At 9:00 on the morning of February 19th, 1945, Corporal Tony Stein crouched in a shallow hollow carved into the black volcanic sand of Ewima. The sand was still cold from the night air, gritty against his palms, and in his hands he held a weapon his sergeant had once laughed at and called a stupid idea. Stein was 23 years old.
He had flown six combat missions as a paramarine, had survived Bugenville, and had never once been credited with a conventional kill in ground combat. Now he was among the first men from company A, First Battalion, 28th Marines, to make it past the killing zone of the beach and cling to a scrap of ground beyond the surf.
Behind him, the ocean boiled with landing craft. In front of him, the island rose like a slab of charcoal. Eight square miles of volcanic rock hollowed out with 11 miles of tunnels and bunkers. 17,000 Japanese defenders waited inside that rock, invisible, patient, their machine guns and mortars woven together into overlapping fields of fire.
The beach itself had already become a graveyard. By midm morning, dozens of Marines lay twisted in the ash, their bodies half buried by explosions and shifting sand. The standard Browning machine guns could lay down fire, but they were heavy, slow to move, and useless for an assault that demanded momentum.
Tony Stein had seen that problem months earlier in Hawaii. At Camp Terawa, he had watched gunners struggle to keep pace with advancing riflemen. They would set up, fire, tear the gun apart, carry it forward, set up again. By the time they were ready, the moment was gone, and the enemy had recovered. Stein had been a toolmaker before the war, born in Dayton to Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Europe.
He understood machines the way some men understood language. He knew what they could do, and more importantly, what they could not. Back on Bugenville, he had met Sergeant Mel Grevich, another tinkerer who had salvaged an aircraft machine gun from a wrecked dive bomber. The gun was light and fired three times faster than anything carried by infantry, but it had no stock, no sights, no way to carry it into battle.
At night, in a maintenance shed, Stein and Gravich went to work. They cut down a rifle stock, welded on a bipod, rigged a crude trigger, bolted on iron sights. When they were finished, the weapon looked ugly and fragile. But when Stein emptied a 100 round box into a target in 6 seconds, nobody laughed anymore. They called it the stinger.
Now, on the black sand of Ewima, Stein tightened his grip and stood up in full view of the enemy. He did it on purpose. He needed the Japanese to fire. He needed them to show themselves. Bullets cracked past his ears. Mortar rounds burst in the sand. And then he saw it. A slit in a mound of rock 75 yd away, the muzzle of a heavy machine gun poking out like a black finger.
Stein lowered the stinger, squeezed the trigger, and the gun came alive in his hands, roaring like a chainsaw made of thunder. In 5 seconds, the pillbox disappeared in a cloud of dust and shattered stone. He shifted left. Another burst. Another gun fell silent. Around him, Marines began to rise from the sand and move forward.
The beach, for the first time that morning, began to breathe. The ammunition ran out almost instantly. 100 rounds were gone in seconds. Stein turned and ran back toward the water across 200 yd of open ground through mortar fire and machine gun tracers. Halfway down the slope, he found a wounded marine who could not walk.
Without slowing, Stein lifted the man onto his shoulder and kept running, the weight of the man and the gun and his pack crushing his lungs. He dropped the wounded marine with a corpseman, grabbed four boxes of ammunition, and ran back into the fire. Again and again, he did it.
Each trip, he carried a wounded man down and ammunition back up. Each time he rose to full height and drew fire so he could find another hidden bunker. He destroyed pill boxes one by one, charging forward with a stinger blazing, emptying belts into narrow slits, finishing positions with grenades. When the gun fell silent, the barrel glowed purple with heat.
The trigger began to stick. His boots disintegrated in the abrasive ash, so he took them off. Barefoot, bleeding, he ran faster. By noon, he had made six trips under fire. He had dragged six wounded Marines to safety. He had burned through hundreds of rounds and smashed open position after position. When a sniper pinned him down, he did not crawl away.
He charged straight at the rifle fire, closed the distance, and erased the sniper’s hiding place with a storm of bullets. By early afternoon, the stinger was barely alive. bent, scorched, shot through twice, it still fired when nothing else could. Stein used it to break a line of eight interlocking bunkers that had stopped two other companies cold.
He stood alone in open ground and swept his fire from left to right, silencing one gun after another while his platoon advanced behind the noise. At 2:00, a machine gun round smashed the stinger out of his hands. Stein sprinted into open fire to retrieve it, fixed the jam with his bare fingers, and destroyed the gun that had nearly killed him.
By 3:00 in the afternoon, company A stood 400 yardds inland at the foot of Mount Surabbachi. They had lost men, but they were moving, and much of that movement had followed the thunder of one improvised machine gun carried by one barefoot corporal. That night, Japanese infiltrators crept through the lines.
Stein, exhausted and bleeding, still fired the damaged stinger to drive them back. The next morning, he climbed Surabbachi with it. A grenade finally brought him down, shredding his arm and leg and sideighed. He refused evacuation and kept firing until he nearly collapsed from blood loss. Only then did the corpseman drag him away.
While he lay on a hospital ship, the flag rose on Surabbachi. Three days later, against orders, Tony Stein left the ship and walked 6 mi back across the island to find his unit. He fought again with a rifle now, slower without the stinger, but just as determined. On March 1st, leading a reconnaissance patrol, he stepped forward onto a ridge and a single bullet ended his life. He was 23 years old.
They buried him in volcanic ash with a wooden cross. Later they gave his widow the medal of honor. They wrote about his courage, his gallantry, the eight trips under fire, the wounded men saved, the enemy guns destroyed. They did not mention the name Stinger. But Marines remembered. They remembered the toolmaker from Dayton who turned scrap into a weapon who ran barefoot through hell to keep his brothers alive who came back from a hospital ship because his unit was still fighting.
In the chaos of Eoima for one long day, Tony Stein changed the shape of a battlefield with ingenuity, stubborn courage, and a machine he built with his own hands. And because of that, men who should have died on that black beach live to go home. That is why his story is still told.
