Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  The actions of these Marines trapped on the reef would determine the outcome of the battle for Tarawa. If they hesitated or turned back, their buddies ashore would be decimated.

  But they didn’t hesitate. They were Marines. They jumped from their stranded landing crafts into chest-deep water holding their arms and ammunition above their heads.

  In one of the bravest scenes in the history of warfare, these Marines slogged through the deep water into sheets of machine-gun bullets. There was nowhere to hide, as Japanese gunners raked the Marines at will. And the Marines, almost wholly submerged and their hands full of equipment, could not defend themselves. But they kept coming. Bullets ripped through their ranks, sending flesh and blood flying as screams pierced the air.

  Japanese steel killed over 300 Marines in those long minutes as they struggled to the shore. As the survivors stumbled breathlessly onto shore their boots splashed in water that had turned bright red with blood.

  This type of determination and valor among individual Marines overcame seemingly hopeless odds, and in three days of hellish fighting Tarawa was captured. The Marines suffered a shocking 4,400 casualties in just seventy-two hours of fighting as they wiped out the entire Japanese garrison of 5,000.

  When the battle ended, Howlin’ Mad Smith toured the island to see the Japanese defenses for himself. Because water lies only four feet below the surface of the Tarawa atoll, the Japanese could not build underground defenses. Instead they built pillboxes aboveground.

  Smith, with other officers and Time reporter Robert Sherrod trailing him, examined one of the five hundred pillboxes on Tarawa. Sherrod wrote:

  The pillbox is forty feet long, eight feet wide, and ten feet high. It is constructed of heavy coconut logs, six and eight inches in diameter. The walls of the pillbox are two tiers of coconut logs, about three feet apart. The logs are joined together by eight-inch steel spikes, shaped like a block letter C. In between the two tiers of logs are three feet of sand, and covering the whole pillbox several more feet of sand are heaped. No wonder our bombs and shells hadn’t destroyed these pillboxes! Two-thousand-pound bombs hitting directly on them might have partially destroyed them, but bombing is not that accurate—not even dive bombing.

  The message was clear. The Japanese were building defenses impervious to our bombs. It would take individual Marine riflemen on the ground to charge and neutralize these defenses.

  Looking at these Japanese defenses, Smith knew the Marines’ road to Tokyo would be a bloody one. The distance between this first major amphibious assault on Tarawa and faraway Tokyo was over two thousand miles. It presented an enormous challenge in terms of distance.

  In 1812, Napoleon had marched his men fifteen hundred miles to Moscow; in the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan advanced four thousand miles from Mongolia to the shores of the Mediterranean. But those campaigns collapsed because of the distances. And now the Marines were faced with a campaign almost the distance from New York to San Francisco.

  A grief-stricken General Smith walked to the beach to view for himself young Marines floating facedown in the lagoon and lying along the blood-splattered beaches.

  When American civilians later saw newsreels and photos of rows of Marine corpses floating in the surf, most were horrified. “This Must Not Happen Again!” screamed editorials, and one mother wrote a commander, “You killed my son on Tarawa.”

  Correspondent Sherrod worried that America did not have the stomach for the sacrifices the Marines would have to make to conquer the Pacific. To him it was obvious that the Japanese strategy was to dig in on every island in the Central Pacific to inflict horrendous American losses in the hope that America would give up and negotiate a peace. The Japanese were counting on civilians to blanch at the human cost of advancing on Japan and for the Marines to falter in the face of the fanatical Japanese defenses.

  Yet, however much civilian support might have been in doubt, Smith had no doubts about the determination and bravery of his Marines.

  And at his last stop on the island, at the high seawall the Marines had to surmount to get onto Tarawa, Howlin’ Mad saw an example of Marine valor. Sherrod wrote that the party saw “a Marine who is leaning in death against the seawall, one arm still supported upright by the weight of his body. On top of the seawall, just beyond his upraised hand, lies a blue-and-white flag, a beach marker to tell succeeding waves where to land. Says Holland Smith, ‘How can men like that ever be defeated? This Marine’s duty was to plant that flag on top of the seawall. He did his duty, though it cost him his life. Semper fidelis meant more to him than just a catchphrase.’”

  Tarawa was the first major amphibious assault in which the Marines faced sustained opposition on the beach. The American victory at Tarawa opened the Central Pacific to a new Marine thrust, with more difficult amphibious island assaults ahead. And it made clear to Marine commanders that many more motivated and well-trained Marines would be needed to win America’s War in the Pacific.

  So in March of 1944 the Marines issued new orders to six young boys who would someday be world-famous heroes. They were to report to a new camp to become part of a new Marine division. The great events in the Pacific began to draw the six flagraisers toward one another. Soon veterans Ira, Harlon, and Mike, strangers at Bougainville, would be introduced to one another. They would be joined by three other strangers: Franklin Sousley, Rene Gagnon, and a non-Marine, a Navy corpsman attached to their unit, whose name was Jack “Doc” Bradley.

  And as these six made their way to their new assignments, a tiny hill far out in the Pacific lay waiting.

  Five

  FORGING THE SPEARHEAD

  If the Army and the Navy

  Ever look on heaven’s scenes

  They will find the streets are guarded

  By United States Marines.

  —FROM “THE MARINE’S HYMN”

  IT WAS LIKE A CITY, but it was not a city. At least it was like no city the six boys had ever seen or imagined: a low-slung city of men; men and heavy machines and weapons and ammunition. Far greater in size and layout than any of their hometowns, it spread out in an olive-drab glaze over the rolling California land between Los Angeles and San Diego.

  Nearly every kid who arrived at the city’s gates was awed. “Camp Pendleton was so large I thought there was no end to it,” James Buchanan remembered. “I thought it went all the way to New York.”

  In the prewar years Camp Pendleton had been a small boot camp—a sleepy little base south of Los Angeles, named for Major General “Uncle Joe” Pendleton, the father of Marine training on the West Coast. In March of 1942 the Navy Department radically increased its size by acquiring the adjoining 130,000-acre Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores.

  Rancho Santa Margarita had consisted of canyons and rolling hills, livestock and grasses and wild Castilian roses and low vegetation, rattlesnakes and fleas. The Pacific Ocean thundered against its westernmost perimeter.

  The new Camp Pendleton, with its isolated and rugged terrain, offered the Marines the perfect environment to harden their young men. The future flagraisers would spend the next six months moving about this untamed land, never sleeping in a barracks, never showering indoors, fighting raging wildfires, only occasionally sighting something as civilized as a dirt road. As one of their friends, Grady Dyce, later told me, “We were in the middle of nowhere. All that was out there was rattlesnakes, sheep, and coyotes. We had to cut the tall grass with machetes.”

  The new specialized city of specialized military men would mold a high-performing population that in traditional cities required generations to gestate. In fact it would have to produce specialists of a level no civic society had ever required: leaders who could make mass life-and-death decisions in split seconds; doctors ready to perform brain surgery at a moment’s notice; mailmen delivering to no fixed address; priests whose duties overwhelmingly involved last rites; cooks who could serve “customers” by the thousands, three times daily; and scores of recordkeepers, mechanics, driver
s, dog trainers, and others—every one of whom would have to perform his duties in sync with the others, in a spirit of total cooperation, and under fire.

  Mostly, the city would produce men to return that fire and vanquish the enemy shooters. Its overarching purpose was to quickly transform Doc, Rene, Ira, Mike, Franklin, Harlon, and 21,000 others from standard-issue fighting men into an elite, interdependent martial society that would be moved intact across an ocean to fight an island battle.

  Camp Pendleton would see the creation of an entirely new Marine division. This new division—the 5th—had been activated on November 11, 1943, Armistice Day. In the ensuing months, its pell-mell assembly into a combat-ready force drew on all the energies and know-how of American industrialization.

  The urgency surrounding the 5th Division’s creation was dictated by harsh military realities. The bloody battle of Tarawa had demonstrated the need for many more Marines trained to rout out well-entrenched Japanese defenders. It would be at Camp Pendleton that the 5th Division learned the skills needed to prevail on the Road to Tokyo.

  It was at Camp Pendleton, a crucible of that counteroffensive, that the six flagraisers first came together. They all swept in on the roiling streams of new men who flooded the unreal city every day. The men poured in by the truckful on convoys along Highway 101 and on crowded railroad cars clattering along an extension of the Santa Fe line. It was as though the American continent was being drained of its young men, and they were flowing here in great rivers.

  Mike, Harlon, and Ira reported to the camp at the end of their post-Bougainville furloughs. Forty percent of this new force would be composed of veterans such as they. Doc, Franklin, and Rene represented the remaining sixty percent—young boys just out of basic training. Doc came up in April from his crash course at Field Medical School in San Diego. Franklin arrived from boot camp in San Diego. Rene was shipped over from the camp at Charleston. He joined the Military Police Company at the camp. But within four days, on April 8, Rene was shifted to a new company. A company destined for great hardship and for everlasting renown.

  This was Easy Company—a stinging irony, given its fate.

  Easy Company consisted of about 250 men. They were divided into a headquarters (or command) section, three rifle platoons, a machine-gun platoon to supplement the rifle platoons, and a 60mm-mortar section to back up the riflemen. Doc was one of two corpsmen assigned to the 3rd Platoon, led by Lieutenant Keith Wells. (Corpsmen remained technically within the Navy, but trained and billeted with the men whom they would watch over in battle.)

  Mike, Harlon, Franklin, and Ira were in the 2nd Platoon, led by Lieutenant Ed Pennel. Its forty members were divided into four squads. Sergeant Mike was a squad leader with three corporals reporting to him. One was Corporal Harlon Block, to whom Private First Class Franklin Sousley and Private First Class Ira Hayes in turn reported. Rene was in another of Mike’s squads.

  Easy Company’s boss was Captain Dave Severance, a tall, lean Wisconsin native; a ramrod Marine of exceptional judgment who had shown his mettle in battle, who expressed his authority through calm understatement and unflinching example.

  Easy Company was part of the 2nd Battalion commanded by Colonel Chandler Johnson. The 2nd was assigned to the 28th Regiment, commanded by Colonel Harry—“the Horse”—Liversedge.

  The new fighting force soon received the honor of its own special moniker: Spearhead. Nearly 600 Marines submitted entries to design a shoulder insignia expressing this name. The winning design, created by a lieutenant named Fergus Young, was a scarlet shield and gold V, pierced by a spearhead of blue.

  “Spearhead” was a salute to the division’s intended role in the grim island battles that lay ahead. When its training was complete, Spearhead would be thrust to the forefront of the great human tidal wave of hundreds of thousands of Marines fighting their way from island to island as it bore down inexorably on Japan.

  Spearhead would fight only one battle. The American high command pinpointed this objective later, in the fall of 1944, although its location and identity would remain top-secret: an ugly little scab of rock and volcano six hundred miles south of the Japanese islands.

  And so, its high command, facilities, colors, and shoulder insignia squared away, Camp Pendleton began molding the assault force that would descend upon that ugly, as-yet-nameless scab.

  Inspired leadership is a key to the Marines’ greatness. Marine officers stress their duty to look after the needs of their men. The mythic Marine “Chesty” Puller once instructed his officers: “Whenever we are at chowtime, the privates will be fed first. Then the noncoms, and the officers last of all.”

  Robert Leader, in Easy’s 3rd Platoon with Doc Bradley, shared his memories of his leader with me: “In the Marines I never saw an officer take a drink before his men drank. Our lieutenant, Lieutenant Wells, would take heavy machine-gun ammo off the back of guys who were struggling. Mortar shells are heavy and Wells would take a couple from a guy to help. There was a loyalty between the men and the officers, between everyone. We knew our officers would go to hell with us.”

  Joe Rodriguez, who was in the same fire team as Ira and Franklin (they reported to Harlon, who reported to Mike), reminisced about Mike’s leadership:

  Everybody idolized Mike. He was a born leader, a natural leader, and a leader by example. Harlon, Ira, Franklin all loved him. Even his lieutenant, Lieutenant Pennel [to whom Mike reported], stood somewhat in awe of Mike.

  He led by example; he had been there. He was an experienced fighter, but he never talked about himself. He had real concern for us, he was a big brother to us. We were young boys and he would reassure us. He would say, “I want to bring as many of you back home to your mothers as possible.”

  Another good example of the leadership talent in the 5th Division was the semimythic warrior who would command the 28th Regiment, to which Easy Company was attached. This was Colonel Harry “the Horse” Liversedge, a towering specimen from Volcano, California, who grew into a six-foot-four Olympic shot-putter and who, in the war, won a Navy Cross for his heroism in the jungle fighting at New Georgia.

  By 1942 he was a Raider commander. Now, two years later, he strode among the young boys of Camp Pendleton, an icon who was willing to wade once more into the horrors of battle at their helm.

  Harry the Horse’s mission at Camp Pendleton was to mold his 3,400 men of the 28th Regiment into a flexible fighting unit. Flexible in that they had to be effective whether they were fighting together as a regiment or as a number of small teams. Whatever he needed—a lone Marine to assault a blockhouse, a three-man fire squad, a forty-man platoon, a two-hundred-fifty-man company, a nine-hundred-man battalion, or a three-thousand-man regiment—all his Marines had to be able to break off or come together as needed.

  Colonel Liversedge and the rest of the cadre of officers would assemble and polish its Swiss watch of a fighting force in several tightly calibrated stages. The training began with the simplest and most critical cog in the great fighting machine—the rifleman.

  First came the mastery of weapons.

  The boys had learned marksmanship in basic training. They had learned (often the hard way) that the Marines venerated the rifle. But now they began to understand that the rifle was the essential weapon of combat in this war. The Navy now held sway in the ocean, the Army Air Force was beginning to dominate the skies. But as Tarawa had shown (and as future battles were to show again), no amount of aerial bombing or naval bombardment—regardless of how obliterating it might look from a bombardier’s sights or from the deck of a destroyer—was going to dislodge these deeply entrenched Japanese from their obsessively fortified Pacific islands.

  It was the rifleman, sloshing ashore in the teeth of murderous fire. It was the rifleman, surrounded by the screams and the floating corpses of his buddies. It was the rifleman, scared and exposed and unprotected by armor of any sort, peering through the smoke and confusion for a glimpse of an individual enemy. It was the rifleman who would determine t
he outcome of America’s War.

  The rifleman was the Marine counterpart of the Army infantryman. Every Marine, regardless of his ultimate assignment, would be trained with the rifle. The Marines even had a motto for it: “Everyman a Rifleman.” Doc would learn the rifle, even though he was a corpsman. Rene would learn the rifle, even though he was a runner, a messenger. Mike, Harlon, and Franklin would be rifle specialists. As for sturdy Ira, his weapon would be an advanced version; a Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. Long and heavy (it weighed about twenty-four pounds), the BAR could be fired either in single shots or in bursts. It held twenty rounds of ammunition, like a machine gun. It produced triple the firepower of a standard rifle. The BAR man was a popular guy to have around in a firefight.

  At Pendleton, the young Marines began to learn the complex choreography of rifle combat.

  “They’d learn ‘fire and movement,’” Dave Severance reminisced to me. “We played war games. Two rifle companies would fire on a target while another company moved. Then they’d switch off and proceed toward the objective—riflemen like Ira and Franklin doing what Sergeant Strank and Corporal Block told them to do. A key was protection: fire groups protecting one another as they advanced to new positions.”

  Jesse Boatwright recalled the emphasis on teamwork. “War is a team sport,” he said. “From the private on up, you learn how to take orders and do what you’re told. To work as a team. To obey the chain of command.”

  The training was intense. “It was about getting up at reveille and going up in the hills and playing war,” Tex Stanton recalled. “We’d crawl and run around in the hills in the hot sun and then walk home.” And tedious. “Repetitious and simple,” Don Mayer remembered. “It was about doing simple things over and over so that you could do them automatically.” And for real. “We fired so much live ammo at Pendleton,” recalled Grady Dyce, “that we’d always be starting prairie fires. We were always fighting fires. Even forest fires.”