Tensely, grabbing at roots and rocks for balance, braced for ambush at every step, Watson’s patrol felt its way upward amid the smoking rubble. The serpent lay dormant; the hostile fire never materialized. With the courage and discipline born of combat, Sergeant Watson and his boys ventured all the way to the volcano’s lip and even risked a look into the crater—a satisfying mass of wreckage—before scrabbling back down to the base and reporting to Chandler Johnson.
As he observed Sergeant Watson descending, Colonel Johnson calculated he could risk a larger force and grabbed a field telephone. He cranked it to full battery power and yelled an order through the fuzzy wires to Dave Severance, who was bivouacked with Easy Company, still hugging the rocks on the southeastern point: “Send me a platoon!”
Severance surveyed his troops. The 2nd Platoon—Mike with Harlon, Franklin, and Ira—was off on a probe around Suribachi’s base. The 1st was encamped several dozen yards away. So Severance chose the survivors of the 3rd (Doc’s platoon), the closest to Colonel Johnson’s command post, to become the first American platoon to climb the mountain. The ranks of the 3rd had been shredded by combat, so Severance augmented the platoon with twelve men from his Machine Gun Platoon, and several 60mm-mortar section men. This increased the platoon strength to forty men.
Harry the Horse Liversedge himself picked the leader: First Lieutenant H. “George” Schrier, Severance’s executive officer. Liversedge had known Schrier when they served in the Marine Raiders together, admired his combat experience, and valued the lieutenant’s knowledge of how to direct air, artillery, and naval fire by radio. No one was ready to believe that the serpent had finished striking.
Just before the forty-man patrol began its climb, Chandler Johnson turned to his adjutant, Lieutenant Greeley Wells, and asked Wells to hand him something from his map case. Then Johnson called Lieutenant Schrier aside and gave him the object.
“If you get to the top,” the colonel told Schrier, “put it up.”
What Johnson handed the lieutenant was an American flag, one that Greeley Wells had brought ashore from the USS Missoula. The flag was a relatively small one, measuring fifty-four by twenty-eight inches.
Dave Severance never forgot the wording of that command. “He didn’t say ‘when you get to the top,’” the captain pointed out. “He said ‘if.’”
The platoon made ready to start its trek. I imagine my father looking around for his buddy, Ralph Ignatowski. Iggy. A Marine staff sergeant named Louis Lowery, a photographer for Leatherneck Magazine, asked permission to come along and record the ascent. The boys in the unit glanced upward, measuring what lay ahead.
It was Boots Thomas—appropriately—who got the unit moving: “Patrol, up the hill! Come on, let’s move out!”
“I thought I was sending them to their deaths,” Dave Severance would later admit to me. “I thought the Japanese were waiting for a larger force.”
As the forty-man line snaked upward, gained altitude, and grew visible against the near-vertical face of the mountain, it attracted attention. Marines on the beaches and on the flat terrain to the north turned to watch. Even men aboard the offshore ships put binoculars to their eyes to follow the thin line’s winding trek. Nearly everyone had the same thought: They’re going to get it.
The men on the march shared this sense of dread. Harold Keller happened to glance at the two stretchers being sent along as the platoon fell into line. “I thought to myself, We’ll probably need a hell of a lot more than that, he recalled.
Doc Bradley, shouldering his Unit 3 bag, was another who wondered how many would return alive. “Down at the base, there wasn’t one out of forty of us who expected to make it,” he told an interviewer not long after the battle. “We all figured the Japanese would open up from caves all the way up to the crater.”
And my father had an additional concern: “All the way up, I kept wondering, how the devil was I going to get the casualties down?”
Don Howell marked the slow, wary progress. “We inched our way up,” he recalled, “blowing caves as we went. We’d see a cave ahead of us, pull the pin on a grenade, and throw it inside.” As he passed the cave entrances, Howell could see that they were strewn with empty sake bottles—the Japanese liquor of choice—and bags of plain rice.
Phil Ward never forgot how the platoon wound its way cautiously, single file. “There was no trail, and there was a lot of blasted rock. We zigzagged our way up. We had to get on our hands and knees and crawl a couple of times. We had heavy weapons and two men had heavy flamethrowers on their backs. We were all scared.”
One of the flamethrowing Marines was Chuck Lindberg. Even he was braced for instant bloodshed. “We thought it would be a slaughter-house up on Suribachi,” he later said. “I still don’t understand why we were not attacked.”
As the Marines climbed, they beheld Iwo Jima for the first time from the perspective of the Japanese. Spreading below them in panorama were the landing beaches and the armada at anchor in the ocean; the narrow neck they had secured at such cost; the enemy airstrip; and the rising terrain of the main bulk to the north. And the small figures that were their comrades, gazing back up at them. How close, how intimate, how eerily serene it all must have looked to them.
About two thirds of the way up, Lieutenant Schrier sent out flankers on either side of the main unit for cover. “We were tense,” said Robert Leader, “thinking the enemy would suddenly jump out, or one of us would step on a mine. But it was completely quiet. Not a shot was fired. It took us about forty minutes to get to the top.”
Sergeant Lowery documented the ascent with his cumbersome camera. At one point he asked a Marine to unfold the flag, so he could get a photo of it being carried up.
The patrol clawed its way to the rim of the crater at about ten A.M. Looking down into the bowl, the boys of the patrol saw devastation: Japanese antiaircraft guns fused together by the heat of American bombing; twisted metal; pulverized rock. Robert Leader could not suppress a smile of glee as he spotted two large drop-tanks—jettisoned fuel tanks from Navy planes. “I got a chuckle thinking of the Japanese watching those tanks come down,” he said.
Leader’s next impulse probably expressed the attitude of every young Marine who had faced the mountain: “I said to Leo Rozek, ‘Gee, I have to pee.’ Rozek said, ‘Great idea.’ So we both peed down the hill. I said, ‘I proclaim this volcano property of the United States of America.’”
The spit-and-polish Hank Hansen took this in, and was indignant: “Knock that off! Who do you think you are?” Leader had a ready answer: “I’m an American citizen!” Hansen changed the subject: He relayed a request by Colonel Liversedge that Leader, as the platoon’s unofficial artist, make sketches of everything around him. Leader set to work.
Then Boots Thomas came up with an order of his own: “See if you can find a pole to put the flag on.”
Leader set aside his sketchpad—he’d bound his drawings together with surgical tape supplied by Doc—and he and Rozek scoured the rubble at their feet. The Japanese had constructed a catch-system for rainwater on the crater’s surface, and fragments of pipe lay scattered about. Rozek, rummaging in the mud, found a fragment of usable length. He and Leader lugged it upright. The two discovered a bullet hole in the pipe. The rope could be threaded through that. They “manhandled” the pole, as Leader put it, up to where Thomas was waiting.
Then, knowing that this was an important moment that would be photographed, the patrol’s brass took over.
Lieutenant Schrier, Platoon Sergeant Thomas, Sergeant Hansen, and Corporal Lindberg converged on the pole. They shook the folded flag out and tied it in place. Lou Lowery documented the proceedings with a steady succession of camera shots. He moved in close, suggested poses, cajoled the boys into self-conscious grins with his patter.
Louis Charlo joined the four. At ten-twenty A.M. they thrust the pole upright in the gusty wind, the first foreign flag ever to fly over Japanese soil. Lowery, wanting added drama for his shot, motioned to
Jim Michels, who crouched dramatically in the foreground with his carbine.
Then, a glitch: Lowery shouted, “Wait a minute!” to the posing Marines. He’d run out of film and needed a second to reload. Lindberg scowled and grunted at him to hurry it up: Men holding flags were easy targets.
With a fresh roll of film in his camera, Lowery called for a final, posed shot: Hansen, Thomas, and Schrier gripping the flagpole as they stiffly circled it; Lindberg and Charlo watching them from a couple of paces off; Michels adding drama in the foreground with the gun.
As Lowery clicked this exposure, an amazing cacophony arose from the island below and from the ships offshore. Thousands of Marine and Navy personnel had been watching the patrol as they climbed to the volcano’s rim. When the small swatch of color fluttered, Iwo Jima was transformed, for a few moments, into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Infantrymen cheered, whistled, and waved their helmets. Ships offshore opened up their deep, honking whistles. Here was the symbol of an impossible dream fulfilled. Here was the manifestation of Suribachi’s conquest. Here was the first invader’s flag ever planted in four millennia on the territorial soil of Japan.
Chuck Lindberg, a man not much given to sentiment, would remember it as a big wave of noise washing over them; it gave him a happy chill, the likes of which he’d never experienced before or since.
Robert McEldowney of Roanoke, Illinois, had watched the patrol’s ascent from the landing beach; now he joined the wild hooting and yelling as he savored the crowning moment. “It was a thrill,” he said. “When they put that flag up, I’ll never forget—the entire island erupted with cheers. It sent a chill up and down my spine.”
Max Haefele watched too, through his binoculars. “It felt great,” he said. “When the flag went up, there was a lot of noise all over the island.”
Many of the young Marines, in their giddiness, assumed that the battle of Iwo Jima was over. In this they were drastically mistaken. Robert Leader was one combatant who did not make this assumption. Amid the jubilation, he experienced a chill of a darker sort than Lindberg’s or McEldowney’s. “When I saw the flag I thought it was a bad idea for us up there,” he remembered. “It was like sitting in the middle of a bull’s-eye.”
Leader’s misgivings quickly proved prophetic. Just moments after the Stars and Stripes went up, Hot Rock’s summit got hot again.
The first Japanese emerged from his tunnel with his back to the Marines. Harold Keller spotted him at once and fired his rifle three times from the hip. The fallen figure was yanked back into the hole from where he’d come. Another sniper immediately popped up and aimed his rifle at the Marines; Chick Robeson gunned him down. Next was a maddened Japanese officer, who leaped into view with a broken sword; an alert Marine dropped him.
Now the crater briefly came alive with ordnance. The serpent was not completely dead after all. Hand grenades started to arc out of several enemy caves. The Marines took cover and began hurling grenades of their own.
Photographer Lou Lowery was standing near the flag when a Japanese soldier stuck his head out of a cave and lobbed a grenade. Lowery dove over the volcano’s rim and rolled and slid about forty feet down the steep, jagged side before he could break his fall. He suffered several cuts to his flesh, but was not seriously injured. His camera was broken, but his film was safe. Lowery decided it was time to head back down to find another camera.
The firefight lasted several minutes, and no American casualties were taken. And then the invisible enemy was silent once again.
After things had settled down, some of the young Marines grew fascinated with the view down below. Donald Howell found a working pair of large artillery field glasses, amazingly intact, in the rubble. He propped them up on their tripod, gazed through them, and was startled by what he could see. “They gave you an amazing view of the beaches,” he recalled. “They [the Japanese] could see our every move.” When eighteen-year-old James Buchanan had his turn, the war fell away for a moment and he was taken with boyish wonder: “I looked through them and could see all of Iwo. It was beautiful.”
For others, the morning exacted grimmer duties. Chuck Lindberg remembered that he and his comrades spent the ensuing hour securing the mountain. “We used the flamethrowers or demolition charges for the caves we couldn’t walk into, and we walked into whatever caves we could. We burned them out. We didn’t know what side the Japanese would be coming up from, so we had to work fast.”
Only later would the Marines comprehend just how much danger still festered inside Suribachi on the morning of February 23. Rummaging through an opened cave for souvenirs a few days afterward, Lindberg and Chick Robeson uncovered a sickening sight: the bodies of at least 150 Japanese, freshly dead. They had died of self-inflicted wounds.
“The stench was so foul that we had to put on gas masks,” Robeson recalled. “We went in with a small flashlight, and found it to be a large cave in two parts. Dead Japanese lay all about—so thick we had to tread on some. Many had died by holding grenades to their stomachs.
“Why these Japanese hadn’t tried to bolt from the cave and overwhelm the flagraising patrol is a mystery,” Robeson continued. “They had our men outnumbered four to one. What made the situation even more unaccountable was that there were other occupied caves on the summit. We’ll never know the number of Japanese who could have hurled themselves against our patrol. But there were surely enough to have killed every man in it.”
There is one persuasive explanation for those self-annihilated soldiers, and it speaks to the corruption of Bushido that was wrought by Japan’s malignant military regime. A traditional samurai might expect to die in combat and be honored for it. He might kill himself to atone for a moral mistake or a failure of courage. But suicide as an expression of ultimate sacrifice for one’s country was not a traditional samurai value. This was a construct of a deranged military establishment cynically bent on extracting the maximum utility from its issen gorin.
While the 3rd Platoon was taking control of Suribachi’s summit, other things were going on down below.
The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had decided the previous night that he wanted to go ashore and witness the final stage of the fight for the mountain. Now, under a stern commitment to take orders from Howlin’ Mad Smith, the secretary was churning ashore in the company of the blunt, earthy general. Their boat touched the beach just after the flag went up, and the mood among the high command turned jubilant. Gazing upward at the red, white, and blue speck, Forrestal remarked to Smith: “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”
Forrestal was so taken with the fervor of the moment that he decided he wanted the Suribachi flag as a souvenir. The news of this wish did not sit well with Chandler Johnson, whose temperament was every bit as fiery as Howlin’ Mad’s. “The hell with that!” the colonel spat when that message reached him. The flag belonged to the battalion, as far as Johnson was concerned. He decided to secure it as soon as possible, and dispatched his assistant operations officer, Lieutenant Ted Tuttle, to the beach to scare up a replacement flag. As an afterthought, Johnson called after Tuttle: “And make it a bigger one.”
At about this same time, a short, nearsighted, mustachioed wire-service photographer named Joe Rosenthal was struggling through a bad morning indeed.
Rosenthal, covering the invasion for the Associated Press, had landed on Iwo at around noon on D-Day and had risked his life to get stirring action shots through the days of combat that followed. But on the morning of February 23, nothing seemed to go right for him. He slipped on a wet ladder and fell into the ocean between the command ship and a landing craft. Fished out, he unzipped his camera—a bulky and durable Speed Graphic—from its waterproof bag, and clicked off a shot of Forrestal and Smith looking resolutely toward the beach.
As he was approaching Iwo Jima in an LCT in the company of Bill Hipple, a magazine correspondent, the boatswain told Rosenthal he had just heard on his radio that
a patrol was climbing Suribachi.
“The hell you say,” Hipple said.
“That’s what I heard,” the sailor said.
Hipple and Rosenthal headed toward the mountain, being careful to avoid marked mines, until they reached the command post of the 28th Regiment. There they encountered two Marines who were also combat photographers: Private Bob Campbell, who worked with a still camera, and Sergeant Bill Genaust, who had a movie camera loaded with color film.
“I think we’ll be too late for the flagraising,” Genaust remarked. But Rosenthal had come too far to turn back. “I’d still like to go up,” he said, and talked Campbell and Genaust—who were armed—into making the ascent with him. The three men shouldered their cameras and hit the steep trail.
While Lieutenant Tuttle was off searching for a replacement flag, Chandler Johnson decided that Lieutenant Schrier, up on the mountain, could use a wired connection with the base for his field telephone, whose battery signal was growing weak. He rang up Dave Severance at Easy Company and ordered a detail to reel out a phone wire. The 2nd Platoon had just trooped in from its probe around the mountain’s base. Severance ordered Mike, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin to the battalion command post to tie in a telephone wire that the fire team would then unreel up the mountain. Strank said simply, “Let’s go!” The boys were tired, but nobody asked the young sergeant where they were going; nobody complained. As Ira later wrote, “We were certainly uneasy.”
The captain also dispatched his runner, nineteen-year-old Rene Gagnon, to the command post for fresh SCR-300 batteries for Schrier.
They reached Colonel Johnson’s field headquarters just as Lieutenant Tuttle hurried into view. He was carrying an American flag that he had obtained from LST-779 on the beach. As it happened, this flag—which at ninety-six by fifty-six inches was a good deal larger than the one now planted on the mountain—had been found in a salvage yard at Pearl Harbor, rescued from a sinking ship on that date which will live in infamy.
Flags of Our Fathers Page 23