

Marines advancing during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Stars and Stripes

Jack Lucas completed Marine Corps training, but then 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 prospect of getting sent back home, Lucas fled the safety of Hawaii, and 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.

In February,1945, Lucas was in a trench in Iwo Jima with three other Marines, when a firefight erupted against 11 Japanese nearby. When two enemy grenades landed in Lucas’ trench, the seventeen-year-old saved his comrades by shielding them with his own body. As he described it: “I hollered to my pals to get out and did a Superman dive at the grenades“. He landed atop one, and grabbed the other to tuck it beneath his body as well.

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.