At 09:00 on February 26th, 1945, Private First Class Douglas Jacobson crouched behind a jagged slab of volcanic rock on the western slope of Hill 382 and watched the bazooka team ahead of him die.

They were maybe fifteen yards out when the Japanese 20 mm anti-aircraft gun opened up. The gun sat dug into the ash at the base of the hill, shielded, low, and perfectly placed. Rounds tore through the two Marines in a heartbeat. The launcher tube dropped into the black sand. The canvas rocket bag pitched sideways like a dead thing.

Company I froze.

The 23rd Marines had been hammering at Hill 382 for over an hour. In that time they’d already lost seventeen men killed and twenty-six wounded. Every attempt to move up the slope drew fire from somewhere: machine guns stitched from hidden slots, mortars dropped out of unseen pits, rifles snapped from cracks in the rock. No one saw the enemy. Men just went down and vanished into the ash.

The Japanese had turned the hill into a layered killing machine. Concrete bunkers wired into each other, 57 mm anti-tank guns covering every approach, light tanks buried in crevices, pillboxes carved into the ridgeline, all tied together by eighteen kilometers of tunnels. Marines called this sector “the Meat Grinder,” and it wasn’t a figure of speech.

Jacobson was nineteen years old. He’d lied about his age to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserve at seventeen, left a draftsman’s job with his father in Port Washington, New York, and three island campaigns later he had zero medals, a rifle, and a simple goal: get off this hill alive.

That wasn’t going to happen as long as that 20 mm gun was operating.

He looked at the dead bazooka team, then at the weapon lying in the open. A bazooka was a two-man job. One man to aim and fire, one to load and hook up the ignition wire. Solo operation wasn’t in any manual.

He moved anyway.

The volcanic ash sucked at his boots. Snipers had already put one Marine down trying to reach that same spot. Jacobson kept low, felt rounds crack overhead, saw ash jump in ugly little spurts. Somehow, he made the fifteen yards, grabbed the tube, ripped the rocket bag from the loader’s shoulder, and ran back toward a cluster of busted rocks.

Sixty-seven pounds of steel and high explosive across open ground under direct fire feels like a lot more than sixty-seven.

He dove behind cover, heart pounding, ears full of the anti-aircraft gun’s flat, angry bark.

The M1A1 bazooka tube weighed thirteen pounds, four feet of metal with no business being handled alone. The rockets—M6A3 shaped charges—were nineteen inches long and eleven pounds each. They were meant to kill tanks, not AA guns, but a gun shield is just armor by another name.

Jacobson yanked a rocket from the bag, shoved it tail-first into the tube until it locked, uncoiled the ignition wire, wrapped it around the contact spring. His hands moved on memory and instinct. He’d trained with bazookas, just never like this.

There was no loader to slap his helmet and shout “Clear back blast!” There was no one behind him at all. That meant the fifteen-meter cone of white-hot gas that came out the rear of the tube would bake nothing but air.

He climbed to a knee, shouldered the weapon, sighted on the gun shield sixty, maybe eighty yards downslope, and squeezed the trigger.

The rocket motor lit inside the tube with a cough. Fire blasted from both ends. The rocket leapt forward at around eighty meters per second. A second later it hit the 20 mm’s shield dead center.

A shaped charge doesn’t blow things away. It focuses. The warhead’s copper liner collapsed inward, turned to a high-velocity jet that punched through the plate at thousands of meters per second, then the explosive body followed. The gun and its four-man crew vanished in a burst of orange and black.

Marines around Jacobson stared.

Someone yelled, “Who the hell is that?”

They didn’t have time to watch. The moment the AA gun went quiet, other Japanese positions woke up. Two machine-gun nests cut loose higher on the slope, stitched three more men into the ash. Company I went flat again.

Jacobson dropped behind his rock, stripped another rocket from the bag, rammed it into the tube, hooked the wire. No loader meant it took him forty seconds to do what a trained team could do in twelve. Forty seconds is a long time when men are dying around you.

He moved right, working an angle on the first machine gun, a dug-in position seventy yards uphill, barrel poking out of a dark slot. The gunner was busy sweeping the Marines downslope; nobody was looking for a lone kid with a bazooka on their flank.

He got to within forty yards. Shouldered. Fired.

The rocket hit just above the opening and blew the front of the imp placement apart. The gun went silent. Bits of wood, dirt, and bodies tumbled out.

The second machine gun pivoted toward him. Dirt kicked up along the rocks as rounds chewed their way closer. Jacobson was already moving, dropping into a shallow depression as bullets tore through the space he’d just vacated.

He crawled twenty yards left, waited for the gun to fire a long burst, then cut off. Reloaded. Popped up. Fired at the flash.

The rocket slammed into the gun mount. The blast turned the nest into a crater.

He had two rockets left.

Up above, the Marines advanced a few yards, then stopped again as fire hit them from something bigger, heavier. Concrete and rock up the slope—blockhouse. NAV & corps artillery had pounded it for hours before the landing, 16-inch shells from battleships, eight-inch from cruisers. It was chipped, scorched, but still very much in business. At least a dozen rifles and a machine gun inside, all pointing down the hill.

Jacobson didn’t have the juice to blow four feet of reinforced concrete apart. Not with two rockets. So he went around.

He crawled across the slope, keeping the bulk of the hill between him and the firing slit. Japanese designers had built their defenses for men coming straight up from the beach. They hadn’t planned on someone getting far enough inside their perimeter to hit them from the side.

On the northeast face he found the blockhouse’s rear—built into the hillside, low entrance, wooden beams, less concrete.

He propped the bazooka on a rock, took careful aim at the door frame, and fired.

The rocket hit the frame and detonated, blowing the entrance inward, collapsing part of the rear wall. Smoke and dust billowed. Jacobson dropped the tube, yanked the pin on a fragmentation grenade, counted “One, two,” and lobbed it through the jagged opening.

The blast echoed inside like God slamming a door.

He threw a second.

When he went in with his Garand, the interior was a mess of bodies, splintered wood, and concrete dust. The position was done.

Four strongpoints smashed. Company I surged again.

For the next two hours, Jacobson moved and killed like he had someplace to be. Every time the advance stalled, he went looking for what was stalling it.

He found an earth-covered rifle pit with two Japanese riflemen inside controlling a lane. He climbed above it, put a rocket through the overhead cover, and folded it into the hill.

He found a cluster of six mutually supporting positions—a semicircle of rifle pits, machine guns, mortars, and an observation post guarding the last approach to the summit. The 23rd Marines had bounced off this cluster twice already in bloody, failed attacks.

He decided to start with the observation post. Kill the eyes and the rest go blind.

Circling wide through broken rock, he got seventy yards out, put a rocket into the side, then another for good measure. The op post sagged and collapsed. Two men staggered out; Marine rifles cut them down.

He grenaded a rifle pit rather than waste a rocket, then took out a mortar nest at sixty yards with another shot. Mortar tubes and crew went skyward. When a light Type 95 Hago tank ground its way up a draw from the east to blast the Marines climbing the slope, he put one rocket into the turret to jam it, another into the thin rear armor to set it ablaze.

When he ran out of rockets, he ran back down the hill for more. Twice.

In between those trips, he crawled, sprinted, slid, and climbed through volcanic ash and shrapnel to put M6A3 rockets exactly where they needed to go: firing slit, entrance, vision block, rear armor. He used grenades and his Garand when rockets weren’t worth the trade.

By the time he climbed toward the final blockhouse on the crest of Hill 382, he had been in continuous combat for nearly two hours. His ears rang from back blast. His shoulder was bruised purple. His throat was dry as sandpaper.

The last bunker was bigger than the others. Four-foot-thick walls, multiple firing slits, the kind of place the Japanese intended as a last stand. Naval gunfire hadn’t cracked it. Tanks had burned trying to get close.

Jacobson had one rocket left.

He tried a shot at a slit and missed high; the warhead did little more than chip concrete. So he worked around again, under fire, to the rear. There—a steel-framed wooden door, facing away from the main American approach.

He fired his final rocket at the frame. It blew the door into splinters.

He dropped the empty tube, pulled two grenades, and ran.

One grenade through the smoke. Boom.

A second grenade. Boom.

Then he went in, alone, into the fumes and dust and the acrid bite of burnt explosive.

Inside, it was ugly and close. Half-stunned Japanese soldiers scrambled to respond. Jacobson shot them. When his Garand clicked empty, he drew his .45 and kept going until the bunker was quiet.

Sixteen positions destroyed. Seventy-five Japanese killed. Thirty minutes of that was the concentrated bazooka work that broke the backbone of Hill 382’s defenses. The rest was clearing, mopping up, making sure nothing behind him was still alive enough to kill Marines who followed.

By noon Company I and elements of the 24th Marines were on the crest of Hill 382. The “Meat Grinder” was bleeding American green instead of Marine red now.

When someone finally asked Jacobson how he’d done it, he just shrugged.

“I just wanted to get off that hill,” he said.

Euwo Jima would grind on for three more weeks. Nearly 7,000 Marines died on that eight-square-mile rock, 17,000 more were wounded. Out of 21,000 Japanese defenders, only a couple hundred surrendered. The rest died in place.

Twenty-seven Marines and sailors earned the Medal of Honor there. More than any other single battle in American history. One of them was the nineteen-year-old draftsman from Port Washington who picked up a two-man weapon and used it like an extension of his will.

After the war Jacobson went home, reenlisted, went to Officer Candidate School, and spent another two decades in uniform. At one point his CO told him he was the only officer in the Corps without a high school diploma. So he got one—took the GED in ’67, passed, and retired as a major not long after.

He sold real estate in New Jersey, married a teacher he’d met in Okinawa, moved to Florida, and lived quietly. Unless you knew what to ask, you’d never guess that once, on a volcanic hill half a world away, he had walked into the worst place on the island, alone, over and over again, carrying a bazooka meant for two men.

When he died in 2000, they buried him in Arlington. The state of Florida put his name on a veterans’ nursing home.

Hill 382 doesn’t remember his name. It remembers what he did. Marines have a way of not forgetting that kind of thing.