Lessons from Hacksaw Ridge and Desmond Doss
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Life Lessons from Hacksaw Ridge and Desmond Doss

Hacksaw Ridge is a 2016 film directed by Mel Gibson, with Andrew Garfield as Desmond Doss. Doss was real. He was a US Army medic who would not carry a weapon, and for what he did on Okinawa he received the Medal of Honor. He was the first conscientious objector to receive it.

The film is a dramatisation, and some well-known lines from it are film dialogue, not his words. This page sets out what the record says he did, which words are his and which are the screenplay’s, and then what a reader can take from the record rather than from the film.

Who Desmond Doss was

Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on 7 February 1919, and was raised a strict Seventh-day Adventist. He kept Saturday as the Sabbath, and his faith forbade him to bear arms.

When the United States entered the war he was working at the Newport News naval shipyard. Accounts differ on how he came into the Army: the Dictionary of Virginia Biography says he was offered a deferment and chose to join the Army on 1 April 1942; the National WWII Museum says he was drafted in the spring of 1942. Both agree he did not use his objection to stay out. Recalling it in 2001, he said: “I felt like it was an honor to serve my country according to the dictates of my conscience.”

He did not like the label conscientious objector. He preferred “conscientious cooperator”, and he asked for medical duty. In October 1945 he explained: “While I believe in the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill,’ and that bearing arms is a sin against God, my belief in freedom is as great as that of anyone else, and I had to help those boys who were fighting for it.”

A law passed in 1940 allowed conscientious objectors to serve in non-combatant roles, and he was not alone in doing so. The National WWII Museum puts the number of men designated conscientious objectors during the war at over 70,000, of whom 25,000 joined the armed forces in non-combat roles such as medics and chaplains.

Training was hard on him. Boots and other items were thrown at him as he prayed at night, and his commanding officers tried to have him discharged for mental illness, a discharge he refused to accept. He became a company aid man in the 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division.

Okinawa was not his first battle. His division took part in the liberation of Guam in July 1944 and then fought on Leyte in the Philippines. The Dictionary of Virginia Biography records a Bronze Star for his work on Leyte; the National WWII Museum says he received one on Guam as well.

What he did on the escarpment

On Okinawa, his regiment moved into the line on 29 April 1945 at the Maeda Escarpment, the cliff known as Hacksaw Ridge. He ministered to the wounded there between 29 April and 21 May.

His Medal of Honor citation describes “a jagged escarpment 400 feet high”. When the battalion reached the summit, artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire crashed into them, “inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back”. Doss “refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them one by one to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands.”

He described it himself in 1945: “They had no way of getting back and I could not leave them up there. I was the only medical corpsman with them, so I just went ahead and continued to pick up the wounded still lying in front of the lines and then began the job of getting them off the cliff.”

Decades later, in the documentary The Conscientious Objector, he remembered how he kept going: “I was praying the whole time. I just kept praying, Lord, please help me get one more.”

The citation goes on. On 2 May he rescued a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines. Two days later he treated four men cut down while attacking a defended cave, advancing to within eight yards of the enemy, and made four separate trips under fire to bring them back. On 5 May he gave plasma to a wounded artillery officer while shells fell close by, and later that day carried another man 100 yards to safety.

Where “75 men” comes from

Doss is widely credited with saving 75 men on the escarpment. It is an agreed figure, not a count. He later said that his commanding officer wanted to credit him with saving a hundred lives, but he estimated the number at fifty, and they compromised on seventy-five.

The citation itself, as reprinted in full by the National WWII Museum, gives no count of the men he saved. Its “approximately 75” refers to casualties from the barrage, and near its end it says he “saved the lives of many soldiers”.

So the record gives a range: fifty by his own estimate, a hundred by his commander’s, seventy-five by agreement. Accounts also differ on the day: the Dictionary of Virginia Biography puts the rescue on the first day, 29 April; the National WWII Museum places it on 5 May.

What the citation adds

The citation’s last episode is easy to skip past. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he stayed in the open while the rest of his company took cover, treating the wounded until a grenade seriously wounded him in the legs. Rather than call another aid man out of cover, he treated his own wounds and waited five hours for litter bearers.

While they were carrying him back, he saw a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter and told the bearers to take the other man first. Waiting for them to return, he was hit again, suffering a compound fracture of one arm. He bound a rifle stock to the arm as a splint and crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station.

The Dictionary of Virginia Biography dates the grenade wound to 12 May; the citation, the official document, says 21 May, and this page follows the citation.

President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor at the White House on 12 October 1945. The cost stayed with him. He spent about six years in military and veterans’ hospitals recovering from his wounds and was never able to work full time again. He had contracted tuberculosis and lost a lung and five ribs, and in 1976 he suddenly lost his hearing. He died on 23 March 2006.

Hacksaw Ridge Movie and Desmond Doss

Hacksaw Ridge tells this story as a film, with dialogue written for it by its screenwriters, Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan. Because the actor is playing Doss, it is easy for that dialogue to be mistaken for Doss’s own words.

In the film, Garfield’s Doss says he wants to serve as a medic “right in the middle with the other guys”, that he is “going to be saving it” while everybody else is taking life, and that “with the world so set on tearing itself apart” he wants to put “a little bit of it back together”. Those are lines from the film. We have not found them in any of Doss’s recorded words we could read: his 1945 newspaper account and his 2001 oral history as quoted in the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, and the documentary excerpts broadcast by NPR.

His own words, with where they come from:

1. His statement on the commandment and on freedom, quoted in full earlier on this page — Doss, October 1945, quoted in the Dictionary of Virginia Biography from the Washington Post of 12 October 1945
2. “They had no way of getting back and I could not leave them up there.” — the same 1945 account
3. “I felt like it was an honor to serve my country according to the dictates of my conscience.” — his 2001 oral history for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, as quoted in the Dictionary of Virginia Biography
4. “I just kept praying, Lord, please help me get one more.” — from Terry Benedict’s documentary The Conscientious Objector (2004), as broadcast by NPR

These are the lines to use when quoting Doss; lines from the film read best credited to the film.

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What follows is our reading of the record, not a programme. Each point is tied to something Doss did.

• Say where your line is, early and plainly. Doss asked for medical duty and said what he would not do, long before he reached a battlefield. NPR notes that the Army could not force him to use a weapon.
• You can hold a conviction and still serve. He refused the weapon, and he refused the discharge his officers tried to arrange. Much of his story is the refusal to treat those as the same choice.
• Count honestly, even when the bigger number flatters you. Offered credit for a hundred lives, he said fifty. A figure argued down by the person it flatters is easier to trust.
• Work in units of one. “Lord, please help me get one more.” The citation describes him carrying men “one by one”. When a task is too large to face whole, the next one may still be possible.
• Choose the name that describes you. He preferred “conscientious cooperator” to a label that described only what he would not do.
• Check a quotation before you pass it on. Lines spoken by Doss in the film were written for it. Our guide to spotting a fake quote or an invented source shows how to check one in a few minutes.

Related: Conquer Your Fears: Face Your Fears ∙ Lessons on Becoming Fearless from Cus D’Amato and Mike Tyson and Lessons from King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans.

Sources

• Marc Leepson, “Desmond Thomas Doss (7 February 1919–23 March 2006)”, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, published 2015. Its own sources include Doss’s 1945 Washington Post account and his 2001 oral history in the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
• The National WWII Museum, “Private First Class Desmond Thomas Doss: Medal of Honor”, including the full text of his Medal of Honor citation.
• Elizabeth Blair, “The Real ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Soldier Saved 75 Souls Without Ever Carrying A Gun”, NPR Morning Edition, 4 November 2016, transcript, with excerpts from Terry Benedict’s documentary The Conscientious Objector.
• Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson, written by Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan. Film dialogue as transcribed at Wikiquote.

Checked September 2026.