Sgt. Ross F. Gray carried a satchel charge though a minefield while under heavy Japanese fire. The explosive weighed 24 pounds and left no room for a rifle. He went in unarmed anyway.
Behind him, three Marines provided cover. Ahead, a fortified Japanese bunker anchored one end of a network of gun emplacements that had stopped his platoon cold on Feb. 21, 1945, two days into the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history. Gray had already mapped a route through the field on foot, under fire, without triggering a single mine. Now he was going back in to finish what he had started.
He destroyed the first position. Then he went back for another charge to repeat the process.
What followed became one of the most extraordinary individual actions of the Pacific War, earning Gray the Medal of Honor. Six days after that, an enemy artillery shell took his life.
The Deacon
Ross Franklin Gray was born Aug. 1, 1920, in Marvel Valley, a small unincorporated community in Bibb County, Alabama, to Benjamin Franklin Gray, a carpenter, and Carrie Clyde Wood Gray. He was one of eight children in the family who survived to adulthood, growing up in a household shaped by faith, physical work and the quiet life of rural Alabama.
He spent three years at Centerville High School before leaving in 1939 to work alongside his father full time. Gray had already been doing part-time carpentry for three years before that. He played football and basketball at Centerville, spent his free time hunting and fishing Bibb County land, and kept a Bible close enough to read every night before bed.
Gray had studied for the ministry before the war and carried that religious seriousness into uniform. It was the foundation of how he operated, and his fellow Marines understood that. Within weeks of serving alongside him, they had given him a nickname.
They called him "The Deacon."
The name came from genuine regard for a man who stepped in to lead prayer when the chaplain was unavailable and whose personal conduct set him apart from the rest of the platoon.
Shortly before his death on Iwo Jima, a war correspondent asked Gray how the nickname had come about.
"I guess they call me Deacon because I do their praying when the Chaplain's not around," he said.
Gray walked into the Marine Corps Reserve recruiting station in Birmingham on July 22, 1942. Parris Island came first, then additional training at New River, North Carolina.
By September 1942 he had joined the 23rd Marines within the 4th Marine Division, and the following April he was promoted to private first class and moved to Company A, 1st Battalion, 25th Marines. That unit would be his home through four amphibious assaults.
The Front Lines of the Pacific War
Because of his trade background and personal convictions, Gray initially served in non-combat engineering roles after joining the division. He continued holding informal services for his fellow Marines, reading his Bible nightly, and working the jobs the Corps assigned him.
The 4th Marine Division shipped overseas in January 1944. The first stop was the Marshall Islands, where the division fought through Roi-Namur in late January and early February, absorbing heavy casualties. Gray was promoted to corporal in March.
Three months later came Saipan, and the scale of the fighting was even worse. The division sustained roughly 6,000 casualties there, including approximately 1,000 dead. Gray's closest friend was among those killed.
He did not go back to his carpenter duties after that. According to the National WWII Museum, Gray picked up a Browning Automatic Rifle and moved to the front lines.
After Saipan, the division assaulted Tinian in late July 1944. Gray was promoted to sergeant in August and sent to the 4th Marine Division Mine and Booby Trap School. The training was extensive. According to Marine Corps records, The curriculum covered the full range of mine warfare from how to construct a field, how to move through one safely, how to find and disarm individual devices by day and by night, and how to cut a clean lane through an active field under combat conditions.
His instructors rated him capable of teaching every one of those skills to other Marines. No instructor billets were available, so he stayed with the rifle company.
His performance had earned him a recommendation for staff sergeant, but the grade had no open billets in his unit and the promotion never came through. The battalion then loaded aboard the troopship USS Napa, running drills at sea in the weeks before the most costly assault the 4th Marine Division would ever face.
Kuribayashi's Defenses on Iwo Jima
Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi had transformed Iwo Jima into something the American military had not fully anticipated. Beginning in March 1944, his garrison carved 18 kilometers of tunnels through the volcanic rock and connected hundreds of bunkers, pillboxes, and artillery positions through an underground network.
The defensive positions were designed to absorb bombardment and remain functional. When one fighting position fell silent, another could cover it. The plan was not to stop the Marines on the beach but to bleed them continuously as they moved inland.
The 4th Marine Division hit the right flank of the assault on Feb. 19, 1945, pushing northeast through terrain that bottlenecked every approach and allowed entrenched defenders to concentrate fire on narrow corridors of advance.
Shortly after the landing, Gray's lieutenant and several members of his platoon were killed. With no one left to lead the unit, Gray stepped into the role of acting platoon sergeant and took command.
The division's sector northeast of Airfield No. 1 became one of the most punishing stretches of the entire battle. The ground was studded with camouflaged positions and laced with mines that engineers and infantrymen alike struggled to locate and clear.
On Feb. 21, two days into the fight, Gray's platoon was pressing toward high ground in that sector when a concentrated Japanese grenade barrage stopped the advance completely. Gray moved his men back out of range and went forward alone on foot to understand what they were up against.
Twelve Trips Through a Minefield
What Gray found from his reconnaissance was worse than he expected. A large minefield covered the entire front of the platoon's line of advance. Behind it, a row of reinforced Japanese emplacements sat connected by covered communication trenches, each bunker positioned to support the next. Clearing one without the others would accomplish nothing. The whole complex had to be destroyed.
Still under enemy fire, Gray worked his way through the minefield and traced a navigable route to the mouth of the nearest fortification. He returned to the company commander and reported what he had found. He then volunteered to attack the network himself.
Three fellow Marines would lay down covering fire from the platoon position. Gray would handle the demolitions. He and the three volunteers made a trip to the battalion ammunition point and carried back 12 satchel charges, which they staged in a covered position near the platoon line.
Before Gray stepped back into the field, he turned toward the men watching and said, "Pray for me."
He picked up the first charge and went in without a rifle.
Gray reached the first emplacement and forced the entrance shut with the charge. Before he could pull back, a machine gun opened from a second opening cut into the same position. He crossed through the field, grabbed another satchel, and came back through the same path to hit the second aperture. Only then was the first bunker destroyed.
He repeated that process across the remaining fortifications, each one a separate crossing, each one completed under fire.
The Marine Corps Medal of Honor citation describes him as approaching, attacking, and withdrawing under "blanketing fire" on every single pass. He drew machine-gun bursts and grenade barrages throughout the assault, and he covered each stretch of ground unarmed, carrying only the demolitions he used against the fortifications.
At one point, a Japanese grenade went off so close to him that it knocked his helmet off his head.
When the last charge went off, six emplacements had been destroyed, more than 25 Japanese troops were dead, and a significant quantity of ordnance and ammunition had been taken out of the fight. What Gray had done only became clear when his platoon moved forward.
Every pass through the minefield had followed the same careful route, and through those 12 crossings, Gray had effectively disarmed the field himself, creating a lane his Marines could follow without triggering any mines.
His citation states explicitly that he had "completely disarmed a large minefield" in addition to destroying the garrison. Both things had been accomplished on foot, unarmed, while under heavy enemy fire.
Gray successfully knocked out an entire Japanese fortification and helped his Marines move through a minefield single-handedly without being wounded.
Killed in Action
The man that the platoon called "The Deacon" never made it home to Marvel Valley.
Sgt. Ross F. Gray was fatally wounded by an enemy artillery shell on Feb. 27, 1945, six days after the assault that would earn him the Medal of Honor. Gray was 24 years old. The fighting on Iwo Jima would not end for another month. The division he had served with since 1942 would not leave the island until late March.
His body was buried in the 4th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima.
Gray's mother, Carrie, did not survive to see the medal presented. Relatives told the Andalusia Star-News that she died of grief after learning of her son's death. The loss encompassed more than one household.
Between Gray's mother and her two sisters, the three women had watched 13 sons ship out to fight in the war.
On April 16, 1946, at the Centerville High School football field in Alabama, Rear Adm. Aaron S. Merrill of the Eighth Naval District formally presented the posthumous Medal of Honor to Gray's father in a ceremony attended by Gov. Chauncey Sparks. President Harry S. Truman authorized the decoration. Gray is the only recipient of the Medal of Honor from Bibb County.
His remains were later returned from Iwo Jima and reinterred at Ada Chapel Bible Methodist Church Cemetery in West Blocton, Alabama.
Ross Gray's Legacy
Iwo Jima produced 27 Medals of Honor for Marines and sailors, more than any other single American military operation in history. Gray is one of those recipients.
The U.S. Navy commissioned the USS Gray (FF-1054) in 1970, a Knox-class frigate built for anti-submarine warfare in the Pacific. It served for 21 years before decommissioning in 1991. Its motto was "Seek, Engage, Destroy."
Gray's Medal of Honor and original citation now reside with the Cahaba Lily Foundation in West Blocton, donated by Roger Kinard, a retired veterans service officer who worked with the Gray family over the years. His name also appears on the Bibb County Board of Education's Wall of Fame, placed there in 2019.
What he did northeast of Airfield No. 1 on Feb. 21 directly opened the line of advance for his company at a moment when the Marines had no other path forward. The network of fortifications he destroyed single-handedly had stopped the entire unit cold. When it was gone, the Marines moved forward to finish taking the island.
In a campaign defined by some of the most intense small-unit combat in the history of the Corps, Gray's one-man assault stands as one of its most tactically decisive individual actions. Even more impressive, he destroyed the entire Japanese fortification while sprinting through a minefield without a rifle.
