Flags of Our Fathers (25 page)

Oh, what a beautiful day,

I’ve got a terrible feeling

Everything’s comin’ my way.

Eight days earlier, en route to Iwo Jima, Major Dollins had received news of the birth of his first child, a daughter. He was the first 5th Division Marine to die in the battle.

In the midst of all this carnage and confusion was my father. My father, with his corpsman’s pouch, his Unit 3, slung over his shoulder. The ex-paperboy, on his rounds.

He was busy almost from the moment he touched land—although his fellow medic Cliff Langley was busy even sooner. “Cliff hit the beach about ten seconds before me,” Doc told an interviewer some weeks after the battle, “and when I stepped out, he was already treating a casualty.” The “casualty” was a lieutenant shot through the jaw, a disabling wound by its appearance. “Do you want to be evacuated?” Langley asked the man. “No, I’m OK, thanks,” the Marine bravely mumbled, and ran back into the battle.

Thurman Fogarty, eighteen then, remembered the “welter of blood” that engulfed the Navy doctors and corpsmen as soon as they landed. Fogarty himself was buffeted by the concussions of the big shells coming in and going out, like gusts of a powerful wind. After just a few minutes he fell to the beach and scraped out as much indentation as he could. Doc Bradley was crouched next to him, attending to a small wound in his own leg.

“I happened to look to my left and saw that the Marine next to me had his arm almost blown off,” Fogarty said. “It was just dangling from his shoulder. I pointed this out to Doc. He looked up from his own wounds and rolled across my legs to attend the injured Marine. The guy was conscious. Doc calmly put a tourniquet on the stump of the arm and told the guy to hold it. Then he shot him full of morphine and tied the dangling arm to the stump. And then pointed him toward the Aid Station.”

After that, Fogarty and my father were separated. Crawling up a terrace, Fogarty spotted a boy whose head had been cut open by shrapnel. The sight nauseated him and he slid into a shell crater to vomit. There again he found Doc, taking care of a man whose chest had been caved in. This sight reactivated Fogarty’s heaving. “Doc asked me where I was hit,” he later remembered. “I told him I was just sick. He smiled at me and assured me, ‘You’ll be all right.’”

John Fredatovich, also eighteen, would become Easy’s first casualty and had need of Doc Bradley nearly as soon as he broke from the water. He recalled it vividly: “I heard the mortar, then I felt a cold chill, the shock to my nervous system as the shrapnel penetrated my arm and leg. I was sliced open from my knee to my buttocks and under my arm. My femur was smashed.

“Doc came over. He made everyone stay away. He was very forceful and took charge. He gave me blood transfusions as I went in and out of consciousness. Then four Marines carried me away to a place on the beach for evacuation.”

The place where Fredatovich lay offered no protection from the hell-storm. Every inch of the beach was an active target. Fredatovich lay on his cot until four
P.M.
, and watched death and destruction explode around him. He saw a boatload of Marines lifted out of the water in a giant flash, and implode into nothingness. He saw other wounded boys on their stretchers get blown to pieces. He saw kids in the beach detail get hit as they unloaded explosives, their flesh fused to the fireball.

The sight that returned to the future teacher most often in memory, however, was a strikingly unlikely one: a glimpse of Harlon Block as Harlon ran past him toward the action.

“I called up to him; I said, ‘Hi,’” Fredatovich remembered, “but he just ran on by. It was the look in his eyes that startled me. He had a glazed, blank look. It was as if memories were coming back to him from past experiences. This surprised me. I later studied psychology and I realized that those dilated pupils meant he was shocked by something and was transfixed on some image from his past. It was as if the noise of the mortars transported him to a past memory.”

Fredatovich later decided that Harlon was summoning up visions of death: the deaths he’d seen on Bougainville, perhaps. Or perhaps his own.

By noon, the heavy casualties continued but the threat of annihilation had vanished. Nine thousand troops were ashore, and counting. The Marines were on Iwo Jima to stay.

Through the long afternoon, the American boys held their positions and even advanced, despite the continuing nightmare of fighting an invisible enemy. The Japanese cross fire maintained and even increased its prodigious volume. It came from everywhere on the island; even the artillery near Kitano Point, nearly five miles to the north, was delivering shells in sheets. From the right flank of the plateaulike land on the eastern beaches came automatic-weapons fire that swept back and forth. Advancing vehicles were blown up by aircraft bombs embedded in the sand as tank mines. “Spider traps” and caves linked to the tunneling system were everywhere. They gave the defenders countless places from which to pop up, fire, disappear, and surface again somewhere else. The veteran Marine who’d boasted to my father that he was experienced enough to dodge bullets had not dreamed of what he’d face. The difference between living and dying was sheer luck, many survivors said later. You were a target if you moved. And you were a target if you stayed in place.

Some of General Kuribayashi’s technical stratagems could almost have been lifted from the science-fiction comic books the Marines had read as boys. Many recalled watching in horror as an orifice would reveal itself on the side of Suribachi; a yawning hole in what had appeared to be solid rock. From the hole, the muzzle of a massive gun would appear and discharge a heavy round. Before American artillery could fix on the hole, it would close again: a reinforced metal shield, operated like a giant retractable garage door.

And yet, as William Wayne recalled, “We did what we were ordered to do. We worked our way across the center of that island with machine guns firing at us. We’d jump into a tank ditch for protection and then our leader would yell, ‘Mine!’ and we’d change direction. We’d blast pillboxes, secure them just like in training. But unlike in training they’d come alive again and fire at us from the rear.

“But we made it. We completed that day’s mission. We got across the island.”

Eight battalions were onshore by the afternoon, as were the tank battalions of two divisions and elements of two artillery battalions.

Getting ashore proved more difficult as the day progressed—and not just because of the gunfire. John Gramling recalled that his amtrac circled for hours in the offshore water, the boys tensed for an incoming shell. “We couldn’t get in because of the congestion,” he said. “When we hit the beach there were stacks of bodies.” Wesley Kuhn’s ’trac encountered bodies well before it hit the shoreline. “They floated facedown because of the air trapped in their backpacks,” he said.

One of the war correspondents aboard the ships, Robert Sherrod, watched the battle through binoculars. To him, the struggling tanks were like “so many black beetles struggling to move on tar paper.”

At around five
P.M.
, Sherrod made ready to board a landing craft to take him ashore. He met Keith Wheeler of the Chicago
Times,
returning from the beach. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Wheeler advised him. “There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the rest of the war put together.”

In the midst of this hell, Harlon was crawling through a trench in the late afternoon, leading a line of boys on all fours. Bill Ranous was directly behind him, and collided with him when Harlon stopped abruptly.

“We all looked to see what had stopped Harlon,” Ranous recalled. “He was staring at two legs attached to hips with no upper torso. He was just transfixed, staring silently.”

To William Wayne, also in the line, the legs were inanimate—something to put out of his mind and move on from. “I was in a survival mode,” he said, “and seeing those legs didn’t bother me at the time. But to Harlon they were part of a person. He turned to me after a little while and said, softly, ‘Why don’t we bury him?’”

Variations on such encounters produced varieties of tortured etiquette. Roland Chiasson tumbled into a crater and nearly rolled over a Marine with his right arm blown off. “I felt silly,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone who has just lost his right arm?”

Mike Strank had performed heroically, shepherding his boys throughout the day. But his grim fatalism had not left him. Aloise Biggs recalled taking a breather in a shell hole with him in the afternoon. In a matter-of-fact voice, Mike said: “This is my third campaign, and I’m not going to make it through this one.”

“I had been through Bougainville,” Biggs said, “and I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

The corpsmen were catching hell along with everyone else. Cliff Langley, Doc’s comedic, was watching six of them in a circle, conferring with one another. A shell landed in their midst. “That was the last of them,” Langley said.

By nightfall the beachhead was secured. As the sun set, the shoreline grew even more grotesquely clogged with human bodies: Each Marine returning for supplies from the front brought a dead or wounded man with him. Their groans could be heard up and down the shore as darkness set in. Uncounted numbers of them died there, blasted by shells as they lay on their stretchers, waiting to be evacuated to the hospital ships.

And still there remained work to be done—for the corpsmen, especially. More injured, hundreds more, lay scattered throughout the field of battle. Doc, as senior corpsman for his unit, received reports and assigned help as best he could.

“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