Why 20 People D.i.e.d After He Built a Gun From Plane Parts…?

You know, when we look back at the newsreels from 1945, we tend to see a very specific version of the Pacific War. We see the overwhelming industrial might of the United States. We see endless supply ships, fresh uniforms, and the kind of firepower that should, by all logic, flatten anything in its path. We have this collective memory that by 1945, the American war machine was a solved puzzle, a perfect system of logistics and lethality. But if you were standing on the black sands of Iwo Jima at oh nine hundred hours on February 19th, that myth didn’t just feel distant. It felt like a lie. Because down there, in the terrified reality of the beachhead, the industrial might of America was currently pinned face down in volcanic ash. The reality wasn’t victory.

It was paralysis. The Fifth Marine Division, one of the finest fighting forces ever assembled, had been on that island for only a few hours. And by mid-morning, they had already lost heavily. And these weren’t just casualties of stray bullets. These men were being chewed up by an enemy they physically couldn’t see.

History tells us that the Japanese defenders had changed their tactics. They stopped doing those suicidal banzai charges. That cleared the way for American rifles. Instead, they dug in. Specifically, they dug 11 miles of interconnected tunnels into an eight square mile rock. They had 17,000 defenders hidden inside that rock.

Waiting with overlapping fields of fire that turned the landing zone into a pre-calculated killing ground. And this brings us to the uncomfortable truth about the equipment those Marines were carrying. See the standard issue machine gun for the Marine Corps at the time was the Browning M1919. And don’t get me wrong. In a defensive trench in Europe. That gun was a masterpiece.

It was reliable. It was sturdy. And it threw 30 caliber slugs downrange with authority. But it had a fatal flaw for an assault force. It was heavy. The M1919 weighed 31 pounds. Empty. By the time you added the tripod and the ammunition, you were asking a team of men to lug a massive anchor across a beach made of soft sinking ash.

So here is the tactical nightmare. The rifle platoons would advance, but the machine gun crews, the guys supposed to protect them, couldn’t keep up. They would have to stop. Set up the tripod, load the gun, fire a burst, break it all down, and then try to run to catch up.

By the time they were ready to fire again, the momentum was gone. The riflemen were exposed and the Japanese gunners in those invisible pillboxes would just wait for that gap and suppression to slaughter them. Good for defense. Terrible for assault. It was a mechanical problem that was costing American lives by the minute.

Now, most men on that beach just accepted this as the grim reality of war. You fight with what you’re issued. But Corporal Tony Stein wasn’t just a marine before the war. Back in Dayton, Ohio, he was a toolmaker. He spent his teenage years working a lathe at Patterson Field. He understood the soul of a machine. He knew what steel could do. But more importantly, he knew what it should do.

Stein had watched this problem play out during training in Hawaii months earlier. He watched crews struggle with those 31 pound anchors. And his mechanical mind simply refused to accept it. He knew that you couldn’t fight a mobile enemy with a static weapon. So while he crouched in that shallow depression in the black sand with mortar rounds bracketing his position, and his friends dying in the twisted ash around him, Stein wasn’t holding a Browning M1919. He was gripping something else entirely.

It was ugly. It looked like a piece of Frankenstein engineering welded together in a garage, because that’s exactly what it was. It was a weapon that his own sergeant had called a stupid idea months earlier. But as the Japanese machine guns opened up and the standard issue gear failed to suppress them. That stupid idea was about to become the only thing that mattered on the beach.

Stein looked at the chaos around him. He looked at the pillboxes the tanks couldn’t reach and the ships couldn’t hit. And he realized that the myth of American firepower wasn’t going to save them. If they wanted to get off that beach. They were going to have to do it with the strange, salvaged monstrosity resting in his hand.

Now, before we get back to the beach, we have to understand the mind of the man holding that weapon. We’ve all known guys like Tony Stein. They’re the ones who don’t just look at a broken engine. They listen to it. They can feel the tolerance of a bolt just by turning it. Stein was born in Dayton, Ohio, to immigrants from the Austria-Hungary region, specifically Erdevik in modern day Serbia.

And you have to imagine the pressure of that household, the grit of first generation Americans driven by a palpable sense of patriotism to prove they belonged. Stein didn’t finish high school to chase girls or play ball. He dropped out to work. He spent his teenage years standing in front of a lathe at Patterson Field, and later as a tool and die maker at Delco Products.

For those of you who have worked in a machine shop, you know that tool and die isn’t just labor, it is the high art of precision. It teaches you that metal has rules. It has limits. But if you respect those limits, you can make steel do almost anything. When Stein joined the Marines in 1942, that mechanical intuition didn’t stay in Ohio. It went with him to the jungle.

On Bougainville, he proved he could shoot, killing five snipers in a single day. But he was constantly looking at his gear with a mechanics eye, looking for the inefficiencies. And this is where fate stepped in. In the form of Sergeant Mel Grevich, which was a similar kind of thinker during the Bougainville campaign in 43, Grevich had been picking through the wreckage of a crashed Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber.

Now, most men see a plane crash and see a tragedy or a pile of scrap Grevich saw a hardware store. He climbed into the twisted fuselage and pulled out the rear gunner’s weapon, an AN-M2 .30 caliber machine gun. To the untrained eye, the AN-M2 looks a lot like the infantry Browning M1919. They are cousins, mechanically speaking, but the AN-M2 was a Thoroughbred racehorse compared to the M1919’s plow horse.

The infantry gun was heavy, thick barreled and slow, chugging along at 400 to 500 rounds per minute. It was designed to keep firing for hours without overheating. The aircraft gun, however, was designed for a dogfight in the air. You only have a split second where the enemy plane is in your sights. You don’t need sustained fire. You need a buzzsaw.

You need to put a wall of lead in the air instantly. So the AN-M2 was stripped of all excess weight. The barrel was thin and light. The internal components were skeletonized. The result was a weapon that weighed only 21 pounds, 10 pounds lighter than the infantry version, but fired at a cyclic rate of over 1200 rounds per minute.

Think about that difference. 400 rounds per minute is a rapid. Tat tat tat 1200 rounds per minute isn’t a tapping sound. It’s a roar. It’s the sound of canvas tearing. It is three times the lethality in two thirds the weight. But there was a catch. There is always a catch in engineering. The AN-M2 was designed to live in the slipstream of a dive bomber.

It relied on 300 mile per hour winds to cool that thin barrel down in the stagnant, humid air of the jungle. That barrel would heat up faster than a cast iron skillet. Furthermore, it had spade grips, two handles on the back like a garden tiller because it was meant to be mounted on a swivel. It had no stock to put against your shoulder. It had no sights for ground aiming.

It had no trigger guard. A normal marine looks at that and says, that’s useless to me. A toolmaker looks at that and says, I can fix this. In early 1944, the elite Marines were disbanded and Stein found himself reassigned to the 28th Marines. It was here that he connected with Sergeant Mel Grevich.

Grevich had already realized the standard gear wouldn’t cut it, and it started scavenging aircraft guns. But Grevich needed a master fabricator to make his vision work. So he enlisted Stein and another marine, John Lyttle. They found a maintenance shed in Hawaii and went to work. This wasn’t authorized. Research and development. This was a few guys with scraps and a vision. They needed to turn a mounted turret gun into a rifle.

They took a standard M1 Garand buttstock. The wooden shoulder piece, and put it on the lathe. They hollowed it out, carving away the wood until it could accept the buffer tube of the machine gun. This would let a marine shoulder the weapon like a rifle. But how do you pull the trigger? The aircraft gun used a solenoid, an electrical switch typically wired to the pilot’s stick. There was no mechanical trigger for a finger.

Stein used his toolmaking skills to hand fabricate a mechanical trigger mechanism that would manually trip the sear. It was crude. It was ugly, but it clicked. They also grabbed the bipod and rear sights from a Browning Automatic rifle, the BAR, and attach them to the receiver. They called it the Stinger.

When they were done, they had a weapon that defied categorization. With the stock, bipod and modifications, it weighed roughly 25 pounds. It was fed by a 100 round belt stored in a specialized box magazine. Attached to the receiver to prevent snagging, it looked like something out of a Mad Max movie. Before Mad Max existed, they built six of them.

Just six. And here is the kicker. Stein was the only marine outside of his own unit to receive one. A testament to his pivotal role in building them. Now you have to appreciate the culture of the military. It is a place that thrives on uniformity. If it’s not standard issue, it’s usually considered contraband.

When other Marines saw these six monstrosities, the reaction was mixed. The skeptics were loud. One sergeant took a look at the exposed mechanism and the thin barrel and called it a death trap. He predicted it would jam on the first burst. Another officer looked at the lack of a cooling jacket and said the barrel would melt and droop. After two magazines. A platoon commander from the second Battalion was even more blunt.

He said only an idiot would carry a plane gun into an infantry fight. And logically, they had a point. If you fire 1200 rounds a minute through a thin steel tube with no air flow, physics says that tube should fail. But Stein knew the difference between theory and practice. He took the stinger to the firing range at Camp Tarawa. He set up a target at 200 yards.

He loaded a 100 round box. The skeptic stood back, probably expecting the thing to explode. Stein shouldered the weapon, aimed, and squeezed his sheet metal trigger. The sound that came out wasn’t the rhythmic chugging of a Browning. It was a solid, continuous scream of fire burst in less than six seconds. The box was empty.

100 rounds sent downrange before a standard gunner could have fired 30. The target at 200 yards wasn’t just hit. It was chewed apart. The silence that followed on that range was heavier than the gunfire. The skeptic stopped talking about jamming. The officers stopped talking about regulations. The company commanders looked at that rate of fire and realized that this wasn’t a death trap.

It was a problem solver. They approved it for combat. The stinger was going to Iwo Jima, but there was one variable Stein couldn’t test on a range in Hawaii. He couldn’t test logistics. He couldn’t test how a man carries enough ammo for a gun that eats a week’s supply of lead in 10s. And he couldn’t test how that open bolt mechanism would handle the fine, grinding grit of volcanic ash. He was about to find out the hard way real quick.

We love digging up these stories of American ingenuity, and we know our community is full of people who appreciate that kind of grit. We want to know where you’re watching from. Are you in the Rust Belt like Stein down south or serving overseas right now? Drop your state or country in the comments. It’s amazing to see how far this history reaches.

Now let’s get back to the beach, where Stein is about to pull that trigger for real. You have to picture the situation on that beach. We aren’t talking about a clean firing range at Camp Tarawa anymore. We are talking about the black sands of Iwo Jima, which is a poetic name for a physical nightmare. The ground wasn’t sand, it was volcanic ash, loose, shifting and deep.

The Marines were pinned down in shallow depressions, basically terrified divots in the ground while invisible Japanese positions hammered them. The standard procedure here, the book answer is to call for tanks or naval gunfire, to dig those pillboxes out. But on February 19th, the book had been thrown out the window.

The Sherman tanks were bogged down at the water line, throwing their tracks in the soft grit. The naval guns couldn’t hit what they couldn’t see. So the tactical situation had devolved into a stalemate. The Japanese were winning the geometry of the battle. They had the angles. The Marines had the exposure. Stein tightened his grip on the stinger.

The barrel was already warm just from the ambient heat and the test firing. He made a decision that on paper, looks like madness, but in the logic of combat was the only way to break the deadlock. He stood up. Now, any combat veteran will tell you that standing up in a kill zone is usually the last thing you ever do.

But Stein stood fully upright, exposing himself completely to the enemy. He wasn’t doing it to be a hero. He was doing it to be a target. He needed the Japanese gunners to traverse their weapons toward him. He needed to see the muzzle flashes, and they obliged. Bullets snapped past his head. That distinct crack of supersonic rounds passing inches from your ear.

Mortar rounds detonated in the ash, throwing up curtains of black dust. And then through the haze. Stein saw it about 75 yards to the northwest. A pillbox. It was a masterpiece of camouflage, built from volcanic rock and sandbags, nearly invisible against the dark terrain. The only tell was the barrel of a Type 92 heavy machine gun, protruding just a few inches from the firing slit. The Type 92 was a good weapon.

The Marines called it the woodpecker because of its slow rhythmic rate of fire. About 450 rounds per minute. Thump thump thump thump. Stein lowered the stinger, looked over those crude BAR sites, and squeezed the sheet metal trigger linkage. This is where the physics of the engagement changed. The Japanese gunner was firing at a cadence.

Stein’s weapon didn’t have a cadence. It had a roar. The stinger erupted at over 1200 rounds per minute. That is 20 rounds per second. If you’ve ever used a power washer on loose dirt, you know how it just erodes the material instantly. That is what 30 caliber rounds do to sandbags when they arrive in a solid stream. The Stinger didn’t just suppress the pillbox.

It disintegrated the front face of it. The volcanic rock shattered. The sandbags tore open, spilling their contents. The Type 92 went silent instantly. The volume of fire was so overwhelming that the crew inside literally couldn’t operate their weapon. Stein shifted his aim through the dust. He saw movement in a second pillbox 40 yards to the left. He pivoted. He clamped down on that trigger again.

Another burst. This one lasted about four seconds. The concrete structure of the second pillbox absorbed the rounds, chipping and sparking, but the sheer density of LED flying through the aperture turned the inside of that bunker into a blender. The firing stopped around him. The dynamic on the beach shifted. It’s a psychological thing. When men are pinned down, they feel isolated.

They feel hunted. But when they hear a weapon on their side, that sounds like the voice of God clearing a path, the fear turns into momentum. Seeing the enemy position suppressed, the rifle men from company A began to rise from their shallow holes. Sergeant started shouting orders. The paralysis was broken. Stein charged the first pillbox.

And here we see the other advantage of his Frankenstein gun. The standard M1919 weighed 31 pounds and was awkward to carry. The stinger was 25 pounds and balanced like a rifle. Stein could run with it. He reached the position and seconds cleared it, and found three Japanese soldiers dead inside. They hadn’t been killed by accurate sniper fire. They had been cut down by a wall of lead.

He moved to the second pillbox. Same result. Two more enemy soldiers down position destroyed in less than a minute. Tony Stein had single handedly cracked the Japanese defensive line that had stalled an entire company. But then, right as the adrenaline was peaking, Stein felt the weapon go light in his hand. He pulled the trigger click.

The stinger had gone dry. And this brings us to the. But the terrible engineering trade off that Stein and Grevich had known about but couldn’t fix. The Stinger fed from a standard belt. Now do the math. When a weapon fires over 1200 rounds per minute, it consumes 20 to 25 rounds every single second.

That means a 100 round belt of ammunition lasts exactly 4 to 5 seconds of continuous fire. Five seconds. That’s it. That is the entire operational life of the weapon before it becomes a 25 pound club. Stein had anticipated this in Hawaii. He knew the gun was hungry, but experiencing it on a volcanic beach with mortar shells raining down is different than calculating it on a notepad.

He had fired two bursts, suppressed two bunkers, and now he was empty. He looked back toward the beach. The ammunition resupply point was near the water line where the landing craft was still dumping crates. It was 200 yards away. 200 yards. Doesn’t sound like far on a football field. It’s a sprint down and back. But on Iwo Jima.

Those 200 yards were a desolate moonscape of open ground, completely exposed to the Japanese observers on the high ground. And then there was the ash. We need to talk about the ash because it is a character in the story. As much as the Marines are. The veterans of Iwo Jima didn’t call it sand. They described it as running through a bin of wheat or loose ball bearings. It was coarse, black and terraced.

When you stepped into it, you didn’t push off. You sank. Your boat would go down six eight inches. Every step required you to lift your leg high, clear the grit and plant it again, only to slide backward half a step. It sucked the energy out of your legs. It filled your boots. It ground your skin off.

Stein was wearing standard issue Marine boondockers heavy leather boots. Sinking into that ash, they felt like lead weights. He stood there by the destroyed pillbox, holding his empty smoking invention. He had two choices. He could stay put, take cover and wait for someone else to bring ammo up, which might take an hour or might never happen if the runner got hit. Or he could go back and get it himself.

Stein didn’t wait. He checked the empty feed tray, secured the weapon, and started running back toward the ocean. This was the beginning of a logistical feat that is almost as impressive as the shooting. He wasn’t just a gunner. He was becoming a one man supply train. He fought the ash with every step. His boots sank. The mortars bracketed the beach.

He was running directly into the kill zone. He had just left halfway to the beach. Stumbling through the drifts, he saw a marine on the ground. A private first class from the second platoon. The kid had taken shrapnel to the left leg and couldn’t walk. He was conscious, terrified, and lying in the open. Stein didn’t break stride.

He stopped, grabbed the wounded man and slung him over his shoulder. Now let’s look at the physics of that. The wounded marine probably weighed 160 pounds. Stein’s combat pack and gear added another 30. The Stinger, which he refused to leave behind, added 25. Tony Stein was now carrying over 215 pounds of weight, and he was doing it while running through volcanic ash that wouldn’t support his own weight, let alone the extra load. He powered through it.

He reached the supply point at oh nine forty-five. Lungs burning, legs screaming. He handed the wounded marine off to a corpsman. He didn’t stop to rest. He didn’t ask for water. He went straight to the ammo dump. He grabbed four 100 round belts of ammunition. That’s 400 rounds.

He stuffed two belts into his pack, grabbed one in each hand, and turned right back around to face the mountain. The return trip took three minutes. Three minutes of slogging uphill, weighted down with lead, while Japanese snipers started to realize that this one particular marine was making an awful lot of trips. Bullets started kicking up the black dust around his feet.

He didn’t stop. He reached his platoon, loaded a fresh belt into the Stinger, and the five second limit reset. The gun was ready to eat again, and the Japanese defenders in the third pillbox had no idea what was coming back for them. Now, if this were a Hollywood movie, the scene would cut here. We’d see the hero destroy the bunker.

The music would swell and we’d fade to the next battle. But war doesn’t work like movies. War is fundamentally a logistics problem. And for Tony Stein, the problem was simple math. The stinger was the most effective weapon on the beach, but it was useless without ammunition. Stein had been in combat for 46 minutes. He had fired 300 rounds.

That sounds like a lot. But for a gun eating 1200 rounds a minute, that is less than 15 seconds of trigger time. He looked at his ammunition box, empty again. He looked at the Japanese lines. They were reeling, but they weren’t broken. He looked back at the beach. That 200 yards stretch of open, churning ash was still being hammered by mortars.

Stein realized that if he wanted to keep his platoon alive, he couldn’t just be a gunner. He had to be a mule. He secured the hot weapon, turned his back to the enemy, and started running toward the surf for the second time. And this is where the character of the man really shows itself. It’s one thing to run through fire, to kill an enemy. That’s adrenaline.

It’s another thing to run through fire, to carry a box of lead. That’s discipline. On the second run, he stumbled across two wounded Marines lying in a crater. The triage situation was ugly. One man had a sucking chest wound, critical, drowning in his own blood. The other had lost part of his right hand to shrapnel. Painful but stable. Stein stopped. He couldn’t carry both. He couldn’t carry the ammo. And two men.

He had to make a choice. He grabbed the man with the chest wound. He threw him over his shoulder fireman’s carry, and sprinted the remaining 100 yards to the beach. He dumped the man with a corpsmen shouting for plasma. Then he did something that wasn’t in the manual. Instead of grabbing ammo and going back to the fight, he turned around, ran back to the crater, grabbed the second marine with a hand wound, and carried him to safety to.

Only then did he grab his four belts of ammo and return to his gun. He had turned one resupply run into three trips through the kill zone. By 11 a.m., Stein had made six round trips for ammunition. He had advanced his platoon 200 yards inland. They had destroyed seven enemy positions. He had personally killed at least 15 Japanese soldiers.

But the island was starting to fight back in a way that had nothing to do with bullets. We need to talk about the boots. The standard issue U.S. Marine Corps boondocker in 1945 was a rough out leather boot with a corded rubber sole. It was a good boot for marching on European roads. It was a decent boot for jungle mud. But on Iwo Jima, those boots were a liability.

The volcanic ash on that island is incredibly abrasive. It’s basically crushed glass and rock. As Stein ran back and forth, sinking shin deep with every stride, the ash was grinding against the leather. It was working its way into the seams. It was acting like sandpaper on his skin. By his fourth ammo run, Stein noticed something terrifying. His boots were disintegrating.

The soles were peeling away, the leather was cracked and torn. But worse than the destruction of the boot was the friction. Every time he planted his foot, the boot acted like a paddle, catching the loose ash and creating drag. It was slowing him down and on a beach covered by Japanese machine guns. Speed is the only armor you have.

Stein stopped in a defilade. He looked at his feet. They were bleeding. The arches were screaming with sharp pain every time he pushed off. He looked at the 200 yards of open ground. He had to cross again. He did the math. The boots were protection, yes, but they were also anchors. Stein sat down. He unlaced the tattered remains of his boondockers and kicked them off.

Then he took off his socks. He stood up barefoot in the black volcanic ash. Most of the men around him thought he had snapped. They thought the stress of the bombardment had finally broken his mind. You do not run barefoot in a combat zone. There is sharp rock, hot metal, shrapnel and fire everywhere. But Stein wasn’t crazy. He was optimizing. He reached up and unbuckled his chinstrap.

He took off his M1 steel helmet, the steel pot, and dropped it in the sand. The helmet weighed two and a half pounds. The boots weighed about 3 pounds. By shedding them he was five and a half pounds lighter. That might not sound like much to you or me sitting in a chair, but when you are sprinting for your life with 200 pounds of gear and wounded men on your back, 5 pounds is the difference between making it to cover and getting cut in half. Stein grabbed the stinger and took off running.

His fifth run to the beach was clocked at two minutes and 40s. That is insanely fast for that terrain. And he realized he was right without the rigid soles of the boots. His toes could splay out and grip the ash. He wasn’t paddling against the sand anymore. He was digging into it. He was getting traction.

Was it painful? Absolutely. The ash was coarse. It was like running on a beach made of broken beer bottles. Every step cut his feet. The ground temperature was rising as the sun got higher. But the pain was just information. The speed was survival. He reached the beach, barefoot and bleeding. He grabbed another wounded marine, this one with shrapnel to the abdomen.

Unconscious. He slung him up. He ran him to the corpsmen. He grabbed the ammo. He ran back. By 11:50 a.m., nearly three hours into the fight, Stein was on his seventh trip. He had carried or assisted a wounded marine to safety on every single return trip. Eight runs into the fire. Eight men brought out alive.

He had brought back over 2000 rounds of ammunition. He had destroyed five more pillboxes. But while Stein was finding his rhythm, his weapon was starting to die. The stinger was a prototype. It was built in a shed. It wasn’t undergoing factory torture tests. It was undergoing the reality of war.

The barrel, designed to be cooled by the 300 mile per hour slipstream of a dive bomber, was now glowing a dull red. The heat was so intense it was discoloring the metal to a bruised purple. The wooden stock, the one Stein had hollowed out from a Garand was beginning to char from the heat radiating off the receiver. The smell of burning wood and hot oil was overpowering.

And then there was the trigger. That sheet metal mechanism was degrading. The ash was getting into the open crevices. Sometimes Stein would squeeze the trigger and get a single shot. Pop. He’d have to rack the slide and hit it again. Sometimes he’d squeeze it and get a runaway burst of five rounds when he only wanted three.

He had to start slapping the side of the receiver with the palm of his hand to reset the mechanism. It was like trying to operate a jammed printer while someone is shooting at you. But it was still firing, and as long as it fired company A could move. At 12:30 p.m. on his eighth trip, the stakes went up again.

Stein was on his way down to the beach when he found a marine who had stepped on a landmine. The man had lost both legs below the knee. He was conscious. He was screaming. The blood loss was catastrophic. The corpsman later said that the man had maybe two minutes of life left in him before he bled out. Stein didn’t hesitate. He scooped the man up. Now, carrying a man with traumatic amputations is a nightmare.

The blood makes everything slippery. The man is in shock. Thrashing. Stein ran. He sprinted the full 200 yards barefoot. He ignored the snipers. He ignored the mortars. He delivered the man to the medical station with seconds to spare. On the way back up, loaded with another 100 rounds of ammo, he ran past another Stinger gunner, one of the other five men from the 28th. The guy was walking back to the beach, dejected.

His weapon had jammed permanently. The barrel had warped from the heat and seized the bolt. Stein looked at his own weapon. The bipod had broken off. The wood was black. The barrel was bent slightly to the left, but he racked the bolt and it clicked. Still in the fight, he probably thought. By now the legend was already spreading down the line.

Marines in other sectors were asking about the Barefoot Corporal. They were watching this wild figure stripped of his helmet, no boots, blood soaked uniform running back and forth like a machine. Some of them thought he was the bravest man on the island. Some of them thought he had a death wish. Stein didn’t care about the reputation he cared about the rhythm. Run. Carry.

Load. Shoot. Repeat. It was a job. But on that eighth return trip, the mathematics of the battlefield finally caught up with him. The Japanese had realized that they couldn’t stop the whole American landing force, so they decided to stop the individual problems. Antonie Stein, the man running across open ground every 15 minutes, was a very big problem.

A Japanese sniper trained in patience and concealment had moved into a spider hole on a ridge overlooking Stein’s supply route. He had watched Stein run down. He waited. He adjusted his sights. He waited for the return trip. Stein came running back up the slope, barefoot, carrying four heavy belts of 30 caliber ammo. Exhausted, dehydrated, and focused on getting back to his platoon.

He didn’t see the spider hole. He didn’t see the glint of the scope. A single shot cracked out. The bullet missed Stein’s head by about six inches. Stein dropped flat in the ash. The Stinger landed beside him for the first time in four hours. The motion stopped. He was pinned. He was exposed and he was alone. The supply run was over. The duel was about to begin.

Stein lay motionless in the Black ash for 30s. The war on Iwo Jima shrank down to a very small, very personal universe. Just him. A patch of volcanic sand and an invisible man with a rifle about 150 yards to the east. You have to respect the discipline of the Japanese sniper.

In the chaos of a beach landing with thousands of marines pouring ashore, this shooter had the patience to ignore the easy targets. He waited. He watched the supply lines. And he identified the one barefoot man who was keeping company alive. He wasn’t firing wildly. He was hunting. The second shot cracked overhead. But here is the mistake the sniper made.

He fired at where Stein had been, not where he was. Stein, lying flat, processed that information instantly. The sniper hadn’t acquired his exact position yet. That meant Stein had maybe 10s the time it takes to work a bolt, reacquire a sight picture, and exhale before the next round took his head off. Most men, when pinned down by a sniper, will try to crawl backward.

They try to disappear. Stein did the opposite. He rolled to his left, grabbed the heavy smoking stinger and came up sprinting. But he didn’t run away. He ran toward the sniper. But here is the thing. He didn’t zigzag. He stood perfectly still. He stood upright, deliberately offering himself as a stationary target to draw the enemy’s gaze.

He needed the Japanese gunner to fire so he could see the muzzle flash. It was a calculated risk that overrode every instinct for self-preservation. Once he saw the flash, he didn’t dodge. He charged directly at the position. Stein closed the distance. 150 yards became 100. The sniper fired again, missed at 100 yards.

Stein saw the movement a subtle shift of shadow and a spider hole concealed by volcanic rock. That was all he needed. He dropped to one knee, leveled the stinger and unleashed the beast. The sniper had a rifle. Stein had a firehose. The stinger roared, spraying 1200 rounds per minute into the rock formation. It didn’t just kill the sniper.

It erased the position. The rock shattered. The spider hole collapsed. When the box clicked empty, there was no return fire. Stein walked up to the position, breathing hard. His bare feet caked in black grit. The sniper was dead. Stein reached down.

Detached the telescopic sight from the enemy rifle as a grim receipt of the transaction, and turned back toward his platoon. But when he finally rejoined company A 1300 hours, he realized the sniper had just been the opening act. The real problem was waiting ahead. The company had advanced into a slaughterhouse. They were pinned down by a complex of fortifications. At least eight pillboxes arranged in a perfect semicircle. It was an interlocking kill zone.

If a marine stood up to attack one bunker, the other seven would cut him down. They had taken 12 casualties in 20 minutes. Stein moved to the front. He looked at the arc of fire. He looked at his weapon. The stinger was dying. We talk about machines like they are invincible, but steel fatigues.

The barrel of the stinger was now bent slightly to the left, a result of the immense heat and the physical abuse of the supply round. The bipod was gone. The wooden stock was charred black and crumbling in his hands, but it still had a heartbeat. Stein stood up. He knew the drill. He opened fire on the leftmost pillbox, a five second burst bird. The position went silent. He shifted to the next bird, a silence.

He was playing a melody of suppression, and the riflemen of company A knew the rhythm. They didn’t need orders anymore. When the stinger roared, they moved. When the stinger stopped. They dropped. It was an instinctive, violent dance. By 1330, they had broken the defensive arc. Five pillboxes destroyed, three abandoned.

But at 1345, the Japanese defenders finally got lucky. Stein was standing exposed, firing a sustained burst at the sixth pillbox when a Japanese Type 96 machine gun scored a direct hit on the stinger itself. The impact was violent. It wasn’t just a graze. The bullet slammed into the weapon with enough force to rip it out of Stein’s hands and throw it six feet backward into the ash.

Stein dove for cover behind a low ridge. He was now unarmed. The stinger lay in the open, smoking in the dirt halfway between him and the enemy. The Japanese soldiers saw it fall. They stopped firing at the Marines and trained their guns on the weapon. They were baiting the trap. They knew he would come back for it. And he did.

Stein looked at the gun. He knew the belt feed was likely smashed. He knew the receiver might be cracked, but he also knew that without that gun, his platoon died. He sprinted. The Japanese machine guns opened up. Stein zig zag slid into the ash, grabbed the hot metal of the receiver, burning his hands, and rolled back behind the ridge.

He inspected the damage. It was bad. Around it struck the feed mechanism and bent the steel guide rails. The belt wouldn’t feed. This is where the toolmaker from Dayton took over. Stein didn’t have tools. He didn’t have a vise. He had his fingers and adrenaline. He ripped the damaged belt out.

He forced the bent steel rails back into alignment using sheer hand strength. He cleared the jam. He loaded a fresh belt. He stood up, screaming and empty the entire belt into the pillbox that had disarmed him. Retribution delivered in continuous fire. The position was obliterated, but the machine’s luck was running out. 45 minutes later, at 1430, it happened again.

Stein was assaulting a trench system when a rifle round from a Type 99 struck the receiver of the stinger clang. The weapon flew out of his hands for the second time, landing ten feet away in a shell crater. Stein was left standing there empty handed while a Japanese grenade detonated five yards behind him.

The explosion threw him forward. Shrapnel bit into his left leg and his back. It was small, jagged metal, hot and tearing. Wounded, bleeding and unarmed, Stein crawled into the crater to find his gun. The Stinger was a wreck. The receiver had a deep gouge in the steel. The impact had damaged the recoil spring.

When Stein tried to fire it, the weapon cycled sluggishly. The rate of fire had dropped from 1200 rounds per minute to maybe 600. It was chugging now, sounding more like the heavy tractor engine of a standard Browning than the aircraft buzzsaw used to be. Stein had to manually cycle the action every few bursts. Bang bang bang.

Jam rack the slide. Bang bang bang. It was broken. It was barely functional, but even a broken stinger firing 600 rounds per minute was faster than anything else on that island. Stein used the crippled weapon to suppress the trench while his squad moved in with grenades. Six more enemies dead. The advance continued by 1500 hours. 3 p.m.

, the adrenaline began to fade and the biological reality set in. Stein had completed eight trips to the beach. He had fired thousands of rounds of ammunition. He had carried wounded men on almost every single return trip. He looked down at his feet. They were a ruin. The volcanic ash had acted like a cheese grater. His soles were raw, bloody meat. The cuts were filled with black grit.

His uniform was stiff with sweat, seawater, and the blood of the men he had carried. And beside him lay the stinger. The barrel was bent at a visible five degree angle. The stock was held together by friction and hope. The trigger group was firing randomly. Sometimes one shot, sometimes five, sometimes nothing. But they had made it.

Company A had reached the objective. They were standing at the base of Mount Suribachi. The dark, brooding volcano that dominated the island. Stein had literally carried his unit to the foot of the Mount. At 1700 hours, the order came down to dig in for the night. The assault on the summit would begin in the morning. Stein slumped into a fighting hole.

He finally had a moment to assess his own body, and the shrapnel in his leg was throbbing. His back was on fire. His hands were blistered from the hot steel of the gun. He was 23 years old, but he felt like an old man. Other Marines crawled past his position. They looked at the barefoot corporal. They looked at the twisted pile of junk metal he was cleaning.

Some of them called him the Barefoot Corporal. Others just shook their heads, convinced he was insane. Stein didn’t say much. He just cleaned the weapon. He knew the stinger was dead. The barrel was shot out. The mechanism was shattered. It would never fire like a dragon again. But it had done its job. It had bought them one day of life.

Stein closed his eyes, listening to the Japanese infiltrators probing the lines in the darkness. He kept his hand on the trigger. The machine was dead, but the toolmaker wasn’t done yet. The next morning, February 20th, the 28th Marines began their climb up mount Suribachi. But Tony Stein wasn’t leading the charge. His body had finally rebelled.

The wounds from the previous day, the shrapnel in his leg, back and arm were infected. The blood loss had caught up with him. He was dizzy, pale, and barely able to stand. A corpsman took one look at him and didn’t ask for permission. He ordered an evacuation. Stein tried to argue, but the fight had left him.

He handed the battered, broken remains of the stinger to another marine in his squad. Passing the torch and allowed himself to be carried down to the beach. From there, a landing craft ferried him out to a hospital ship anchored off shore. For the next five days. While Stein lay in a clean bunk smelling of antiseptic, the battle ashore turned into a meat grinder.

On February 23rd, the Marines raised the flag on Suribachi. We’ve all seen the photo. Stein missed it. He was getting shrapnel dug out of his shoulder. The doctors patched him up, gave him fluids, and told him the good news. His war was over. He was being sent to a rear area hospital in Hawaii. Maybe even back to the States. Most men would have wept with relief.

Tony Stein just stared at the ceiling. Because on February 25th, news reached the ship that hit him harder than any bullet. The fifth Marine Division had moved north, assaulting a nightmare of terrain called Hill 362 A. The reports were catastrophic.

Company A, his company his friends, had lost 30% of its strength in two days. His platoon sergeant was dead. His squad leader was dead. The boys he had trained with in Hawaii were being slaughtered. On February 26th, Corporal Tony Stein got out of bed. He put on his uniform. He walked to the deck where a landing craft was loading supplies for the beach. He looked the boat crew in the eye and lied.

He told them he had been cleared for duty. He hadn’t been cleared. He was technically AWOL from a hospital ship, but nobody questioned a marine with bandages on his face trying to get back into the fight. He hit the beach at 1400 hours. The first thing he did was find a supply sergeant and demand a pair of boots. His feet were still raw, wrapped in gauze, but he laced the new leather tight.

He grabbed a standard M1 Garand rifle from a pile of gear. The stinger was gone. Lost in the chaos of the mountain assault. It didn’t matter. He walked six miles north through the stench of sulfur and Death pass the burned out tanks until he found the ragged remnants of company A at the base of Hill 362 A.

The company commander looked at him like he was a ghost. Stein just reported for duty. He was put back on the line immediately. They needed every rifle. For two days, Stein fought as a standard rifleman. No super weapon. No barefoot sprints. Just the brutal, intimate work of clearing caves. Then came March 1st.

Company A was tasked with a reconnaissance patrol. Their job was to locate a complex of Japanese pillboxes that had pinned down the regiment. It wasn’t an assault. It was a look and see mission. Stein was designated the assistant patrol leader. They moved out at zero 700. The terrain was a maze of volcanic ridges at zero 745.

They reached a vantage point. Stein moved to the front. He needed to see what was over the ridge. He stepped forward. M1 Garand ready at zero 752. A single shot rang out. It came from a spider hole 200 yards away. This time, the sniper didn’t miss. The bullet struck Stein in the head. He fell instantly. The corpsman rushed to him, but it was over at zero 753 on March 1st, 1945.

The toolmaker from Dayton was gone. The patrol suppressed the sniper with mortars, completed their mission, and carried Tony Stein’s body back to the line. He was 23 years old. Tony Stein was buried in the fifth Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima the next day. A simple wooden cross marked his grave. Just a name, a rank and a service number.

There was no mention on that cross of the stinger. No mention of the eight barefoot trips. No mention of the fact that he had essentially invented a new class of infantry weapon in a maintenance shed, in the chaos of a war. The Stingers themselves disappeared. All six of the original guns built by Stein and Grevich were lost. Some were destroyed by enemy fire.

Others were likely tossed onto scrap piles when the barrels finally warped beyond use. The military generally doesn’t preserve unauthorized field modifications. They are considered junk today, not a single original stinger exists. They are ghosts. But the story didn’t stay buried in the volcanic ash. In 1946, Stein’s widow Joan stood in the Ohio State House and received the Medal of Honor on his behalf. The citation is incredible. Reading.

It talks about conspicuous gallantry. It details the personally improvised aircraft type weapon. It counts the 20 enemy soldiers killed in a single hour. It is the official record of a man who refused to accept that. Good enough was good enough. And that is the real legacy of Tony Stein. It isn’t just about the shooting.

It’s about the ethos of the American war fighter. Stein represented a very specific kind of American genius. He was a toolmaker. He looked at a problem. This gun is too heavy, and my friends are dying because of it. And he didn’t wait for a committee to fix it. He didn’t write a letter to the War Department.

He went to a shed, turned on a lathe and built the solution himself. He understood that rules are important, but survival is mandatory. He understood that when the map doesn’t match the ground, you throw away the map. When the boots slow you down, you take them off. When the hospital ship tells you to rest.

But your brothers are dying on a hill, you get on the boat and you go back. Today at Parris Island, they still teach recruits about Tony Stein. They teach the story not just as a history lesson, but as a challenge. They are asking every young marine when the plan fails.

What will you build when the odds are impossible? How fast will you run? Tony Stein lives in Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio. Today he is home. But his spirit, that stubborn, barefoot, mechanical ingenuity, is still out there. Wherever someone refuses to quit just because the manual says they should. And that’s a lesson we could all use a little more of. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you in the next one.