February 19th, 1945.
9:02 a.m.
Beach Green 1, Ewima.
Corporal Tony Stein hits the volcanic sand and immediately sinks to his ankles.
The black ash swallows his boots like quicksand.
Around him, 30,000 Marines are pouring onto an 8 square mile island defended by 21,000 Japanese soldiers.
They cannot see.
The beach is quiet.
Too quiet.
Three days of naval bombardment, 6,800 tons of shells.
The Americans expect devastation.
What they find is emptiness.
Lieutenant General Tatamichi Kuribayashi is watching from Mount Suribachi.
He has 11 miles of tunnels beneath this island, 800 pill boxes, 21 artillery positions.
His orders to his men are precise.
Let them land.
Let them advance.
Then kill them all.
Stein doesn’t know any of this.
What he knows is that in his hands, he’s carrying a weapon that doesn’t exist in any military manual.
It weighs 25 lb.
It fires 1,200 rounds per minute.
It was built from a crashed airplane, a broken rifle, and scrap metal.
The Marine Corps calls it unauthorized field modification.
Stein calls it the Stinger.
In the next 8 hours, this improvised weapon will kill 20 Japanese soldiers, destroy multiple fortified positions, and earn Stein the Medal of Honor.
But the real story starts 14 months earlier on a different island with a different problem.
November 1st, 1943.
Empress Augusta Bay, Bugganville Island.
6:34 a.
m.
The Marines hit the beach at dawn.
Within 90 minutes, they’re dying.
Not from artillery.
Not from naval guns, from something worse.
Snipers.
Japanese snipers have turned the jungle into a killing field.
They hide in trees 60 ft above the forest floor.
They wait for hours without moving.
They fire one shot.
They disappear.
Private first class William Colby watches his squad leader take a round through the throat.
The shot came from somewhere in the canopy.
No muzzle flash, no sound until impact.
Colby never sees the shooter.
This is the mathematics of jungle warfare.
In 1943, a Japanese sniper reveals his position for door.
3 seconds per shot.
A Marine machine gun crew needs 4.
2 seconds to acquire a target and open fire.
The sniper is gone before the first round leaves the barrel.
The Marines have a firepower problem.
Their standard machine gun, the M1919 A4, fires 400 to 500 rounds per minute.
It weighs 31 lb.
The tripod adds another 14.
Operating it requires a four-man crew.
Against a sniper who shoots once and vanishes, this weapon is useless.
Too slow to aim, too slow to fire, too heavy to reposition.
What the Marines need is something that can saturate a target area in milliseconds.
Something one man can carry and fire on the move.
That weapon doesn’t exist, not officially.
The A/M2 Browning machine gun was never designed for human hands.
It was designed for aircraft.
Specifically, the SBD Dauntless dive bomber mounted in the rear cockpit, operated by a gunner sitting in a metal seat, cooled by a 200 mph slipstream.
The specifications are remarkable.
Weight 21 lb, rate of fire 1,200 to,500 rounds per minute.
That’s 20 to 25 rounds per second.
Three times faster than the M1919.
The problem is everything else.
The ANM2 has no stock.
You can’t shoulder it.
It has no trigger.
Instead, it has spade grips.
Two handles like motorcycle handlebars with thumb buttons.
It has no sights.
Aircraft gunners aim by watching tracer rounds and adjusting.
This weapon was built to be bolted to an airplane and operated by a man strapped into a seat.
Using it on the ground is theoretically impossible.
November 3rd, 1943.
Bugganville perimeter, 2:47 p.
m.
Colby finds what he’s looking for in the wreckage of a crashed, dauntless 400 yd from the American lines.
The aircraft hit the trees 3 days ago.
The pilot is dead.
The rear gunner is dead, but the&M2 is intact.
He strips it from the mount, carries it back to his position.
He can’t remove the spade grips without machine tools.
He doesn’t have, but he has a bipod from a damaged B that took shrapnel two days ago.
He clamps it to the anm2’s barrel jacket.
It’s crude.
The fit is wrong, but it holds.
That evening, Japanese soldiers probe the perimeter.
Colby hears movement in the treeine.
He drops prone, positions the modified anm2, and waits.
Three figures emerge from the jungle at 40 yards.
Colby presses the thumb button.
The AN M2 screams.
1,200 rounds per minute.
Sounds like tearing canvas, not individual shots.
In 1.
5 seconds, he fires 30 rounds.
All three Japanese soldiers go down.
The concept is proven.
The ANM2 can work on the ground, but Col’s modification is barely functional.
The spade grips make precision aiming impossible.
He can’t move with it.
He can only fire from prone.
Someone needs to solve the engineering problems.
Sergeant Milan Melgrevich, third parachute battalion, is not a typical Marine.
Before the war, he worked in a machine shop in Mountain Iron, Minnesota, population 967.
He learned to weld at 14.
By 18, he could fabricate parts from technical drawings.
By 22, he was designing his own tools.
The Parramarines recruited him because they needed men who could think mechanically.
Parachute troops fight behind enemy lines without supply chains.
When equipment breaks, they fix it.
When equipment doesn’t exist, they build it.
Gravich sees K’s improvised&m 2.
He sees the potential.
He sees the problems.
The ANM2 has no stock.
So, Gravich acquires an M1 Garand rifle stock from a damaged weapon.
He cuts it down with a hacksaw, hollows out the interior to fit the ANM2’s buffer tube, attaches it with two bolts.
The spade grips work in an aircraft.
On the ground, they’re awkward, slow, and prevent instinctive shooting.
Gravich fabricates a trigger mechanism from sheet metal.
He models it on the M1 Garand’s trigger group.
The mechanical linkage is complex.
It has to translate finger pressure into electrical contact with the ANM2’s solenoid.
It takes him two weeks to get it right.
The ANM2 has no sights.
Aircraft gunners aim by watching tracer fire, but you can’t aim tracer fire in daylight against a target that shoots once and disappears.
Gravich removes the rear sight from a bar, machines an adapter plate, and mounts it on the&m2’s receiver.
The weapon needs to be portable.
One man moving fast through jungle terrain.
The bar’s bipod becomes both forward grip and ground support.
Gravich attaches it just ahead of the receiver.
The result is ugly.
Frankenstein’s machine gun.
A hybrid of four different weapons held together by bolts, welds, and improvisation.
It weighs 25 lbs.
It’s 40 in long.
It fires 1,200 rounds per minute, and one man can carry it and move with it.
Gravich names it the stinger.
The sound it makes, that tearing canvas roar stings the ears.
The effects on targets sting considerably more.
But Buganville ends before the Stinger sees combat.
The third parachute battalion ships home.
The paramarines are disbanded in February 1944.
Grevage transfers to the 28th Marines, Fifth Marine Division.
He brings the Stinger design with him.
Corporal Anthony Michael Stein was born September 30th, 1921 in Dayton, Ohio.
Son of immigrants from Austria, Hungary.
His father worked in a factory.
His mother cleaned houses.
Stein dropped out of high school at 14.
Not because he was stupid, because his family needed money.
He got a job at Patterson Field as a tool and die maker.
For 7 years, he machined parts from metal blanks.
Learned to work with steel, aluminum, bronze, learned to read blueprints, learned precision.
In September 1942, he enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Not the regular Marines, the parramarines.
The toughest training the military offered.
He was 5’6 in tall, 130 lb.
The instructors looked at him and saw a wash out.
They were wrong.
Stein graduated first in his class in hand-to-hand combat.
First in marksmanship, third overall.
What he lacked in size, he made up in ferocity.
Buganville changed him.
20 months of combat.
Guadal Canal, Vela Lavella, Buganville.
Again on Buganville, they called him the sniper exterminator.
Five Japanese snipers in a single day.
He hunted them the way they hunted Marines.
Patience, silence, one shot.
He came home in 1944 weighing 190 lb, all muscle, 2 in taller.
His eyes were different.
His mother barely recognized him.
When the paramarines disbanded, Stein transferred to the 28th Marines, same regiment as Grevich.
They met in November 1944, two former paramarines, two men who understood that standard weapons weren’t enough.
Grevich showed Stein the Stinger design.
Stein saw it and understood immediately.
His years as a tool and die maker had trained him for exactly this moment.
They started building.
The 28th Marines are preparing for something big.
The men don’t know what the officers do.
Ioima, the most fortified island in the Pacific.
Gravich and Stein have six weeks.
They acquire M2 aircraft guns from crashed planes and damaged inventory.
Some they buy with whiskey.
Some they trade for.
Some simply disappear from supply depots.
They work nights in a maintenance shed at Camp Pendleton.
Stein handles the precision machining.
Gravich handles the assembly and testing.
Six stingers.
That’s all they can build in time.
Grevich is in G company.
He takes one stinger himself.
Three go to G Company’s rifle platoon.
One to the demolition section.
The sixth goes to Tony Stein.
Stein is in a company, different chain of command.
No authorization for experimental weapons, but Stein is a parramarine.
He knows people.
He calls in favors.
The Stinger becomes his.
January 1945, the 28th Marines board transport ships.
Destination classified.
On the voyage, Grevich and Stein make final modifications.
They’re still adjusting the trigger mechanisms.
When the ships anchor off Eoima is 8 square miles of volcanic rock and black sand, it looks like the surface of the moon.
Nothing grows.
Nothing lives except the 21,000 Japanese soldiers dug into its tunnels.
Lieutenant General Kurabayashi has had 10 months to prepare.
He knows the Americans are coming.
He knows he cannot stop them from landing.
He knows he cannot win.
His strategy is different.
He will make the Americans pay for every yard.
He will kill so many Marines that America will hesitate to invade Japan itself.
The defense system is engineering genius.
11 miles of tunnels connect 800 pill boxes, bunkers, and artillery positions.
Soldiers can move underground from one end of the island to the other.
They can appear, fire, and vanish.
They can take casualties, retreat through tunnels, and reemerge behind American lines.
Every inch of the beach is pre-registered for artillery fire.
Kurabayashi’s gunners have rehearsed for months.
They know the exact coordinates of every landing zone.
His orders to his men.
No banzai charges, no suicidal attacks.
Kill 10 Americans before you die.
The Marines expect to take the island in 5 days.
It will take 36.
February 19th, 1945.
8:59 a.
m.
The first wave hits the beach 1 minute early.
8,000 Marines in the initial assault.
Tony Stein is among them.
The sand is the first enemy.
Volcanic ash, fine as powder, mixed with sulfur.
Men sink to their calves.
Vehicles bog down.
Progress is measured in feet, not yards.
And the beach is silent.
No artillery, no machine gun fire, no resistance.
The Marines advance 200 yd inland, then 300.
Still nothing.
Staff Sergeant John Basilone.
Medal of Honor recipient from Guadal Canal leads his men toward the first airfield.
This is too easy, he tells his radio men.
At 9:15 a.
m.
, Kuri Bayashi gives the order.
The island explodes.
Artillery from positions the naval bombardment never touched.
Mortars from caves invisible from the air.
Machine guns from pillboxes buried in the sand.
Marines who were walking upright are cut down in seconds.
The beach transforms from quiet landing zone to killing ground.
Basselon is dead by 10:30 a.
m.
So are 600 other Marines.
Tony Stein lands on Beach Green One with a company, First Battalion.
Within 10 minutes, his platoon is pinned down.
Japanese machine gun fire from three pill boxes is shredding anyone who moves.
The platoon leader is hit.
The sergeant is hit.
Men are dying in the black sand 30 yards from the waterline.
Stein does something that witnesses will later describe as insane and suicidal.
He stands up full height in the open.
Machine gun fire cracking past his head.
He’s not being brave.
He’s being tactical.
From prone, he can’t see where the fire is coming from.
Standing, he can trace the tracers back to their sources.
Three pill boxes.
Left flank 80 yard, center 120 yard, right flank 90 yard.
Stein raises the stinger.
The sound is unlike anything on that beach.
Not the steady hammer of the M1919.
Not the slower thud of the Japanese Type 92.
This is a mechanical scream.
1,200 rounds per minute concentrated on a firing slit 118 in wide.
The left pillbox goes silent.
Stein moves.
Not crawling, running.
The volcanic sand drags at his boots.
He doesn’t care.
80 yards to the center pillbox.
The Japanese gunner sees him coming.
Swings his weapon.
Too slow.
The stinger screams again.
Two seconds.
40 rounds through the firing slit.
The ricochet effect inside a concrete pillbox is devastating.
Every round that enters bounces off the walls.
The three-man crew doesn’t have a chance.
Right pillbox, 90 yards.
The Japanese gunner is already firing at Stein.
Rounds kick up black sand at his feet.
One clips his sleeve.
Stein doesn’t stop.
Doesn’t take cover.
Charges straight at the position and fires.
Silence.
Three pill boxes.
3 minutes.
20 Japanese soldiers.
But the Stein is empty.
The ENM2 was designed for aircraft.
Aircraft carry thousands of rounds.
A man carries what he can hold.
Stein has a 100 round belt at,200 rounds per minute.
That’s 5 seconds of firing.
He’s already used three belts.
The ammunition resupply point is on the beach 400 yd back under constant artillery fire.
Stein runs.
He reaches the beach, grabs four belts of 30 caliber ammunition, and turns to go back.
That’s when he sees Private First Class Robert Jansen lying in the sand with a shattered femur.
Stein throws Jansen over his shoulder, carries him to the aid station, grabs more ammunition, runs back to the front.
First trip.
The second time he finds two wounded men, drags one, supports the other, gets them to the aid station, reloads.
Second trip.
By noon, Stein has made eight trips to the beach and back.
Each time under fire, each time carrying wounded Marines out.
Eight trips 800 yardds each way, 6,400 yards total under artillery and machine gun fire while carrying wounded men.
By the fourth trip, Stein realizes he’s too slow.
The volcanic sand is the problem.
His boots sink with every step.
Precious seconds lost while Japanese gunners track his movement.
He makes a decision that will become legend.
He removes his boots, then his helmet.
Barefoot, bareheaded, carrying an improvised machine gun that weighs 25 lb, Stein sprints across the most heavily defended beach in Pacific history.
He’s faster now.
The sand still sucks at his feet, but bare skin grips better than leather souls.
Without the helmet, his peripheral vision improves.
Private First Class James Knapp watches him pass.
He looked like a crazy man.
No boots, no helmet, covered in black sand and other men’s blood, carrying that weird gun that sounded like a chainsaw.
He was grinning.
The Japanese notice him, too.
During his sixth trip, a sniper puts a round through the Stinger’s receiver.
The impact tears the weapon from Stein’s hands.
He picks it up, checks the action, keeps moving.
It still works.
During his seventh trip, it happens again.
Another round hits the stinger.
This time, the stock cracks.
Stein wraps it with a rifle sling, keeps firing.
By 6:00 p.
m.
, a company has advanced 500 yd.
They’ve taken 40% casualties, but they’re off the beach and dug in.
Tony Stein’s personal statistics for D-Day.
Eight trips to the beach for ammunition.
Eight wounded Marines evacuated.
20 confirmed Japanese kills.
At least eight pill boxes neutralized.
Weapons shot out of his hands twice.
Wounds received, zero.
That night, regimental staff officers asked Gravich how many more stingers he can build.
The answer, none.
There are no more&m2s available.
No more time, no more resources.
Six stingers.
That’s all they’ll ever have.
The next four days are measured in yards and bodies.
The 28th Marines push toward Mount Surabbachi.
The extinct volcano dominates the southern tip of Ewima until it falls.
Japanese observers can direct artillery onto every American position on the island.
Stein fights with a company through the sulfur fields, through the mine belts, through the interlocking fields of fire that Kurabayashi designed to be impenetrable.
The Stein fights with a assault.
When pillboxes hold up the advance, Stein goes forward.
When snipers pin down the platoon, Stein hunts them.
On February 23rd, Marines reach the summit of Surabbachi.
A patrol raises an American flag.
Photographers capture the moment.
The image becomes the most famous photograph of World War II.
Stein isn’t there.
He’s in a field hospital on USS Samaritan, 2 miles offshore.
A mortar fragment caught him during the final push through the shoulder.
Not fatal, but bad enough for evacuation.
The battle should be over for him.
February 28th, 1945.
USS Samaritan anchored off Eoima.
Stein lies in a hospital bed and listens to the radio traffic from the island.
A company is at Hill 362A, the northern plateau.
Some of the worst terrain on Ioima, ravines and ridges and cave complexes that make Surriachi looks simple.
They’re taking heavy casualties.
Stein’s shoulder isn’t healed.
The doctors have told him he needs two more weeks of recovery minimum.
He’s officially non-combat effective.
That night, he steals a rifle, finds a boat going back to the island, and disappears.
By dawn on March 1st, he’s back with a company.
The company commander, Captain Aaron Wilkins, sees him arrive.
You’re supposed to be on a hospital ship.
I’m supposed to be with my men.
Wilkins doesn’t argue.
He needs every Marine he can get.
March 1st, 1945, 2:15 p.
m.
A company is pinned down in a ravine 200 yd from Hill 362A.
Japanese machine gun fire from three positions makes movement impossible.
Two attempts to flank have failed with casualties.
Stein volunteers to lead a patrol.
19 men.
Their mission.
Locate the machine gun positions and destroy them.
The stinger is damaged.
The stock is cracked.
The trigger mechanism is loose.
Stein has rewrapped it with wire and tape.
It still fires.
The patrol moves up a narrow draw.
Volcanic rock on both sides.
No cover.
At 2:47 p.
m.
, they locate the first machine gun position.
Built into a cave mouth.
Excellent field of fire.
The Japanese gunner sees them at the same moment.
Stein reacts first.
The stinger screams.
Rounds slam into the cave entrance.
The Japanese gun goes silent.
Stein signals the patrol forward.
They’re 50 yards from the second position when the sniper shoots one round 7.
7 mm through Tony Stein’s throat.
He’s dead before he hits the ground.
The patrol completes the mission.
They destroy all three machine gun positions.
A company advances and takes Hill 362A.
Stein’s body is recovered that evening.
He’s buried in the fifth Marine Division cemetery on Ewima.
Plot five, row six, grave 1007.
The Medal of Honor recommendation goes up the chain of command.
15 separate endorsements.
More than any other recipient in the Pacific theater.
Every officer who witnessed his actions writes a statement.
Every surviving Marine from accompany signs.
The citation reads, “For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, the first man of his unit to be on station after hitting the beach in the initial assault, Corporal Stein, armed with a personally improvised aircraft type weapon, provided rapid covering fire as the remainder of his platoon attempted to move into position.
Determined to
neutralize the strategically placed weapons, he boldly charged the enemy pill boxes one by one and succeeded in killing 20 of the enemy during the furious single-handed assault.
February 19th, 1946, one year to the day after the landing in the Ohio State Capital, Governor Frank Laos presides over a ceremony.
Admiral Richard Penoyer places the Medal of Honor around the neck of Joan Stein.
She’s 24 years old, a widow for 11 months.
Tony Stein’s mother, Rose, stands beside her.
She came to America from Austria Hungary 40 years ago to escape violence.
Her son died fighting a different kind of violence 4,000 mi from the home she made for him.
The metal is cold and heavy.
Joan will never wear it again after this day.
The six stingers built by Grevich and Stein all survived the battle of Ewima.
None of them exist today.
The weapons were never officially documented.
They appear in no supply records, no serial numbers, no maintenance logs.
After the war, they simply vanished.
Collectors have searched for decades.
Museums have offered rewards.
Veterans have been interviewed.
nothing.
The most likely explanation is mundane.
The stingers were non-standard weapons.
When the war ended, someone probably threw them in a scrap pile with damaged equipment, melted down for aluminum recovery.
The weapon that saved dozens of lives, possibly hundreds, was destroyed as junk.
The Marine Corps considered adopting the stinger concept after Ewa.
A formal evaluation was conducted in May 1945.
The report recommended developing a standardized version to replace the Bure in infantry squads.
Rate of fire superior.
Weight comparable.
Effectiveness demonstrated in combat.
Then Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, then surrender.
The war ended.
The evaluation was filed and forgotten.
The military moved on to different weapons, different wars, but the principle Grevich and Stein discovered remained valid.
In Korea, Marines would again complain about the M1919’s weight and slow rate of fire.
In Vietnam, the M60 machine gun would prove too heavy for jungle warfare.
The solution was always the same.
Lighter weight, higher rate of fire, one-man operation.
The M249 squad automatic weapon, adopted in 1984, finally delivered what the Stinger promised in 1945.
Magazine fed, 750 rounds per minute, 17 lb, one operator.
It took the military 40 years to build what two Marines created in 6 weeks with scraps.
Tony Stein was 23 years old when he died.
He was the only Jewish marine to receive the Medal of Honor at Iwoima.
The son of immigrants who couldn’t afford to keep him in school.
A tool and die maker who learned to shape metal before he learned to shave.
The skills that made him a hero weren’t military.
They were industrial.
The same hands that machined aircraft parts at Patterson Field machined the trigger mechanism of the Stinger.
The same eyes that read blueprints read the terrain on Beach Green One.
He didn’t wait for the military to solve the firepower problem.
He solved it himself with scrap metal and ingenuity and the absolute refusal to accept that his men should die because the right weapon didn’t exist.
USS Stein, a Knoxclass frigot, was commissioned in 1972.
It served until 1992.
A building at Camp Pendleton bears his name.
His body was returned to Dayton in 1948, re-entered at Calvary Cemetery a week before Christmas.
The grave marker lists his name, his dates, his rank.
It doesn’t mention the stinger.
It doesn’t mention the eight trips across the beach.
It doesn’t mention the 20 Japanese soldiers or the eight wounded Marines he carried to safety.
It just says Medal of Honor.
Sometimes that’s enough.
