Private First Class Albert Ernest Schwab at Okinawa Shima, 1945
Welcome to Beyond the Call, where history, leadership, and heroism come alive. Today’s story explores Private First Class Albert Ernest Schwab at Okinawa Shima in nineteen forty five, a powerful account of courage and responsibility in combat. If you enjoy learning more about military history and extraordinary individuals, you can find more articles, podcasts, and resources at Trackpads dot com. On a jagged ridge above a shallow valley, a single Marine with a flamethrower changed the fate of his company. His choices under fire still echo through the story of the Pacific war.
The valley in front of the ridge looked harmless at a glance, just a stretch of rough ground broken by low folds of earth and scattered brush. When the Marines of First Battalion, Fifth Marines moved into it on May seventh, nineteen forty five, they did so as part of a wider effort to crack the defenses on Okinawa Shima. The ground had already taught them to expect sudden fire from unseen positions, but this time the trap was even more complete. A Japanese machine gun, dug in high on the crest, opened with a violent burst that swept the valley floor and drove the company flat into the dirt. In an instant, the open ground became a killing zone.
Pinned in the valley, the Marines tried to find options. To either side the land rose in steep, almost sheer cliffs that made any flanking move impossible. Behind them lay the ground they had already crossed under fire, now littered with the wounded and the gear of men who had been hit. Ahead, the unseen gun continued to hammer the slightest movement, its field of fire reaching into every shallow depression where a helmet or sleeve appeared. Beyond the Call is the Monday feature of Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine. In that valley, the words “beyond the call” were about to gain a very specific meaning.
Among the Marines pressed into the thin cover was Private First Class Albert Ernest Schwab, carrying the heavy tanks and hose of a flamethrower on his back. He had grown up far from Okinawa, born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In Tulsa he had gone to high school, spent a short time at the local university, and then taken steady work with an oil company in a nation still shaking off the Great Depression. His life before the war was that of a young civilian trying to build a future in familiar streets and familiar fields. The war would pull him far from that path.
When Schwab enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in May nineteen forty four, he stepped into a world that was already deep into its hardest campaigns. Recruit training on the West Coast turned him from oil field worker to Marine through long days of drilling, rifle marksmanship, physical training, and instruction in amphibious warfare. After boot camp he returned home for a brief ten day leave, the only time his family saw him in uniform before he went overseas. Then he joined a replacement draft headed into the Pacific, where battle worn divisions needed fresh Marines to fill their ranks. His assignment to First Battalion, Fifth Marines placed him in a regiment with a hard record in earlier island battles.
Somewhere along that path, he was trained as a flamethrower operator, one of the most dangerous specialties in the infantry. The weapon he carried could project a stream of burning fuel into caves, bunkers, and machine gun positions that ordinary rifle fire could not touch. It was also heavy and highly visible, and enemy soldiers understood very well how important it was to kill the man carrying it. By the time Schwab landed with the First Marine Division on Okinawa on Easter Sunday nineteen forty five, he had become one of the Marines the battalion would call on when fortified positions blocked the way. The ridges and ravines of the island would give him many chances to use that skill.
On May seventh, his company moved into the shallow valley that lay beneath the enemy held ridge. At first, the fire they took was scattered and familiar, bursts of mortar and rifle fire that the Marines could read and work around. Then the machine gun on the ridgeline above opened fully, sending long bursts that raked the valley and struck down Marines in mid stride. The company commander realized almost at once that his men were trapped in a bowl that the gun dominated from above. Every attempt to shift position drew a new storm of bullets, and radio calls for corpsmen and reports of casualties began to overlap.
Time in such a place moves strangely. For the Marines in the valley, each minute under fire meant more wounded, more danger of the company breaking under pressure, and a growing risk that the battalion’s larger attack would stall. Schwab lay among them, feeling the flamethrower tanks press into the earth, listening to rounds crack past and slap into the ground. His weapon was made for this exact problem, but using it here meant something more than normal risk. To reach the gun he would have to climb straight up the exposed slope, alone, visible from the first step, with nothing but shallow dips and rocks for cover. There would be no safe path.
He did not wait for a carefully drawn plan. In that moment Schwab understood that every second of delay gave the enemy gun more chances to cut down his friends in the valley. Rising from his shallow cover, he began to climb the ridge with the flamethrower on his back. Japanese gunners saw the movement at once and shifted their fire, scouring the slope in an effort to stop him. Dirt and rock erupted around him as bullets searched for his body. He moved in short bounds, using every kink in the terrain, every patch of broken ground, to close the distance.
Reaching a point from which he could strike, Schwab brought the flamethrower nozzle to bear on the enemy emplacement. When he squeezed the trigger, a sheet of fire swept the machine gun position, engulfing weapon and crew. From the valley below, Marines saw the gun’s fire falter, then stop. The sudden silence from that part of the ridge was more than a tactical detail. It was a physical relief, a break in the storm that allowed men to lift their heads, drag the wounded to slightly better cover, and begin to think about moving again. One man’s climb had opened a door.
As the company started to adjust its line, ready to push up toward the newly silenced position, a second machine gun farther along the ridge exploded into action. Its first bursts tore into the Marines who had begun to move, causing fresh casualties and threatening to lock the valley down even more tightly than before. In an instant, the fragile gains that Schwab’s first assault had bought were at risk of vanishing. The company once again found itself pinned, this time under fire from a gun that could cover both the valley floor and the slope he had just climbed.
Schwab, still on the exposed ridge and working with a nearly empty flamethrower, took in the new situation. He would have known that his remaining fuel was limited and that his earlier climb had already drawn the enemy’s full attention. Now, any movement by him would almost certainly bring a direct concentration of fire. Yet he also understood that if the second gun remained active, the company might be forced back or destroyed where it lay. With that knowledge in mind, he made another choice. He began to move again along the ridge.
Under renewed fire, he advanced toward the second machine gun, closing the distance in the same determined way he had with the first. Bullets tore into the ground around him, and a burst struck him, inflicting severe wounds, but he did not stop. Drawing on the last of his strength and his dwindling supply of fuel, he lifted the nozzle once more and directed the remaining bursts into the second emplacement. The position went silent, its crew and weapon destroyed by the flames. In that act, he broke the last major obstacle blocking his company’s path up the ridge.
The phrases in his Medal of Honor citation describe these moments in formal language, but each line points back to this deadly ground. When it speaks of “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty,” it is describing a Marine who climbed into fire twice when survival was unlikely. When it notes that his company was pinned in a valley under blanket machine gun fire with no way to maneuver, it captures the depth of the trap in which they found themselves. His choice to advance “up the face of the ridge in bold defiance of the enemy fire” is less a flourish than a plain description of his path.
The citation also highlights his behavior after the first success, when the second gun opened fire and tore fresh gaps in the company’s line. It speaks of his “split second decision” to continue the attack despite a “diminished supply of fuel” and the weight of enemy fire directed at him. The words “cool and indomitable” may sound ceremonial, but on the ridge they meant that even after being gravely wounded, he kept his focus on the second gun and finished the job. When the citation notes that his actions occurred at a “critical stage of the operation” and “materially furthered the advance” of his company, it is summing up a simple fact. Without those two destroyed machine guns, the company might never have left that valley alive.
In the larger frame of the Okinawa campaign, the ridge where Schwab fell was one of many hard fought positions. Okinawa was a battle of attrition, measured in ridges taken and valleys crossed at great human cost. His actions did not win the war on their own, but they ensured that his battalion did not stumble or break at a vital point in the line. By destroying the two key positions, he allowed his company to secure the high ground and maintain the pressure that the division needed to keep advancing. In that way, his courage rippled outward, shaping events beyond the few yards of dirt where he stood.
The traits that emerge from his story are those often linked to leadership, even though he did not hold high rank. Initiative appears in his willingness to act when the usual options were gone and the cost of hesitation was measured in the lives of his friends. Responsibility appears in his acceptance of the risks bound up in the flamethrower, not as a reason to hide but as a reason to move first. His professional skill shows in his ability to bring a heavy, dangerous weapon to bear under extreme pressure and use it effectively in the worst conditions. For anyone studying leadership and character, his example suggests that influence on the battlefield often comes from the person who steps into the hardest job at the hardest moment.
Albert Ernest Schwab died of his wounds on May seventh, nineteen forty five, the same day he made his two assaults on the ridge. He was twenty four years old. His Medal of Honor was awarded after his death, and for his family in Tulsa that high honor was bound up with the grief of losing a son and brother. In the years that followed, his name would be woven into the local memory of the city and into the institutional memory of the Marine Corps. Memorials, graveside markers, and written accounts of the Okinawa campaign have all carried his story forward.
Today, when people read his citation or hear his name, they may first see only the formal words or the brief description of his actions. Behind those words stands a young man who left a civilian job in the oil fields, who went through the same training and doubts as many others, and who then faced a moment that demanded more than anyone had the right to expect. Remembering him as a full person rather than just a line in a record helps keep the human reality of war in view. As you think about his climb up that ridge and the lives saved in that valley, you take part in the act of memory that Beyond the Call exists to keep alive.
