Morris Lynn Johnson Jr. was the son of Morris L. Johnson and Lona Hanna Johnson. He was born in 1925 in Mecklenburg County, N.C., but the family moved to Henderson County before 1930. He grew up and attended schools in Henderson County. He was attending the Blue Ridge School for Boys in Hendersonville when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was killed in action Sept. 28, 1944, at the Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific. At the time of his death he had either attained the rank of sergeant or was meritoriously promoted to sergeant after his death. He received two Silver Stars. His burial site is at Arlington National Cemetery, section 34, grave 2596.

The following article was written by a combat correspondent during World War II and published in the Marine Corps Chevron, Volume 3, Number 52, on Dec. 30, 1944. The original newspaper can be viewed online at http://diglib4.princeton.edu/historic/cgi-bin/historic?a=d&d=MarineCorpsChevron19441230-01.1.5&e=——-en-20–1479–txt-IN-washington—-#

‘How to Make Corporal – in One Hard Lesson’ – Is Demonstrated by Shy Pfc
By TSgt. Asa Berdages,
Combat Correspondent
SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC (Delayed) – The title of this story might be “How to Make Corporal – In One Hard Lesson.”
It is how one Marine did it in the three-day battle to capture Talasca airdrome on New Britian. Among other things, he stayed in the firing line an afternoon and night after being hit five times by shrapnel.
He is Pfc. Morris Lynn Johnson Jr. of Hendersonville, N.C., a gangling kid who left the Blue Ridge School for Boys because he “figured it was my war, too;” a veteran of three blitzes at 19.
At 19 years, too, he was killed in Pacific battle — carrying that portion of the burden which he considered part of his war. But before his death, for action on New Britain, Johnson was awarded the Silver Star.
He was acting as assistant squad leader; just one of the privates first class in a company of Marines sent climbing up a jungle-shrouded ridge to stop a Japanese attempt to flank our column moving up the trail along the base of the ridge.
They were moving up in squad columns, little groups of Marines pushing through the jungle, each in single file. They were hit. They couldn’t see the enemy, but they could hear the angry whine the bullets made. They knew Marines were off on their flank, but they didn’t know how big the gap was. All that they knew was that the Japs were trying to get through to hit the Marine column below them.
“So I figured we had to make contact,” the boy from North Carolina said. “Anybody knows you’ve got to keep contact in the jungle. If you leave a gap in your line, it’s your neck. Anybody knows that. So I said, ‘Come on,’ and four fellows — they were the only Marines I could see — came with me and we made contact. Then we pushed the Japs back and dug in. That’s all there was to it.”
But didn’t he crawl ahead, spotting the best places for his four men? Didn’t he do that with the Japs within 20 yards of them?
“Well, yes.” he admitted, “but how else can you deploy men? You can’t tell a man to go down there 10 yards because you don’t know what’s down there. And the only way you can know is to go see.”
Didn’t they crawl up on six or eight Japs clustered around a light machine gun? Didn’t they crawl up within 10 yards of the Japs and hit them and capture the gun?
“Well, yes, but it was Mitch got the gun.”
And when Mitch — PlSgt. Byrd Mitchell of Washington, D.C. — was wounded, didn’t PFC. Johnson take the gun and set up a firing line behind a log to block the attacking Japs?
“Yes,” he admitted, “but that was just common sense. There was no sense staying there in the open where they could see us and we couldn’t see them.”
Didn’t a grenade burst only three feet from him? Didn’t he get hit six times? And didn’t he keep on fighting until the next day when they made him go to the rear?
“No,” he said, “I got only five fragments all together.”
He did admit that the shrapnel “felt like somebody was sticking me with hot pins.” He admitted, too, that the thing he kept thinking about all that night was that the shrapnel that hit his foot had ruined his brand new jungle boots.
But he was embarrassed by all this talk just because he’d been called out before the company on parade and awarded a meritorious promotion to corporal.
Sure he was glad to make corporal. Who wouldn’t be?
“It’s 12 more bucks a month,” said Corp. Johnson.
But he never had the satisfaction of spending that extra pay.
There is not much time between action in the Pacific. And sometimes — as in the case of the newly-made corporal — death comes just as fast.