He had been Lieutenant Chamberlain once. That was in the Philippines, where he had fought as a guerrilla for a year and a half. Before that he had been a corporal with the old Fourth Marines. He had fought on Cavite, Bataan, Corregidor. Five hours after The Rock fell, suffering from malaria and multiple wounds, he made his escape by boat to Mindanao. He joined the guerrillas. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, then a first lieutenant. In 1943 a submarine took him to Australia. He was flown to the States to receive a Distinguished Service Cross for what General MacArthur described as “extraordinary heroism.” He could have remained there to take the bows he deserved, but he resigned his Army bars in exchange for a Marine sergeant’s stripes and requested combat duty. They sent him to the Third Division. There he trained with those men who marched over dusty roads bellowing the song they had composed to the tune of “McNamara’s Band.”
Right now we are rehearsing for another big affair,
We’ll take another island, and the Japs will all be there.
And when they see us steaming in, they’ll take off on the run.
They’ll say, “Old pal from Guadalcanal, you didn’t come here for fun.”
Training ended and the Third boarded ship to join the armada of 495 vessels “steaming in” to Iwo with the “Anglo-Saxons.” And yet, when the assault Marines did go ashore on February 19, some of them had in their pockets copies of the prayer of a seventeenth century Anglo-Saxon general. One of the chaplains had given them cards bearing Sir Jacob Astley’s plea before the Battle of Edgehill in 1642:
O Lord! Thou knowest how busy I must be this day: If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.
4
It was a bright clear day.
Superforts were bombing, Hellcats were strafing, all the warships and rocket ships were thundering, but Iwo Jima lay deathlike and quiescent—Mount Suribachi squatting toadlike to the south, the black beaches and hummock-speckled sands silent and menacing in the center, the jumble of ridges and hills vaguely visible north.
“Very light swells,” broadcast Vice Admiral Turner’s flagship Eldorado. “Boating: excellent. Visibility: excellent.”
It was a day made for invasion and the Marines went roaring in.
They hit the beaches at about nine o’clock and within an hour both divisions had all their assault battalions ashore and fighting.
One hour.
That was all that Tadamichi Kuribayashi gave the American Marines. Then his gunners struck at the invaders with all the fury of their formidable armament. Shells shrieked and crashed among the invaders, every hummock spat automatic fire and the very beaches erupted with exploding land mines. But the American Marines had had the opportunity to move inland from 200 to 300 yards and that was all they needed.
On the left flank, the Fifth Division was battling to carry out its mission of crossing the island.
“C’mon, you guys,” Manila John Basilone called to his machine-gunners. “Let’s get these guns off the beach.”
They sprinted inland, sinking above their ankles in that hot loose sand, the soles of their shoes turning warm, the calves of their legs protesting against the unfamiliar strain—but Manila John would never see Dewey Boulevard again. A mortar shell crashed in his very footprints and Basilone died with four other Marines.
Below one of the highest terraces barring the path of tanks and amtracks, young Lieutenant Norman Brueggeman jumped erect and shouted to his men:
“If you want to win this war let’s get the hell up there!”
He swung an arm at the top of the terrace, and fell dead —while his men crawled and clambered over the sands and swept inland. In their ears, in everyone’s ears, was the constant crashing of enemy shells, the sighing of bullets, the soughing of the big projectiles, the whizzing of shrapnel. Concussion lifted them and threw them down. They dug foxholes for cover, but the buckshot-sand slid down and filled them in. No hummock could be trusted. A captain sat on one and called out an order to advance. The blasting of a five-inch gun beneath him knocked him unconscious.
Still the attack on the left pressed forward, and with the passage of every new obstacle a new Marine hero was born—too often in his death.
Captain Dwayne ( Bobo ) Mears went after a pillbox blocking his company’s advance. He knocked it out, but a bullet opened a gash in his neck. He waited until it could be bandaged. He moved on. Another bullet tore through his jaw. Blood poured from the ragged hole. He kept on. At last he sank to his knees, his huge vitality ebbing from his big body. Bullets dug spurts of sand around him. A private tried to hide him from sight of the enemy.
“Get the hell out of here,” Mears gasped. “I’ll be all right.”
The corpsmen found him, but he died aboard ship.
Tony Stein did not die until he had fought perhaps the most incredible single fight of the landing. Weighted with ammunition and his stinger, Stein covered his entire company as it moved into position. When it was pinned down, he jumped erect, drawing fire and spotting the enemy guns. Alone, he struck at pillbox after pillbox, killing 20 Japanese. He ran out of ammunition. He threw off his helmet, shucked his shoes, and sprinted back for more bullets. He did this eight times, each time pausing en route to help a wounded Marine to an aid station. At last the Japanese forced his platoon to pull back. Stein covered their withdrawal. Twice his stinger was shot from his hands. But he retrieved it and fired on—until at last the inevitable bullet found him and he died.
It was with such men that the Fourth Division bucked across the island, cutting off Mount Suribachi to the left—while to the rear of both divisions the Japanese gunners made a bloody, burning, smoking shambles of the beachhead. For perhaps two hours after the Japanese had opened up, only a few landing craft were able to pierce that curtain of fire drawn along the shore. Tanks in lighters, amtanks and amtracks sank or blew up on the beaches.
Early in the invasion Lieutenant Henry Morgan brought his tank, the Horrible Hank, into the left-flank beaches—only to have its lighter founder and sink in the surf. Morgan radioed his commander: “Horrible Hank sank.” He went on to have two more tanks blown out from under him. Many of the vital Shermans were stalled before the terraces. They could neither climb nor find traction in the loose sand. Amtanks were forced to back out into the surf to take pillboxes under fire from the water. Bulldozers were needed to cut paths through the terraces. Marston matting was needed to build hasty roadways of steel mesh. But that could not be done until the Fourth Division on the right stormed the high ground from which much of the Japanese fire was coming.
On that extreme right for which Major General Cates had shown so much respect, the “ghouls”of Jumpin’ Joe Chambers had fought into their Gethsemane. They called themselves “ghouls” for the ghostly antiflashburn cream they had smeared on their faces in anticipation of close work with demolition charges. But the cream was not proof against bullets and shell fragments as Chambers led them against the high ground above a rock quarry. They took it. They beat off Japanese attempts to throw them off, but they had only 150 front-line men left when the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth, relieved them that night. By nightfall, the regiment had suffered 35 per cent casualties, but the right flank was nailed down, and on the left of the Fourth Division’s zone the Marines of the Twenty-third Regiment had fought up to the eastern edge of Airfield Number One.
Sergeant Darrell Cole got them there as much as anyone. He led his machine-gun section toward the field and into a network of pillboxes and a storm of fire. He knocked out two positions with hand grenades himself. A trio of pillboxes pinned his men down. Cole directed a torrent of machine-gun fire on the nearest to silence it. The Japanese retaliated with grenades. Cole counterattacked. He slipped forward, armed with a pistol and one grenade. He tossed his bomb and withdrew to get more. He attacked again, hurling grenades—again running back. Still, the Japanese fired. Cole struck a third time. He knocked out the Japanese strong point, and then a bursting grenade snuffed out his own life.
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br /> Casualties were mounting, and the reinforcing regiments had hunched their shoulders and come ashore. They came in riddled, forming on a battlefield more horrifying than any in the memory of the oldest salts. Death had been violent on Iwo Jima. Few indeed were the corpses not mangled. Some were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay everywhere, rarely within less than 50 feet of the body from which they had been torn. It was as though the owner of a toy factory had gone berserk and strewn handfuls of heads and limbs over a miniature island. Except for the puttee-tapes of the Japanese or the yellowish leggings of the Americans, it was hard to identify the fallen of either side. From it all rose the intensifying reek of death. It had cost the Marines 2,420 casualties to take a beachhead 4,000 yards wide from south to north, 1,000 yards deep at the left where the island had been crossed, 400 yards deep on the right. Of these casualties, close to 600 were surely dead and there were more dying.
During the night there were more casualties under the methodical onslaught of Japanese artillery. The big Japanese rockets also appeared, although they turned out to be harmless. They invariably overshot their marks and landed in the open sea, after first having terrified the Marines by passing overhead with a horrible blubbering noise, trailing showers of red sparks. The Marines soon grew contemptuous of the rockets, calling them “Bubbly-wubblies.” But the Marines were not so derisive of the enemy artillery, especially the fire falling on the beachhead from Mount Suribachi to the south.
This was Iwo’s highest ground. Atop Suribachi the Japanese could look down the Americans’ throats. The volcano would have to be taken.
Big Colonel Harry Liversedge was called “Harry the Horse” both for his size and his galloping style of attack. He had commanded a Raider regiment on New Georgia, and now he led that Twenty-eighth Regiment which had landed on the extreme left flank and cut off Suribachi from the rest of Iwo Jima.
On February 20, the second day of battle, Liversedge’s men faced south toward the volcano and attacked.
They struck down-island, two battalions abreast, while warships, rocket boats and land artillery pounded Suribachi’s approaches. Although the shelling knocked out some pillboxes, it merely unmasked the presence of many others—and the Marines had to go in on foot with dynamite and flame-throwers. There were also Navy and Marine fighters slashing the volcano’s slopes in strafing runs or dropping tanks of napalm, but the fire-bombs merely flamed and went out. There was nothing to catch fire.
The Marines gained only 200 yards. Their casualties grew. The wounded were taken to the beaches, where wine-colored bottles of whole blood swung like strange blossoms on upended rifles, and they were loaded aboard amtracks.
The amtrack Mama’s Bathtub took six maimed Marines aboard and wallowed into the sea with a roar as a Japanese rocket slobbered in from Suribachi. Corporal Bruno Laurenti and Pfcs. William Seward and Alex Hebert had been making round-trip runs since the day before. They were groggy from want of sleep. Laurenti sent Mama’s Bathtub churning out to a mercy ship. It was dark when they reached it, but they discharged their burden. Laurenti wheeled the amtrack around and made for his LST. The ship’s jaws were clamped tight-shut and the skipper would not open. them during darkness and a mounting sea.
Mama’s Bathtub came about and headed for the shore. Halfway in, a huge wave struck the amtrack, and she nearly capsized. Her engine sputtered and died. She began to drift. She floated eight miles out to sea. A Higgins boat came along and took her in tow but the rope broke. The Higgins boat turned to go ashore for another rope.
“We’ll come back,” the coxswain called.
They did not. Laurenti got the motor going just enough to idle the bilge pumps and keep the pontoons from filling with that sea water which would sink them. Mama’s Bathtub began to drift faster. The tiny craft pitched and tossed. The three Marines passed an LSM. They shouted at it, flashed lights, waved signal flags. The LSM chugged on unheeding. It was nearing midnight and it was getting very cold. Iwo Jima is in the North Pacific and this was February. In the bright moonlight the darkly gleaming obsidian waves seemed mountainous. Behind them, they could see rockets exploding in the sky.
They were not rockets, but flares. The commander of Suribachi had fired them after he had signaled his general, “We should rather like to go out of our position and choose death by banzai charges,” and Kuribayashi had curtly answered, “No.” So the Suribachi garrison stayed under cover and sent up flares marking the American lines. Down from the northern ridges came a whistling rain of shells-and the Twenty-eighth Marines passed a night almost as bad as the day.
In the morning, with 40 fighters and bombers harrying the volcano, supported by tanks, half-tracks, naval gunfire and field artillery, Harry the Horse’s regiment pressed slowly forward until by nightfall all lower pockets had been reduced and the base of Suribachi had been reached on both coasts.
That same morning, the trio of chattering Marines in Mama’s Bathtub sighted a destroyer. They signaled. They were seen. The destroyer came carefully alongside and threw them a line. They were towed back to their mother-ship, and helped aboard, exhausted. They staggered below and sank into sleep, while behind them Mama’s Bathtub sank beneath the surface of an angry sea.
The weather had turned bad at Iwo.
Wind and waves were broaching supply craft on the beaches, leaving them helpless targets, capsizing some of them.
On the morning of February 22, as the Twenty-eighth Marines attacked three battalions abreast, a drizzling rain began to fall. It turned into a downpour and Suribachi’s ashes became a clutching gray paste, a sticky goo which fouled rifle breeches and made them impossible to fire except on single-shot. Drenched, exhausted, the Marines moved around the base of the volcano, to either side, fighting all the way. Corporal Dan McCarthy alone shot 20 Japanese. Sergeant Merritt Savage killed seven as he led his platoon in a charge. One Marine was charged by a saber-swinging Japanese officer. He seized the sword, wrenched it away with dripping hands and cut off the officer’s head. Another Marine jumped alone into a blockhouse and killed its 10 occupants before he died. Corpsmen crept up to the muzzles of the enemy guns to treat wounded Marines. Sergeant Charles Harris paddled a rubber raft out in the rocky surf to come in among the enemy bullets and rescue two Marines lying helpless on the west side of Suribachi.
By dusk Suribachi was surrounded.
All but a 400-yard strip on the west coast was in Marine hands. Already it had become obvious that the Japanese defenders were cracking. A language officer had come forward with a loudspeaker to broadcast surrender appeals. Shortly after, the Marines saw Japanese leaping to their deaths from the lip of the crater. It was a sure sign.
“At dawn,” said Harry the Horse, “we start climbing.”
They started at dawn and went right up.
Sergeant Sherman Watson and Pfcs. Ted White, George Mercer and Louis Charlo climbed to the summit without spotting a single Japanese. Watson reported back. Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson of the Second Battalion made a decision. He rounded up a 40-man patrol under Lieutenant Harold Schrier.
“If you reach the top,” Johnson said, “secure and hold it.” He handed Schrier a square of colored cloth. “And take this along.”
It was an American flag. Lieutenant George Wells had brought it ashore from the transport Missoula.
Schrier’s patrol picked its way up the northern or inner slope of the volcano. They climbed through the debris of shelled positions, through an eerie silence. Battle sputtered to their rear, but here there was no sound. They worked past the Japanese defenses and came to the crater where they spread out and charged.
Nothing—nothing but the lava pit yawning beneath their feet.
Suribachi had fallen.
At half past ten the American flag was raised above it, flown from a hollow pipe someone had found and jammed between rocks. It was raised by Schrier and Sergeants Ernest Thomas and Henry Hansen, by Corporal Charles Lindberg and Pfc. James Michels. It fluttered while Sergeant Louis L
owery photographed the event, and Pfc. Jim Robeson snorted, “Holly-wood Marines!” and wisely kept a wary eye peeled for Japanese.
They came. Even as the tiny flag brought forth a cheer from the Marines below, an enraged Japanese jumped from a cave to heave a grenade. He was shot dead. An officer charged waving his sword. He was shot into the crater.
“Let’s go!” Schrier called. “We haven’t got any time to waste around here. Let’s get back to work.”
For the next four hours fierce fighting raged at every level of Suribachi, but by half-past two the volcano was fairly secure, and it was then that the most dramatic picture of World War Two was recorded.
From below Suribachi the Marines could barely see the little 54-by-28-inch flag. One of them went aboard LST 779 beached near the eastern base of the volcano. He borrowed a big flag 96 by 56 inches and took it up Suribachi. Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press saw him going, and followed with his camera. When Rosenthal reached the summit he saw six men raising the new flag. They were Pfc. Ira Hayes, Pfc. Franklin Sousley, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corpsman John Bradley, Pfc. Rene Gagnon and Corporal Harlon Block. Rosenthal photographed them in that order, left to right—and the great battle photograph of American arms had become history.
The flag had risen at Iwo Jima, and although the inevitable scoffers of the inevitable postwar reaction have spit on the event as “a phony,” there was very little fakery about the death which shortly overtook Sergeant Strank, Corporal Block and Pfc. Sousley, or in the wound of Corpsman Bradley. Nor was the first flag-raising a piece of stagecraft any more than the subsequent deaths of Sergeants Hansen and Thomas and Pfc. Charlo, or the wounds suffered by Pfcs. Robeson and Michels. The flag went up in the first place because the sight of it would cheer Marines below who knew that the Japanese looked down their throats so long as they held the highest land on Iwo. When the first flag proved too small to be seen, a second and bigger flag went up. This raising was photographed by Rosenthal with no attempt to stage it—else why everyone’s face away from the picture and thus unidentifiable for the newspapers?—and it turned out to be superb. The fact that the famous flag-raising was the second, not the first, no more affects its place in history than the fact that the Suribachi flag-raising was itself intermediate to the first flag-raising on Guadalcanal and the last on Okinawa. The facts were that Suribachi fell because American Marines suffered and died to conquer it, and that some of them raised flags above it to proclaim the victory.
Strong Men Armed Page 46