Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  “A” Company, which had landed first and made the heroic charge across to the western beach, was among the most devastated. “Your father sent me over there,” Cliff Langley recalled. “Their corpsmen were gone and they needed help. They’d started the day with two hundred fifty boys and they were down to thirty-seven. They had paid the price for that seven-hundred-yard dash across the island.” On arriving, Langley encountered eight “walking wounded” among the casualties. “They were suffering,” he said, “and I gave them tags to identify them as casualties so they could be evacuated. They could have left and received Purple Hearts, and held their heads high.” But like the lieutenant shot through the jaw in the morning, none of them would go. “They stood there wounded and bleeding,” Langley remembered. “But they refused to leave their buddies.”

  The first night on Iwo Jima brought its own special horrors.

  The hellish red comets that had cut the predawn blackness reappeared in the sky, intermixed with streaks of white: tracers; shells from the offshore destroyers (more than ten thousand rounds); phosphorous “star shells” to provide bursts of white light; searchlights to keep Suribachi illuminated; parachute flares that made a Poof! sound when they illuminated and then floated down slowly. These flares cast an especially eerie glow over the island. As they wafted downward in the wind, their back-and-forth motions made the shadows move and seem to come alive.

  To Danny Thomas, lying in his foxhole on his back, the night sky was a mesh of hot light, a net of crisscrossing fire. “It seemed like you could stick a cigarette up and light it,” he said.

  The leaders of Spearhead hardly rested. Colonel Harry Liversedge moved his command post two hundred yards nearer the front, to be ready for the next morning’s assault on the mountain.

  In the waters offshore, boats churned through the night, bringing in more of the living, taking away more of the dying. At the White House, President Roosevelt shuddered when told of Iwo’s first day. “It was the first time in the war, through good news and bad, that anyone had seen the President gasp in horror.”

  The first day’s fighting had claimed more than half as many casualties as the entire Guadalcanal campaign: 566 men killed ashore and afloat, and 1,755 wounded. Ninety-nine boys had suffered combat fatigue.

  The remaining troops lay as still as they could, trying to sleep, trying not to sleep. They had been trained to shoot any moving object as the enemy. The falling parachute flares illuminated everything; the shadows darted and slid. Any shadow might be a Japanese soldier, crawling softly for the kill.

  One surgeon had established an operating theater in what he’d thought was a safe area. With sandbags and tarp, he’d fashioned a makeshift hospital. But as he tried to sleep that night, he heard what sounded like foreign voices below him. Was he dreaming? He dug his fingers into the soft ash and felt for evidence. His fingertips scraped something solid: the wooden roof of a reinforced cavern. The surgeon had built his hospital directly atop the enemy.

  Phil Ward remembered that the passwords for that night were based on American-made cars. Uttering “Nash,” “Plymouth,” “Chevrolet,” or “Dodge” at a crucial moment could make the difference between life and death.

  “Late in the night,” Ward recalls, “a guy put a gun to my head and I forgot all the passwords.” Somehow, he was spared.

  The first day of the Battle of Iwo Jima had come to an end. There were thirty-five left to go.

  Eight

  D-DAY PLUS ONE

  It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.

  —ROBERT E. LEE

  RAIN GREETED THE BOYS of Easy Company as they awoke and looked out at Suribachi’s great squat bulk on Tuesday, February 20. Rain and cold gusts would lash them for the next three days. The surf, mercifully calm during the invasion, had risen with the night winds; it roiled and slammed its ugly gray foam onto the beach in four-foot waves. Now the unloading of equipment would be hampered by more than enemy artillery, and the mood among the high command was grim. “It became a fight against the sea, the surf, the volcanic ash, and the Japanese, all joined in one colossal alliance against us,” General Smith would lament in his memoirs.

  It had been a chilly, nerve-shattering night. From their position above the western beaches, Mike, Ira, Harlon, and the others could hear the mortar, rocket, and artillery fire from Japanese guns. It did not abate throughout the night. The shells wiped out two casualty stations on the assault beach, killing many already wounded men.

  The young Marines had spent the night braced for a banzai charge. General Smith had warned them to expect it. Such attacks—hordes of issen gorin rushing insanely through the darkness toward the bivouacked Americans—had been routine tactics in other Pacific island battles. Although terrifying, these charges at least exposed the Japanese soldiers to the Marines’ gun sights; usually, the attackers lost many more men than the defenders. “This is usually when we break their backs,” Howlin’ Mad Smith observed as he gave orders to prepare. But no attack came. This extension of Kuribayashi’s coolly radical “fill-the-beach-and-then-get-them” strategy withstood the objections of the traditionalists beneath him. Instead, the mortar and big-artillery shells continuing through the night killed more American boys than any banzai charge ever could.

  And the stealthy menace implied by the flares’ eerie glow was real; not all the shadows were phantoms. At around two A.M. a Japanese grenade had landed in Easy’s midst and injured Ed Kurelik and Phil Christman. A weary Doc Bradley felt his way through the darkness on his hands and knees to treat the wounded, shouting his name so that he would not be shot as an enemy.

  Richard Wheeler recalled that Kurelik, a Chicago kid, was steamed that the Japanese had not played fair. “I heard somebody coming up the trench and hollered, ‘Studebaker,’” Kurelik fumed as Doc bound his wounds, “and then that Jap t’rew a hand grenade!”

  The gray dawn illuminated the night’s destruction. To the experienced correspondent Robert Sherrod, who thought he had seen all the worst that the Pacific campaign had to offer, it revealed nothing less than “a nightmare in hell.” His dispatch continued: “About the beach in the morning lay the dead…They died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific have I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet away from any body.”

  Thus, for some Marines who hours earlier had prayed for night, it was now the dawn that proved a blessing.

  The 28th Regiment—Harry “the Horse” Liversedge’s outfit—had established itself across the narrow neck of the island, isolating Suribachi just a few hundred yards to the south. Now the 3,000 men of the 28th would begin their dangerous advance southward toward the volcano, while the other 33,000 Marines on the island would fight their way north across the island’s main mass, toward the airfields and the high fortified ground on the northern rim.

  The cost of taking Suribachi would be high, and the 28th braced itself for the grim assignment. Soon after sunrise on D-Day plus one, Colonel Liversedge positioned his 2nd and 3rd Battalions to continue their assault on Mount Suribachi. Easy Company was not among these units. They were held in Regimental Reserve. Easy would retrace their steps of the day before, going eastward to position themselves in the 2nd Battalion area. There, they would assume a backup position from where they could be rushed into the front lines.

  The covering bombardment erupted at first light. An air strike screamed in with the dawn; Navy carrier planes looming out of the wet sky to slam the mountain with rockets, bombs, and napalm blobs.

  At eight-thirty, Harry the Horse gave the order to attack, and elements of the 2nd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, and the 3rd Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Charles Shepard, moved out. As the Marines zigzagged their way through the rain toward Suribachi, shells from halftracks and nearby U.S. destroyers lambasted the mountain. It had little impact on the subterranean enemy. Captain Severance committed Easy’s 1st Platoon to the attack early
in the day. The platoon leader, Lieutenant George Stoddard, was wounded and evacuated. The ground assault gained less than seventy-five yards through the morning, and those yards were earned the old-fashioned way: via flamethrowers, hand-held guns, and demolitions.

  Around eleven A.M. Johnson sent a message to 5th Division Headquarters: “Enemy defenses much greater than expected. There was a pillbox every ten feet. Support given was fine but did not destroy many pillboxes or caves. Groups had to take them step-by-step, suffering severe casualties.”

  While the attack surged and then stalled, Easy Company, minus the 1st Platoon, continued to pick its way east, always with the mountain and its gunners looming not far away. Contact with the enemy was negligible, except in the case of one Marine from the 3rd Platoon, a blacksmith’s son and bona fide eccentric from Montana named Don Ruhl. Ruhl had become something of the company oddball during training; he hated wearing a helmet, lectured his buddies that brushing one’s teeth only wears them down, and made no secret that he’d had enough training; he was ready to fight.

  On D-Day, Ruhl had shown everyone that he was not kidding. Spotting a cluster of eight Japanese who were fleeing their blown-up blockhouse, the boy charged them by himself, killing one with a bullet and another with a bayonet thrust.

  Now, at around eleven-thirty of D

  1, Ruhl came loping up to Easy Company’s First Sergeant, John Daskalakis, with an equally reckless notion: A Marine lay wounded about forty yards forward of Easy’s position, and Ruhl wanted permission to bring him in. Several other Marines and corpsmen had already tried this, and were driven off, many with wounds, by machine-gun fire. Sergeant Daskalakis pointed this out to Ruhl and then told him to go ahead. “He jumped out of the tank trap we were in,” Daskalakis recalled, “ran through a tremendous volume of mortar and machine-gun fire, and made it to the wounded man’s side. Then he half-dragged and half-carried him back.” Ruhl rounded up an assistant and a stretcher and bore the man off, again through heavy fire, to the Battalion Aid station three hundred yards away. Then he sprinted back to the platoon and took his place again.

  The beach was still hot. Unlike Normandy’s beaches, which fell quiet after twenty-four hours, the Iwo Jima shoreline continued to absorb casualties for days. Corpsman Hector McNeil could never forget the sight of wounded boys on their stretchers being blown to bits by shells. Roy Paramore of Lufkin, Texas, saw Seabees and bulldozer operators killed as he himself unloaded supplies in the firestorm.

  Father Paul Bradley and his assistant, Max Haefele, were likewise exposed, preoccupied through the onslaught as they cared for the wounded. Max remembered in particular one young Marine who had stepped on a land mine. “We raised his blanket and saw his legs and one arm were just chopped meat. He wouldn’t survive. But he just lay there calmly smoking a cigarette.”

  But up on the front lines, American boys were avenging these losses with a fury. Some of the fiercest of these “boys” were just that: kids barely out of childhood. Jacklyn Lucas was an example. He’d fast-talked his way into the Marines at fourteen, fooling the recruiters with his muscled physique and martinet style—he’d attended a military academy before signing up. Assigned to drive a truck in Hawaii, he had grown frustrated; he wanted to fight. He stowed away on a transport out of Honolulu, surviving on food passed along to him by sympathetic leathernecks on board.

  He landed on D-Day without a rifle. He grabbed one lying on the beach and fought his way inland.

  Now, on D

  1, Jack and three comrades were crawling through a trench when eight Japanese sprang in front of them. Jack shot one of them through the head. Then his rifle jammed. As he struggled with it a grenade landed at his feet. He yelled a warning to the others and rammed the grenade into the soft ash. Immediately, another rolled in. Jack Lucas, seventeen, fell on both grenades. “Luke, you’re gonna die,” he remembered thinking.

  Jack Lucas later told a reporter: “The force of the explosion blew me up into the air and onto my back. Blood poured out of my mouth and I couldn’t move. I knew I was dying.” His comrades wiped out the remaining Japanese and returned to Jack, to collect the dog tags from his body. To their amazement, they found him not only alive but conscious. Aboard the hospital ship Samaritan the doctors could scarcely believe it. “Maybe he was too damned young and too damned tough to die,” one said. He endured twenty-one reconstructive operations and became the nation’s youngest Medal of Honor winner—and the only high school freshman to receive it.

  When I asked him, fifty-three years after the event, “Mr. Lucas, why did you jump on those grenades?” he did not hesitate with his answer: “To save my buddies.”

  In the midst of battle the Marines buried their dead. Don Mayer, at nineteen, had never before touched a corpse; on this day he dragged body after body out of the surf: kids who’d drowned jumping from their amtracs or who had been hit just as they landed.

  Bob Schmidt of Appleton, Wisconsin, was part of Graves Registration. (Like the “Kissing Bandit,” he’d grown up near Doc, but didn’t know him; in later years they would play golf together.) His unit was supposed to go in on D-Day, but the beach was so full they didn’t make it until two P.M. on D

  1. “We spent twenty-eight hours in that little amtrac just circling around,” Schmidt said. “It was torture. I would doze off and then be awakened by waves of seasickness. All you could see was the carnage of the landing craft being blown up on the beach.”

  When Bob Schmidt finally went to work, he realized at once that this was a different sort of battle. “I had buried the dead on Saipan,” he said, “but the difference was how mangled the bodies were. The Japanese were hitting us with higher-caliber weapons than we had ever seen. On Saipan each Marine was buried in an individual grave. But on Iwo Jima we’d bulldoze a single grave a hundred feet long, ten feet wide. We didn’t bury by grave, we buried by rows. We had surveyors plotting the markers.”

  Chaplain Gage Hotaling could never forget the bleak enormity of these mass burials: “We buried fifty at a time in bulldozed plots. We didn’t know if they were Jewish, Catholic or whatever, so we said a general committal: ‘We commit you into the earth and the mercy of Almighty God.’ I buried eighteen hundred boys.”

  At about four P.M. on D

  1, Easy Company received its order to head for the front with the 2nd and 3rd Platoons, plus company machine-gun squads supporting each platoon.

  Its mission was to relieve a unit that had been on line for most of the afternoon and taken many casualties. The 2nd Battalion had clawed its way some one hundred yards toward Suribachi. The winter sun, which had emerged from the clouds late in the day, had now sunk behind the mountain, and the Marines of Easy moved directly into its giant shadow. Many of the young boys were seized with the feeling that the mountain was looking at them; and in fact, it was, with thousands of eyes: those of the 22,000 Japanese who were barricaded under its surface.

  Arriving at the front at a running crouch, Richard Wheeler asked a rifleman, flat on his stomach, “How’s it going up here?” “We’re getting shot to hell!” snapped the shooter. Almost immediately, Easy was experiencing this truth firsthand. Kenneth Milstead, a 2nd Platoon buddy of Mike, Ira, Franklin, and Harlon, had just dropped into a shallow foxhole he’d dug when a shell landed beside him and blew him out again. Blood streamed from the embedded fragments in his face. “I could have been evacuated,” Milstead recalled, “but the Japanese had pissed me off. I went from being scared to being angry. That was the day I became a Marine.”

  Over the boys’ heads, rounds from tanks and offshore destroyers slammed into the mountain. “Nothing but noise,” Phil Ward recalled. Navy and Marine fighter planes angled in, plastering the steep flanks with napalm that burst in bright orange plumes.

  On the ground, under fire, my father prowled, his Unit 3 pouch slung over his shoulder; exposed; looking for wounded.

  “Our sick bay was just a rifle in the ground,” recalled Dr. James Wittmeier, the battalion surgeon. “Doc Brad
ley came in with another casualty, and since he had been out with the troops so much I ordered him to rotate to the back and take a breather. He was tired, but he refused to stop. He said, ‘I don’t want to leave my men. I want to stay with them.’ Then he went back to the fighting.”

  It was a day of heroics and tragedy for Easy Company. Sometimes the two were almost inseparable. As the Marines pushed ever closer to the mountain’s base, Lieutenant Ed Pennel spotted five gravely wounded men in open terrain not far from him. They needed immediate rescue, but they lay under withering cross fire. Pennel looked around for a solution. A few tanks were finally lumbering toward the field. The nearest was about a hundred yards away. Lieutenant Pennel took out for it on a dead run. Somehow reaching it unscathed, he grabbed the telephone hanging on its side and guided its driver back to two of the wounded men. Mike, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin dashed to the pair, partly shielded by the tank’s bulk, and pulled them into a trench. Pennel directed the driver to back the tank until it straddled the men, who were then pulled inside through the escape-hatch door. The lieutenant then guided another tank toward the other three wounded men, and repeated the risky operation twice more. He received a Navy Cross for his valor.

  And Don Ruhl remained in a fighting mood.

  A large Japanese gun was in place about seventy-five yards from the company’s right flank. A company next to Easy had taken seven casualties in an attempt to rush and neutralize it. Now the toothbrush-hating Ruhl and a buddy came up to Lieutenant Keith Wells, the 3rd Platoon leader, and offered their services. As dozens of their fellow Marines watched, the two boys sprinted across territory that had cost other American boys their lives. Reaching the big gun, they found its emplacement unoccupied. The two stayed in the emplacement beside the weapon through the night to prevent the Japanese from reoccupying it. Rooting in the darkness, Ruhl found a tunnel not far away. With no apparent thought that it might be occupied by extremely unfriendly tenants, the eccentric Montana boy crawled inside and explored its entire length with lighted matches. He discovered several woolen blankets and brought them back to his dumbfounded comrades.