Justice Chambers

The name "Iwo Jima" is written large in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.

In February 1945, more than 4,500 Marines were killed in the bloody battle to take the Japanese-held island. Thousands more were wounded. Bravery was the order of the day. More Medals of Honor were earned at Iwo Jima than in any other Marine battle, before or since. Twenty-four men received the medal for their valor on Iwo.

One of those men was Justice M. Chambers of Huntington's Westmoreland neighborhood.

Today, the bridge that carries Adams Avenue into Wayne County is marked with green signs that identify it as the "Colonel Justice M. Chambers Memorial Bridge." His boyhood home is a short walk from the green sign at the Wayne County end of the bridge.

Arthur Chambers, a furniture salesman, and his wife Dixie had two girls and a boy. Justice, the middle child, was born in 1908. A boyhood bout with polio left him with one leg shorter than the other. The men he would later lead into battle would call him "Jumping Joe," because of the way he ran to compensate for his shortened leg.

Graduating from Huntington High School, Chambers worked his way through three years at Marshall University, and then transferred to George Washington University. From there he want on to National University to earn a law degree.

He joined the peacetime Naval Reserve in 1929. Later he transferred to the Marine Corps as a private and steadily rose in the ranks. When his unit was called to active duty in 1940, he was a captain. He showed what he was made of early in his Marine career. He served initially in Edson's Raiders, a commando unit, where he won the Silver Star for evacuating wounded men and directing a night defense of an aid station on the island of Tulagi. He did so even though wounded himself.

Promoted, Lt. Col. Chambers led his men in the attacks on Saipan, where he suffered a blast concussion, and Tinian. Then came Iwo. It would be his fifth island assault. From the outset of the battle, he was in the front line, encouraging his men to advance and repeatedly braving enemy fire himself - until he was hit by a machine gun burst. A bullet hit him in the left collarbone, passed through his chest and his lung, and exited his back. He was removed to an aid station, then to a hospital ship for surgery.

The recommendation that Chambers be awarded the Medal of Honor began to work its way up the chain of command immediately after Iwo fell but it would be five years before President Truman hung the medal around his neck in a brief ceremony on Nov. 1, 1950. By this time, Col. Chambers had retired from the Marine Corps because of his war wounds and was working as a staff adviser to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

His Medal of Honor citation read in part:

Exposed to relentless fire, he coolly reorganized his battle-weary men, inspiring them to heroic efforts by his own valor and leading them in an attack on the critical, impregnable high ground. He was directing the fire of the rocket platoon when he fell, critically wounded.

After the presentation, Chambers spoke briefly. His daughter Pat recalled, many years later, her father saying something like "This is for my men."

Chambers went on to serve as Deputy Director of Civil Defense for Truman. When President Eisenhower was elected, he left government service and turned to lobbying. Later, President Kennedy appointed him Deputy Director of the Office of Emergency Planning.

He died July 29, 1982, at age 74 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 2011, Terence W. Barrett, a licensed psychologist at North Dakota State University in Fargo, published The Search for the Forgotten Thirty-Four, a book in which he cited 34 men who been honored by the Marine Corps but were unheralded in their hometowns. He included Chambers among the 34. (Some of the information in his article is taken from Barrett's book, with his permission.)

It's true that Justice Chambers mostly slipped from the public eye in Huntington after his 1950 medal ceremony, but recent measures have done much to redress that oversight.

Another Marine who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo, Hershel W. "Woody" Williams of Ona, and his fellow members of Huntington Detachment 340 of the Marine Corps League have done much to gain Chambers the local recognition he deserves. In 2002, they successfully lobbied Wayne County officials to install a courthouse plaque that memorializes Chambers. In 2004, they convinced the West Virginia Legislature to rename the Auburn Road bridge in the Marine hero's honor. And this year saw Chambers inducted into the Greater Huntington Wall of Fame