Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Something happened to Mike, Ira, and Harlon on Bougainville. They would never discuss it, never identify exactly what had affected them so. But for the rest of their days death was never far from their thoughts.

  The three Pacific veterans sailed home from Bougainville on separate boats that left the second week of January. They would have a month to stare at the ocean and ponder their private thoughts before they arrived in San Diego on February 14, 1944.

  At about this time, Franklin Sousley was getting his first taste of life as a Marine. He had entered the Corps on January 5 and reported to the recruit depot in San Diego for boot camp.

  One of Franklin’s buddies, Tex Stanton, remembers boot camp as “weeks of monotonous training, learning how to march, how to follow orders, how to shoot a rifle, how to be a real Marine.”

  Tex remembers Franklin as “a big redheaded country boy,” serious about proving himself as a Marine. But nobody ever said that war had to be all serious. Not as long as Franklin R. Sousley had anything to do with it.

  He quickly noticed something interesting about the lyrics to the stirring anthem that all recruits had to memorize, the “Marine Corps Hymn” (“From the halls of Montezuma/To the shores of Tripoli/We fight our country’s battles/In the air, on land and sea”). What Franklin noticed was that those lyrics could be transferred nicely to another tune: specifically, the raucous, rousing tune of the Roy Acuff hillbilly standard, “The Wabash Cannonball” (“Listen to the jingle/The rumble and the roar/As she glides along the woodlands/through the hills and by the shore”). Franklin was glad to belt it out in his high nasal twang for any leatherneck who would listen, slapping an upended rifle as a makeshift bass fiddle. Somehow, he escaped time in the brig for that one.

  Franklin left the boys laughing, but in a letter home to his mother, Goldie, he revealed the challenge of being a young man far from home: “I believe I am homesick for once in my life. If you had treated me mean before I left, it wouldn’t be so hard to forget; but you were so good that when they start raving around here, I think of home.”

  Franklin was like so many of the millions of country boys who served in World War II for whom a big weekend was playing Ping-Pong at the USO for two days. As his buddy Pee Wee Griffiths remembers, “Franklin was a big overgrown kid with rust-colored hair. He’d lumber along speaking in his Kentucky drawl. He was a big smiling country boy.”

  In that January of 1944, eighteen-year-old Private First Class Rene Gagnon was serving in a Military Police unit guarding the Navy Yard at Charleston, South Carolina. He had endured a hot and humid boot camp at Parris Island during the summer of 1943. Other “boots” who trained with him would later remember little about him other than he was “a nice guy.” But there was one thing. In his dress uniform, the handsome French-American looked “like a movie star.”

  That January marked the end of Jack Bradley’s safe passage through the war. A fellow pharmacist’s mate told Jack he was transferred to Field Medical School. This meant he was being transferred to the Marines, to be a combat medic, a corpsman. Not good news. Jack raced downstairs and indeed found his name on the list. He must have been stunned. His strategy had been to join the Navy to avoid fighting with the Army. Now he found himself a member of the most rugged group of warriors in the world.

  At Field Medical School (FMS) outside San Diego, Navy corpsmen were trained to care for Marines in battle. FMS had classes in specialized life-saving skills, and Jack was also expected to endure the rigors of battle like any leatherneck. That meant tough Marine Corps conditioning.

  “We had been through Navy boot camp,” Corpsman John Overmyer remembered. “But with the Marines it was much more rugged. We were learning from hardened combat veterans. We definitely got the message that we would someday have to do under fire what we were being trained to do. The Marines were serious.”

  “There was culture shock for us Navy guys going into a Marine school,” Corpsman Gregory Emery recalled. “The discipline and demands in the Marines are immediate. No boot camp in another service can ever match the Marine Corps. It’s immediately obvious, from the very first second.”

  Jack wore Marine uniforms, Marine dog tags. He watched Marine combat films and learned how to fire his .45-caliber pistol. He rose at dawn to hike with Marines who never slowed down.

  He was shown footage of horribly wounded Marines in actual combat. “We learned how to crawl out under fire and rescue injured men,” Corpsman Overmyer recalled. “We learned how to make a splint with weeds, paper, twigs, anything.”

  I asked Mr. Overmyer what he remembered, years later, as the most noticeable difference between his Navy and Marine training. “Pride,” he answered immediately. “You felt a different sort of pride being trained in the Marine tradition. The Marines made us feel we were part of a special team.”

  In February and March of 1944, Jack continued his FMS training while Rene was back east. Franklin was granted a furlough after boot camp, as were Mike, Ira, and Harlon after they docked in San Diego.

  To the civilian noncombatant, war was “knowable” and “understandable.” Orderly files of men and machines marching off to war, flags waving, patriotic songs playing. War could be clear and logical to those who had not touched its barb.

  But battle veterans quickly lost a sense of war’s certitude. Images of horror they could scarcely comprehend invaded their thoughts, tortured their minds. Bewildered and numbed, they could not unburden themselves to their civilian counterparts, who could never comprehend through mere words.

  Mike, Ira, and Harlon—these three boys back from their Pacific Heart of Darkness—now embraced death. Two were convinced their next battle would be their last. And one lingered on for ten years before he was consumed by his living nightmare.

  Ira wrote to his parents when he touched land. His letter, posted from San Diego, was typically upbeat: “Well, I’m back in Dago…arrived here Monday with the whole regiment. We get furloughs starting Monday for 30 long days…I’ll get home the fastest way possible.”

  He was back on the Gila Reservation a few days after that. Nancy saw the change in him as soon as he stepped off the bus.

  At twenty, Ira was stockier, Nancy noticed; he had gained about fifteen pounds of muscle during boot camp and it had stayed on him during the jungle nightmare on Bougainville. The slim, quiet boy had been transformed into a very formidable-looking young man.

  But the real change, his mother saw, was in his affect.

  He looked old, Nancy thought. Standing there in his overseas cap. So much older than she remembered. He’d always had a solemn face, his full mouth in repose a natural frown. But now those turned-down corners did not broaden so easily into a smile. Hardly at all, in fact.

  Ira had always been a solemn-looking boy, Nancy thought. Now he looked, at times, downright sullen.

  Ira never admitted what was bothering him. But in a letter to his mother about Bougainville he first hinted at the memories that would haunt him all his life: “We lost some of our dear buddies…which isn’t a very good thing to remember.”

  As Ira’s leave drew to a close, his parents once again held a farewell dinner in his honor. The guests were tribal leaders, church elders, and the choir.

  After the feasting, the tribal council asked him to speak. Ira slowly stood and addressed the congregation. His words were typically thoughtful and gentle, but they were no longer the words of a boy. A man was talking now, a man who had seen things.

  Brotherhood was on his mind. He praised his fellow Marines for their bravery, self-sacrifice, and brotherhood. “They’d never let me down,” Ira remarked. Ira concluded by promising never to bring any shame upon his tribe. When he finished speaking, they warmly embraced him. As the choir sang, he cried softly. And then he went back to war.

  Mike Strank returned to Franklin Borough worn out by battle and a case of malaria he had contracted on Bougainville.

  His friends Mike and Eva Slazich took him out for an evening on the town. They saw a movi
e, a war movie. Slazich asked his friend what he thought of the movie. Mike Strank remarked quietly: “It isn’t really like that.”

  At the end of the evening Mike turned to his friend and said, “I doubt if I’ll ever see you again. I don’t think I’ll be coming back.”

  “Don’t say that!” replied a shocked Slazich.

  Mike was sure that his next battle would be his last. But his parents wanted him alive and in the United States, away from war. One night his father sat Mike down at the kitchen table for a talk. Vasil asked if there was any way Mike could secure a training assignment in the States so they could see him more often.

  Mike, tired from malaria, convinced he would never come home again, looked into the eyes of the father he would soon leave for good and said: “Dad, there’s a war going on out there. Young boys are fighting that war. And Dad…they need my help.”

  Before departing Franklin Borough for his cross-country trek back to the Pacific, Mike took his little sister aside. He urged her to keep goading their parents, so tentative with the English language, to keep writing letters to him.

  “Keep those letters coming,” he urged eleven-year-old Mary. “You might not get an answer, but keep ’em coming.” Shortly after that he was gone. Little Mary would never see her big brother again.

  Harlon Block had gone home to east Texas for what he, too, believed was the last time. On his furlough in the booming citrus country, Harlon did some things that Belle and Ed and his friends would never have conceived. He took long walks in the swampy fields near the Rio Grande, the mosquito-laden fields. He was trying to catch malaria. It wasn’t cowardice. Harlon was hoping that the sickness would be a sign from God that he would not have to go back into battle and continue to kill his fellowman.

  But the malarial mosquitoes never found his flesh. God was not going to let Harlon Block off the hook that easily. When he realized that, Harlon began to prepare some of those close to him for his eventual death.

  Not everyone. He spared Belle and Ed. But he told it to his football buddy Leo Ryan’s young wife, Jean. He met Jean in her office at the Sunny Glen Orphanage, associated with the Church of Christ; Jean was executive secretary to the director there. He took her to a café in town. Over coffee, he told her simply: “I don’t think I’ll be coming back next time. I’ve had my chances and I think my number will be up next time.”

  After this, Harlon started telling several other friends and relatives as well.

  Catherine Pierce was one. Harlon visited his special girl one afternoon during his furlough; he looked her up at the boarding school in Keene, Texas, where she was completing her senior year. Catherine noticed something different about Harlon right away. He was a little thinner than she remembered, but that wasn’t it. He was subdued. But just under that careful surface she could sense strong emotions. She recalled that going back to the Pacific was very much on his mind that sunlit, awkward afternoon. He loved her, but his message was not about her “waiting for him.”

  He surprised her as he softly said, “I don’t think I’ll be coming back, Catherine.”

  “He was a different person,” Catherine told me. “Before he went to war he had been happy, with lots of enthusiasm. Now he was quiet, like something was weighing on him.

  “I tried to encourage him. I said, ‘Oh, Harlon, don’t be silly. Nothing is going to happen to you.’ But he felt differently. He said with conviction, ‘Catherine, I just have this strong sense that I won’t be coming back.’”

  The idea that young Marines like Mike and Harlon would foresee their deaths in battle, especially after experiencing combat, might seem a normal, even predictable thing. But in fact such thoughts are the exception to the rule. Almost all men in combat are convinced that “the other guy is going to get it, not me.” It’s not natural to think that death is imminent and to continue to function normally.

  A surgeon who later served on Iwo Jima wrote a memoir that included a passage suggesting how rare were Mike’s and Harlon’s intuitions that they were going to be killed:

  As I slowly headed back north in my jeep, one of the frequently used war slogans came to mind. Our Marines were willingly laying down their lives for their country. This statement was sheer nonsense, for the overwhelming majority of the men felt they would be spared, and that it was the next guy that would be killed or wounded. They had no intention of laying down their lives for their country or anything else. Each man believed he would be one of the lucky ones to return home. Those that lost or never did have this feeling of invulnerability would sooner or later crack up.

  Hilltop, Kentucky, stirred when their Marine Franklin Sousley arrived home on furlough, proud, with a new focus and direction in his young life.

  “When Franklin came home,” his friend J. B. Shannon, then a wide-eyed thirteen-year-old, remembers, “it was a big deal for our little community. He stepped off the train in his Marine dress blues looking straight as a string.”

  “He stopped at my house on his way home,” Emogene Bailey remembered clearly years later. “He looked so very handsome in his uniform. I took him out in my backyard and made him pose for a picture. I still have that picture today.” Emogene helped Goldie cook Franklin’s welcome-home dinner as Franklin entertained his younger brother, Julian, with tall stories in the living room.

  On Franklin’s last night home he borrowed his aunt’s car for a date with Marion Hamm. “He came over to my house and we visited,” she remembered. “We took a walk and he told me how proud he was to be a Marine, how excited he was to serve his country in the Corps.” At the end of the night he asked Marion to do what so many millions of World War II boys asked of their special girls: “He asked me to wait for him.”

  Franklin couldn’t sleep after he said good night to Marion. He walked over to the Hilltop General Store. “We sat on the porch talking until three A.M.,” his chum Aaron Flora remembered. “Franklin told us how great it was to be a Marine.”

  The next morning Franklin said his sad farewells to his friends and family. They embraced and cried. He presented his mother, Goldie, with a copy of his formal Marine Corps portrait. Then Franklin stepped back. With a big smile he looked Goldie in the eye and proclaimed, “Momma, I’m gonna do something to make you proud of me.”

  Later that morning he said good-bye to Marion. On the back of the portrait he gave her he wrote:

  Picking a girl

  Is like picking a flower from the garden

  You only pick the best.

  Love,

  Franklin

  His last words to his sweetheart were: “When I come back, I’ll be a hero.”

  At the train station young J. B. Shannon just couldn’t bear to say good-bye to his buddy. He considered riding the train to Maysville with Franklin, but it was a quarter each way, big money for a thirteen-year-old in 1944. But as Franklin was boarding his train, J.B. shouted impulsively, “Hey, Franklin, I’ll just ride along with you.”

  “On the train he told me he was just thrilled to be a Marine,” J.B. remembered. “He said he was right where he wanted to be in his life, in the uniform of the United States Marines. He said he was fulfilling his dream.” In Maysville, J.B. waved good-bye as Franklin’s train pulled out of the depot. “He was a hero to me there and then,” J.B. told me fifty-four years later.

  It was a battle on the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the Central Pacific that would foreshadow the fate of Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene, Doc, and all the Marines fighting America’s War.

  Tarawa was a tiny one-square-mile spit of sand, only eight hundred yards wide. It was in the Central Pacific, in the Gilbert Island group, north of Bougainville in the Solomons.

  Tarawa represented the kickoff of Howlin’ Mad Smith’s Central Pacific thrust on the “Road to Tokyo,” the dramatic opening of a second front in the war against Japan. This was a new theater of sand, coral, and volcanic rock that left the jungles of the South Pacific far behind.

  The Central Pacific campaign was unlike the battles in
the South Pacific. The Japanese had heavily fortified these island outposts; to capture them, Marines would have to mount offensive thrusts into the teeth of an armed and waiting enemy.

  In 1943, there were reasonable military officers in the Pacific who expressed serious doubts whether “any fortified island could ever be assaulted by amphibious forces. These men honestly believed…the heavily barricaded enemy atolls of the Central Pacific would prove to be the burial ground of any American force foolish enough to ‘leap off the deep end.’”

  Howlin’ Mad Smith was not among those officers. He knew he was attempting the “toughest of all military operations: a landing, if possible, in the face of enemy machine guns that can mow men down by the hundreds.” He knew the battle would be costly in Marine lives. The Japanese had boasted that Tarawa “could not be taken in a thousand years.” But Smith was confident his Marines would succeed.

  Huge Navy gunships hit Tarawa with the greatest concentration of aerial bombardment and naval gunfire in the history of warfare up to that time. The Navy admiral directing the bombardment even promised he would “obliterate” the island.

  But when the first three assault waves of Marines stormed ashore on the morning of November 20, 1943, they realized the Navy bombardment had been ineffective, had only rearranged the sand. Japanese gunfire ripped through their ranks. Confusion reigned.

  The Marines pinned down on the shore were in desperate need of reinforcements. Two waves of landing boats full of troops, tanks, and artillery were on their way.

  Then disaster struck.

  The landing boats hit an exposed reef five hundred yards from shore and were grounded.

  It would be forty-four years before physicist Donald Olson would discover that D-Day at Tarawa occurred during one of only two days in 1943 when the moon’s apogee coincided with a neap tide, resulting in a tidal range of only a few inches rather than several feet.