Battle Field Angels (18 page)

More than two thousand miles away, on May 12, 1945, shadows lengthened across the deck of the USS
New Mexico
as it steamed toward its night anchorage. A day of fire support for the Marines ashore on Okinawa was nearly over when Sammy Petrovich began to relax. He had been assigned to a 20mm gun on the twenty-six-year-old battleship. It was grueling duty that had begun almost two months earlier when the
New Mexico
first arrived off Okinawa.

Two enemy aircraft approached the
New Mexico
. When they turned toward the battleship, Petrovich’s gun pounded the sky. The aircraft dropped low and straight toward the center of the ship. The kamikazes intended to send the
New Mexico
to the bottom of Hagushi Bay.

In the Philippines, Bob Warren “shot” patients. An X-ray technician in the Air Force, he had been training to become a pilot when he learned that the military needed medical personnel more than it needed aviators.

Petrovich, Warren, and Marquez tried to keep in touch with each other after enlistment, but wartime letters were sporadic and slow at best. News of a buddy’s exploits was always out of date. They each knew one was a corpsman, another a gunner assigned to a battleship gun tub, and the third an X-ray technician, all in the Pacific theater.

On September 2, three months after the
New Mexico
had survived the kamikaze attack, Joe Marquez sailed into Tokyo Bay for the formal Japan surrender ceremony. As the USS
Mascoma
prepared to refuel the USS
New Mexico
, Marquez yelled across the rail to a group of sailors standing on a catwalk.

“You guys know a guy named Sammy Petrovich? He was on the
New Mexico
a while back,” hollered Marquez.

“Sure do,” answered one, who then told Marquez about Petrovich’s duty on the battleship, the marathon assault to take Okinawa, and how it had returned to action after battling the kamikazes.
⁵³

The bus slowed as it climbed into Nevada’s San Antonio Mountains. The world had known peace for only a few months when Joe Marquez returned home in late 1945. Brakes squealed as the bus slowed to a stop at the Tonopah bus station. No one had come to greet the war hero. Young men who had left hometowns as boys returned home every day on nearly every bus. Marquez pulled his duffle bag from the luggage compartment and started walking toward his grandparents’ house.

A week later, Marquez returned to the bus station to greet one of his high school buddies. There was so much to talk about. It had been more than two years since they had been together, drinking and drawing straws on graduation night. When the bus door swung open, Bob Warren stepped out into the sunlight. Marquez started toward him. He stopped when Warren raised a hand, his faced clouded.

“Don’t ever speak of that night again,” said Warren.

Awkward small talk briefly broke the silence before each turned for a solitary walk home.

Sammy Petrovich never joined them. The two kamikazes had crippled the USS
New Mexico
four months earlier. One had crashed into it amidships. A massive explosion had instantly killed more than fifty men, including Sammy Petrovich, the suave Yugoslavian who had drawn the short straw two years earlier.

Shock wasn't the only enemy on the battlefield. Only a few months following Peleliu, four heroic corpsmen confronted unspeakable conditions on a tiny island called Iwo Jima. Corpsmen would treat the searing physical wounds of battlefield burns and an invisible enemy so entrenched that he was within killing range of nearly every man on the island.

World War II: Iwo Jima

T
he old man could barely walk. He shuffled on stick-thin legs onto the cavernous hangar deck of the USS
Midway
aircraft carrier in San Diego in the summer of 2006. He immediately noticed the carrier’s “breath,” a mixture of hydraulic fluid, oil, grease, and fuel. It is a smell unique to U.S. Navy ships. After forty-seven years of active service, the longest of any U.S. aircraft carrier in the twentieth century, the USS
Midway
—now a museum—was no different. More than 200,000
Midway
sailors had inhaled the same smell.

It carried George Wahlen back to another life. To a time when he tried to ignore that very smell, compounded with sweat, body odor, and vomit as his ship approached a stark, little-known island called Iwo Jima. Although the
Midway
was docked at San Diego’s Navy Pier, Wahlen remembered the rhythmic swells and troughs of the Pacific. It seemed unnatural to be aboard a Navy ship and hear the sounds of families instead of men cleaning and snapping their weapons back together again.

Wahlen was only twenty years old in 1944 when American forces were pushing the Japanese back toward their homeland, one island at a time. After the United States had secured air bases in the Mariana Islands, American B-29s began bombing Japan. But the bombing run was a long, three-thousand-mile roundtrip, and the Japanese had installed a large radar station on Iwo Jima, a small, eight-square-mile island about four hundred fifty miles from the mainland. Radar detection of incoming American aircraft provided Japan with two hours’ advance warning. The Japanese sent fighter planes from Iwo Jima’s two airfields to confront the American attackers. Intelligence reports revealed Japanese engineers were building a third airfield on the island to increase its defensive capability.

Capturing Iwo Jima offered several strategic advantages: American fighters based there could escort the heavy bombers to Japan. The island also could serve as an emergency landing area for B-29s too badly damaged to make it back to the Marianas. And driving the Japanese off their own territory would deal Japan a powerful psychological blow.

American aircraft took thousands of air reconnaissance photos of Iwo Jima, revealing a barren outcrop of volcanic ash and sand. Shaped like an upside-down pear, the rocky island was anchored at the southern end by Mt. Suribachi, which provided multiple lines of defensive fire on the beaches below. Officers reviewed the lessons from the overwhelming losses they had sustained earlier on Tarawa and other Pacific islands. The assault on Iwo Jima would require a seventy-thousand-man invasion force to pry an estimated twelve thousand Japanese defenders out of bunkers and pillboxes. American invasion planners anticipated a casualty rate as high as 5 percent in the first few days on Iwo Jima’s exposed beaches. Corpsmen, aid stations, division hospitals, and offshore hospital ships would play a key role in the invasion.

Some of the young men reporting to field medical training camps in North Carolina and California would be assigned to the Marines destined for Iwo Jima. They began training alongside Marine riflemen and grenade launchers, flamethrowers and snipers, without knowing they’d be fighting an invisible and vastly underestimated enemy. George Wahlen was among them. The slightly-built hospital corpsman with a long, thin face and narrow shoulders had volunteered for duty with the Marines after discovering he hated the routine of hospital duty after he had become a Navy corpsman.

Born in 1924 in Fairmont, Utah, a place of hardscrabble farms west of Ogden, Wahlen belonged to a family that struggled to make ends meet. They lived on land owned by his mother’s parents, and when the Depression struck, they moved to property that belonged to his father’s grandparents. Wahlen hunted night crawlers after dark and sold them by day to help with family expenses.

A month before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Wahlen had convinced his father to allow him to drop out of high school to attend a private aviation mechanics school. When he graduated in 1942, he enlisted in the Navy, confident he would be working on Navy aircraft. But the Navy sent him to corpsman school. On December 10, 1943, he reported to Camp Elliott about ten miles northeast of downtown San Diego. There, Wahlen met a quiet young man with a quick smile and a broad, open face. John Harlan Willis had grown up in Columbia, Tennessee. As a youngster, Willis had lived with his grandparents and was the most popular newsboy for the local
Democrat
newspaper. The oldest of nine children, he also worked in local grocery stores and helped with barnyard chores to support his large family. A man of faith, he often practiced preaching to his friends while standing on a tree stump. His favorite prayer was “Oh, God, give us those things which you think we ought to have.” Willis arrived at Camp Elliott the day after Thanksgiving in 1943. He wrote letters to his hometown sweetheart, Winfrey Morel, and considered getting married before shipping out to the Pacific.

On January 31, 1944, another young corpsman arrived at Camp Elliott. Born in Harrison, Arkansas, Jack Williams was raised in the Ozark Mountains. The son of a blacksmith, he tended the family’s chickens on a small, rented farm. He hauled water from a nearby spring to a farmhouse that lacked indoor plumbing. He liked to play marbles, and he stashed money he earned from odd jobs in a violin case after he had abandoned music lessons. The country boy with narrow eyes and crooked teeth enlisted in the Naval Reserve. Six months later, he completed basic and corpsman training. He had been promoted to hospital apprentice first class when he began training with the Marines at Camp Elliott.

When Jack Williams transferred to the Marines’ 5th Division headquartered at Camp Pendleton just north of San Diego on April 1, 1944, he joined George Wahlen and John Willis, who had arrived two days apart in early February. The 5th Division was new, established for a Pacific campaign shrouded in secrecy.

The Marines’ 4th Division had left Camp Pendleton six weeks earlier, on January 13. Francis J. Pierce was one of the corpsmen assigned to the division. He had volunteered the day he turned seventeen, a week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. A native of Earlville, Iowa, he was an avid hunter. When he trained with the Marines at Camp Pendleton, he became so proficient at firing a submachine gun that the Marines nicknamed him “Angel with a Tommy Gun.”

More than two dozen troop transport ships left Pearl Harbor on January 27, 1945, carrying twenty thousand Marines. Nervous boredom preceded battle at an unannounced destination. Some men did calisthenics on deck to kill time. Others repeatedly took apart and reassembled their weapons. Meal time was good for standing in line, wasting at least an hour before being served. Young men facing the uncertain prospect of killing and being killed were crammed in transports that reeked of fear.

In late January, senior medical officers called their corpsmen together. They pulled tarps off models and unfurled maps. Few knew anything about Iwo Jima. The officers knew the island was in the midst of an unprecedented seventy-day pre-invasion bombardment. No one dared repeat the pre-invasion mistakes made on Tarawa when the gunfire from poorly positioned ships had skipped off the island’s interior harmlessly before detonating in the lagoon.

“I could not forget the sight of Marines floating in the lagoon or lying on the beaches at Tarawa, men who died assaulting defenses which should have been taken out by naval gunfire,” wrote General Holland Smith, commander of the Marines’ amphibious forces in the Pacific.
⁵⁴

The marathon bombardment of Iwo Jima concluded with a massive, three-day pounding delivered by Navy battleships as the final prelude to the landing on February 19. Ship loudspeakers blared updates:

One of Japan’s top admirals, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had been ordered to repel the American assault force. He had amassed nearly twenty-three thousand troops, almost as many as had defended Saipan, which was nine times larger than Iwo Jima. He had devised one of the most ingenious defensive positions in modern warfare. Working through the night to avoid American photo reconnaissance planes, his troops had dug more than fifteen miles of tunnels that connected approximately fifteen hundred gun emplacements, concrete pillboxes, and observation posts. He had made it clear to his island’s defenders that they were expected to die, but not before each killed at least ten American soldiers. Tactically, suicidal banzai charges would not be employed. His troops had been trained to allow the Americans to land and concentrate their forces on the beach before showering them with rockets, mortars, and bombs.

On February 19, thousands of Americans were positioned to come ashore from the southeast. Their goal was to cut off the five hundred fifty-foot Mt. Suribachi from the rest of the island, secure the high ground, then move north to force the Japanese defenders into the sea.

John Willis, Jack Williams, and George Wahlen had been assigned to different regiments in the 5th Division that would be making the initial assault. Wahlen’s unit would be held in reserve, but that only meant he would go ashore in an assault wave following the initial invasion. Corpsmen checked their gear one last time in the final pre-invasion hours. They carried a pouch over each shoulder. The bag on the left held sulfa powder, burn dressings, and battle dressings. The pouch on the right contained morphine syringes, iodine pencils, tags, ammonia, scalpels, and hemostats. The pouches marked corpsmen as a priority target for the enemy.