Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  There is no record of what Kuribayashi’s last thoughts were before he fell off to sleep that night. But in a broadcast to the mainland on Radio Tokyo he had said, “This island is the front line that defends our mainland, and I am going to die here.” And to his son Taro he had written, “The life of your father is just like a lamp before the wind.”

  But there is one thought he had never shared with the 22,000 men he was about to lead to their deaths. He had written it years before to his wife when he was stationed in the United States, after traveling extensively across America: “The United States is the last country in the world Japan should fight.”

  Seven

  D-DAY

  Life was never regular again. We were changed from the day we put our feet in that sand.

  —PRIVATE TEX STANTON,

  2ND PLATOON, EASY COMPANY

  IT BEGAN EERILY, IN THE NIGHT:

  A dark Pacific sky cut by hellish red comets, rising and descending in clusters of three, each descent followed by a distant explosion. Sleepless young Marines stood watching atop their LST’s, thirteen miles offshore.

  To Easy Company’s Robert Leader of Cambridge, Massachusetts, it looked like heat lightning on a summer night. Through his daze, he heard a voice in the darkness utter what sounded like a fragment from a dream: “That’s Sulfur Island.” “What do you mean?” Leader murmured, not turning his eyes from the sky. The speaker beside him, a Navy crewman, replied: “Don’t you know? ‘Iwo Jima’ means Sulfur Island.”

  The sun rose pink. The sky turned blue and clear. On the horizon, the sulfur island lay wreathed in smoke.

  The date was February 19, 1945.

  The cooks on the transport ships had provided a gourmet breakfast for the young men about to suffer and die: steak and eggs.

  Doc awoke with the others, before dawn. The first words spoken to him were from a veteran: “Me, I’m experienced enough to dodge the bullets. You—well, you’ll probably get one right between the eyes.”

  Mike had spent much of the night watching the shelling. Ed Blankenburger, who’d stood beside him, had been elated: Surely this barrage would all but obliterate the enemy. His optimism was shared by many of the boys. Seventeen-year-old Donald Howell, from Mercer City, Ohio, was so certain there would be no Japanese survivors that he relaxed on board with a book called House Madam, about brothels on the West Coast.

  And so Blankenburger was surprised when, near dawn, he heard Mike say quietly: “I’m not coming back from this one, Ed.”

  Over 70,000 Marines—the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Divisions—massed in the ships that had finally arrived at Island X, ready to hit the narrow two-mile beach in successive phases. Awaiting them, dug into the island and out of sight, 22,000 elite Japanese—the Rising Sun—who understood that they were to die.

  At seven A.M. the boys of Easy Company walked down the metal steps of LST-481 and into the yawing holds of their assigned amphibious tractors. All the terrifying practice that Doc Bradley had put in scrambling down those treacherous net ladders in Hawaii had gone for naught. But there was plenty of terror left. “I was petrified when we got into those amtracs,” Corpsman Vernon Parrish, a close friend of Doc’s, recalled. “I was new to battle but I could sense that even the veterans were scared.” Parrish’s fears were hardly calmed when one veteran, gazing at Iwo, said out of the corner of his mouth: “You don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re going to learn more in the first five minutes there than you did in the whole year of training you’ve been through.”

  Now the first waves of tractors were loaded and surging toward the island at full throttle, kicking up white foam behind them, their turbine engines deafening to the helmeted young men packed inside, about twenty to a boat. Behind and above them was an overwhelming American force that controlled the sea and the air: in the sea, the armada at anchor, vessels stretching away from shore for ten miles; in the air, flights of Navy Hellcats swooping low to strafe Mount Suribachi, reshaping its contours with their firepower. In front of them lay the most ingenious and deadly fortress in military history. The Century of the Pacific was about to be forged in blood.

  In those final moments before the first landing, many of the troops in the boats could still convince themselves that this was going to be no sweat. They could do this despite the evidence to the contrary around them: the doctors and medics with their surgical instruments and their operating tables ready to be set up on the beaches. The rabbis, priests, and ministers in their midst, prepared to wade ashore and risk their lives to comfort the dying. And the wooden crosses, the Stars of David, the body bags, that later boats would carry.

  Maybe all that stuff would not be needed. Wasn’t the island being blown to bits even as the amtracs churned toward shore? The enormous battlewagons out in the ocean were blasting Iwo Jima with sheets of one-ton shells. The concussion of these great guns nearly capsized some of the smaller boats. Howlin’ Mad Smith himself would remember it as a barrage that blotted out all light “like a hurricane eclipse of the sun.”

  In those final moments, a carefree kid aboard Doc’s amtrac could still serenade his buddies with Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald movie tunes. In those final moments, eighteen-year-old Jim Buchanan of Portland, Oregon, could still view the bombing as a beautiful tableau, like in a movie; the island nearly invisible beneath clouds of gray, yellow, and white dust from all the rockets and bombs. He turned to his buddy, a kid named Scotty, and asked hopefully: “Do you think there will be any Japanese left for us?”

  Jim Buchanan could not possibly fathom what lay immediately ahead. None of them could.

  The bombardment had not touched the subterranean issen gorin. They would have to be obliterated individually, up close, at tremendous cost. The Marines were hurtling toward a mutual slaughter that would involve nearly 120,000 Japanese and Americans on- and offshore, consume thirty-six days, kill or maim more than half the land combatants, and assume characteristics unlike anything in twentieth-century warfare.

  The battle of Iwo Jima would quickly turn into a primitive contest of gladiators: Japanese gladiators fighting from caves and tunnels like the catacombs of the Colosseum, and American gladiators aboveground, exposed on all sides, using liquid gasoline to burn their opponents out of their lethal hiding places.

  All of this on an island five and a half miles long and two miles wide. An area smaller than Doc Bradley’s hometown of Antigo, but bearing ten times the humanity. A car driving sixty miles an hour could cover its length in five and a half minutes. For the slogging, fighting, dying Marines, it would take more than a month.

  The naval bombardment lifted precisely at 8:57 A.M. At 9:02, just 120 seconds behind a schedule that had kicked in at Hawaii, the first wave—armored tractors, each mounted with a 75mm cannon—lumbered from the waves onto the soft black sands of Iwo Jima.

  The first troop-carrying amtracs landed three minutes later, at 9:05 A.M., and behind them came hundreds more, each trailing a white wake. Easy Company rolled in on the twelfth wave at 9:55 A.M. Easy was part of Harry the Horse’s 28th Regiment, whose special mission was to land on Green Beach One—the stretch nearest Mount Suribachi, just four hundred yards away, on the left—and then form a ribbon of men across the narrow neck of the island, isolating the fortified mountain and ultimately capturing it. This assignment meant that Easy Company would be part of a 2,000-man force fighting a separate battle from the main assault: Some of the 5th and the entire 4th Division would fan out toward the right and progress northward along the island’s length to engage the bulk of its defenders. Before the battle ended, part of the 3rd Division, originally seen as a reserve force, would be rushed into action.

  The 28th’s was no small mission. As Howlin’ Mad Smith would later declare: “The success of our entire assault depended upon the early capture of that grim, smoking rock.”

  And so the great tragic funneling from wide ocean to narrow beach had begun: hordes of wet, equipment-burdened boys slogging from the water, forming a tightly packed
mass on the two-mile strip of beach. Targets in a shooting gallery.

  The boys squinted upward at their assigned routes and the ugly, stunted mountain beyond. The beach slanted upward from a point some thirty yards from the edge of the surf; it rose in three terraces, each about eight feet high and sixteen feet apart. In peaceful times it might have resembled a gently curving amphitheater. In this context it was an amphitheater of death. The boys would have to climb not on hard white sand but on soft black volcanic ash that gave way and made each upward step a lingering effort.

  The first wave of Marines and armored vehicles hit the shores. The vehicles bogged down immediately in the absorbent maw. The troops moved around them and began their cautious climb, unshielded, up the terraces.

  It was all so quiet at first.

  Perhaps the optimistic young Marines had been right. Perhaps it was over already. Donald Howell recalled, “When the landing gate dropped I just walked onto the beach. I was confident. Everyone was milling around. I thought this would be a cinch.”

  The “cinch” lasted about an hour. The false calm was part of General Kuribayashi’s radical strategy: to hold off from firing at once, as every other Japanese force had done in the island campaign, and wait until the funneling attackers had filled the beach.

  Easy Company had been ashore some twenty minutes and in their assembly area when the slaughter began.

  Smoke and earsplitting noise suddenly filled the universe. The almost unnoticed blockhouses on the flat ground facing the ocean began raking the exposed troops with machine-gun bullets. But the real firestorm erupted from the mountain, from Suribachi: mortars, heavy artillery shells, and machine-gun rounds ripped into the stunned Americans. Two thousand hidden Japanese were gunning them down with everything from rifles to coastal defense guns. “It was so loud it was almost like it was quiet,” one stunned Marine remembered. To Lieutenant Keith Wells, Doc’s 3rd Platoon leader, Suribachi turned into a monstrous Christmas tree with blinking lights. The lights were gun barrels discharging ammunition at him and his men.

  There was no protection. Now the mortars and bullets were tearing in from all over the island: General Kuribayashi had designed an elaborate cross fire from other units to the north. Entire platoons were engulfed in fireballs. Boys clawed frantically at the soft ash, trying to dig holes, but the ash filled in each swipe of the hand or shovel. Heavy rounds sent jeeps and armored tractors spinning into the air in fragments. Some Marines hit by these rounds were not just killed; their bodies ceased to exist.

  More than Marines. “I was watching an amtrac to the side of us as we went in,” Robert Leader remembers. “Then there was this enormous blast and it disappeared. I looked for wreckage and survivors, but nothing. I couldn’t believe it. Everything just vaporized.”

  In the same boat with Leader was Doc Bradley.

  The boys on the beach scrambled forward. It was like walking through a pile of shell corn, said one. Like climbing in talcum powder, said another. Like a bin of wheat. Like deep snow.

  Advancing tanks crushed those of the wounded who could not get out of the way. Others, unwounded, were shoved to their deaths by those behind them. “More and more boats kept landing with more guys coming onto the beach,” said Guy Castorini. “You had to just push the guy in front of you. It was like pushing him to his death.”

  The shock of actual combat triggered bizarre thoughts and behavior. Some Marines dropped into a deep, terror-induced sleep amid the carnage and had to be kicked awake by their officers. Others clung to fastidious habits of civilian life. “I don’t smoke,” moaned a badly wounded boy who’d been offered a lit cigarette. Jim Buchanan, who had hoped there would be some Japanese left for him, became indignant when he realized what was happening. “Did you see those Japanese firing at us?” he screamed to the guy next to him. “No,” the leatherneck answered, deadpan. “Did you shoot them?” “Gee, no,” Buchanan replied. “That didn’t occur to me. I’ve never been shot at before.”

  Phil Ward, leaping out of the amtrac that also contained my father, had a similar epiphany: “We’d had live ammo training in Hawaii, so I was used to the sound of bullets, but suddenly I realized why this was different. ‘Goddamn!’ I said. ‘These people are shooting at me!’”

  The beach rapidly turned into a salvage yard of wrecked trucks and Jeeps stuck in the sand or smashed by artillery. The dead piled up along the shoreline. “Coming in, I could see guys lying on the beach,” Corpsman Roy Steinfort recalled. “I thought, great! They’ll cover our landing. But when we drew closer I saw they were all dead.”

  Annihilation seemed possible in the hideous first minutes. Radio transmissions back to command quarters aboard the ships raised that specter: “Catching all hell from the quarry! Heavy mortar and machine-gun fire!” “Taking heavy casualties and can’t move for the moment!” “Mortars killing us!” “All units pinned down by artillery and mortars!” “Casualties heavy! Need tank support fast to move anywhere!” “Taking heavy fire and forward movement stopped! Machine-gun and artillery fire heaviest ever seen!”

  But it was even worse than what the transmissions indicated. No one was out of danger. A five-foot-three Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal, landing with the 4th Division, ran for his life through the hail of bullets. Later he would declare that “not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.” Corpsman Greg Emery, crawling on all fours, glanced back at a landing craft coming in; the ramp dropped down; machine-gun fire ripped the interior. Boys fell dead atop each other as they stumbled off the ramp.

  The first wave of Easy Company Marines, caught on the terraces in their heavy packs, scrambled for survival. “Like climbing a waterfall,” one remembered. Jerry Smith pressed himself as close to the ground as he could, and felt bullets rip through his backpack. “Even the socks in my pack had bullet holes in them,” he recalls. The volcanic ash slowed progress and kept the Marines exposed to fire; but in another sense the ash saved lives: It absorbed many of the mortar rounds and shrapnel, muffling explosions and sucking in the lethal fragments.

  Lieutenant Ed Pennel’s 2nd Platoon nearly lost its way in these early moments of deafening chaos. The unit, with Mike as a squad leader and Harlon, Franklin, and Ira in the ranks, landed far off course, north of Green Beach. Shortly after the bombardment erupted, Harry the Horse summoned Easy Company Captain Dave Severance and ordered him to stand by: “Are you ready to move out?” Liversedge demanded. “All except the Second Platoon that hasn’t arrived yet, sir!” Severance replied. “Well, you’ve got five minutes to find that platoon or you’re up for a general court-martial!” the colonel retorted.

  The platoon soon rejoined the company. Its wayward landing down the beach had touched off a comic moment before the carnage. Lieutenant Pennel had thought to reorient his men with a show of John Wayne–like gallantry. As the amtrac’s ramp went down he yelled, “Come on, men!” and then fell flat on his face into the water-saturated volcanic ash. “The guys ran up my back, laughing,” he remembered.

  Not everyone was laughing. “I was a very scared son-of-a-gun,” Ira wrote later. “Our boat hit solid ground and the ramp went down. I jumped clear of the ramp. About three yards away lay a dead Marine right on the water’s edge, shot in the head. He hadn’t begun to fight. My stomach turned flip-flops, and I started to get scared all over again.”

  A tissue of their former lives connected many of the onrushing warriors: ironies, coincidences of place and memory, overlapping fragments of their boyhoods. Wesley Kuhn of Black Creek, Wisconsin, was nineteen years old when he hit the beach. Wesley did not know Doc Bradley, who could not have been more than a few dozen yards away; but he knew Doc’s future wife, Betty Van Gorp. Wesley and Betty had been in a school play together in the ninth grade. Wesley’s role had been that of the “Kissing Bandit,” who’d snuck up and planted a kiss on Betty, who was playing an innocent housewife.

  Bodies, body parts, everywhere he looked, recalled Kuhn. “My worst memory is of the
first time I saw a man with his chest blown open and dirt trickling in on his vital organs.”

  There were moments of grotesque humor. Monroe Ozment of Virginia and his buddies were struggling up and over the third terrace, getting picked off by machine-gun and mortar fire, when someone yelled: “Turner got hit!” “Turner was a heavyset guy,” Ozment remembered, “and we always kidded him that if he got hit he’d get it in the butt. ‘Where’d he get hit?’ I shouted, and someone yelled back, ‘In the butt!’”

  But there were many more moments of unbearable pathos. Nineteen-year-old Corpsman Danny Thomas hit the beach at 10:15 A.M., several paces behind his best buddy, Chick Harris. In training camp, Thomas and Harris were called “the Buttermilk Boys” because they were too young to buy drinks on liberty. “I was charging ahead and saw Chick on the beach, facing out to sea, his back to the battle,” Thomas recalled. His buddy was in a strange posture: His head and torso were erect, as though he’d let himself be buried in the sand from the waist down in some bizarre prank. As Thomas rushed past him, he yelled a greeting and saw Chick’s hand and eyes move, acknowledging him.

  Then Thomas glimpsed something else that made him fall to his knees in the sand, vomiting. The “something else” was blood and entrails. “I vomited my toenails out,” Thomas remembered. “I realized that Chick had been cut in two. The lower half of his body was gone.” He added, “He was the first person I ever saw dead.”

  “Buttermilk Chick” was fifteen. He had lied about his age to get into the Marines.

  The big shells had blown a few holes in the ash. Guy Castorini and a few other rookies were in one behind their leader, a veteran named Lundsford. “We had no idea if this was a bad battle or not. One of the guys yelled, ‘Hey, Lundsford, is this a bad battle?’ Lundsford shouted back, ‘It’s a fucking slaughter.’ Maybe two minutes later—Whoom!—we got hit with a mortar. I ducked and something dropped on my back and rolled off. It felt like a coconut or something. I looked down and saw that it was Lundsford’s head. Those were his last words: ‘A fucking slaughter.’”