Flags of Our Fathers (26 page)

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 Bradley 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.

As Suribachi’s shadow spread into general darkness, Easy Company dug in for another cold, sleepless night. The fatigued boys knew what lay in store when the winter sun rose again. They knew that in the morning their battalion would have to assault the mountain. And that they would be part of the assault force.

Again, the star shells, the flares, and the searchlights conjured vast jumping shadows on Suribachi’s sides to bedevil the boys’ night-thoughts. As if to provide a soundtrack for those thoughts, a Japanese mortar shell hit an ammunition dump on the beach late in the night. The explosions continued for an hour.

By the end of this day, the 4th and 5th Divisions controlled only a mile and a half of the island. For this territory, the 5th Division had suffered some 1,500 casualties, and the 4th, about 2,000. And still, the Americans could not see their enemy; could see little evidence that they had inflicted casualties. For most of the young boys, it had not fully sunk in yet that the defenders were not
on
Iwo, they were
in
Iwo, prowling the sixteen miles of catacombs. Psychologically, it was as though they were shooting at—and getting shot by—phantoms.

And now, in the darkened land of the phantoms—in the madman’s haunted house—the boys tried once again to sleep.

Nine

D-DAY PLUS TWO

Some people wonder all their lives if they’ve made a difference. The Marines don’t have that problem.

—
RONALD REAGAN

A STORM LASHED IN FROM THE OCEAN; blasts of wind; the surf at six feet. But this was nothing compared to the hell-storm about to erupt on the southern neck of the island. At eight-thirty
A.M.
a thin line of unprotected American boys would arise and rush directly at the most fortified mountain in the history of the world. Almost one third of them would be killed or maimed. But not in vain: Their charge would mark the beginning of the end for “impregnable” Suribachi—and thus for Iwo Jima itself as a factor in the war.

Soaked, cold, and fatigued, the Marines awoke and gazed toward the primitive mass of rock that held their fates. In the tense silence as first light broke, Easy Company lay poised for action on the 2nd Battalion’s right flank. Easy faced a long, lethal gauntlet on the volcano’s northeastern side. Dave Severance’s boys would have to rush across two hundred yards of open terrain toward the mountain’s base, with very little cover of any kind.

The guns trained down on the two hundred yards between the 28th Regiment and the mountain’s base would soon make those yards the worst killing ground in the Pacific. Only after the battle would Americans grasp the full extent of what had been concentrated against them. Suribachi’s interior had been hollowed out into a fantastical seven-story subterranean world, fortified with concrete revetments and finished off with plastered walls, a sewer system, and conduits for fresh air, electricity, water, and steam. As many as 1,300 Japanese soldiers and 640 navy troops filled each of the various rooms and tunnels. They were armed with guns of every conceivable size and design.

The terrain below this fortress—the ground between the Marines and the mountain—was not only barren of natural cover, it lay in the teeth of overlapping ground-fire. At the mountain base stretched a welter of reinforced concrete pillboxes and infantry trenches. The firing ports of the pillboxes were angled so that the Japanese shooters could see one another and offer mutual support with their spewing machine guns.

At a little after seven-thirty
A.M.
the Marines’ own artillery opened its earth-shattering barrage. Hot “friendly” metal streaked low over the Marines’ heads, splintering the rock on the side of the mountain. The boys on the perimeter ducked under the lethal salvos; shrapnel was a fickle friend. “Ask for all of it!” Harry the Horse had yelled at his operations officer. There was no reason to hold back; after this day, there would be no space between the Marines and the enemy to aim shells. The combat could be hand-to-hand.

Toward the end of the barrage, forty carrier planes screamed in low, drilling the mountain with rockets that exploded at an earsplitting pitch. Some of the bombs landed a football field’s length away from the crouching Marines.

The planes pulled away; H-Hour drew near: eight
A.M.
The boys braced themselves for the cry of “Attack!” that might usher in their last moments on earth.

But no attack order came.

The problem was tanks. Colonel Liversedge had expected several to arrive to cover the assault, but none had appeared. Rearming and refueling problems and Japanese mortar harassment had kept them pinned down. Harry the Horse delayed the assault until eight-fifteen, hoping that at any moment the mechanized monsters would grind into view.

Nothing.

At eight-thirty, Colonel Liversedge made a harrowing decision. Despite the crucial absence of armor to cover the charging boys, he could afford to wait no longer. He gave the order to go.

An electric current of pure terror pulsed across the regiment. The Marines could see that the tanks were not in the field. No tanks; no large bulky shapes to protect the boys against fire from the pillboxes as they ran. No tanks; nothing but bodies against bullets. A certainty of death filled the air. No jaunty war cries came from the veterans. Richard Wheeler experienced a pang of utter hopelessness: “I could feel fear dragging at my jowls.” Lieutenant Keith Wells would later admit to a memory from his boyhood in his father’s slaughterhouse: an awareness, among the cattle, as the doors closed behind them, of what lay in store.

And then the heroes of the day began literally to stand up and be counted.

One of the first was Lieutenant Keith Wells of Easy Company’s 3rd Platoon. Wells did not tell his men to follow him. He simply got to his feet, waved his gun toward the mountain, and began running. “I just thought it was pure suicide,” he later recalled.

His mute example stirred the troops. Behind him, hundreds of scared boys stood up, leveled their rifles, and advanced against the mountain. To the left of Wells’s 3rd Platoon (with Doc Bradley) was Lieutenant Ed Pennel’s 2nd Platoon (with Mike, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin) matching Wells’s advance step-by-step.

The mountain exploded back at them, a screaming death.

Harlon, Doc, Ira, and Franklin swept forward with the rest of Easy Company, in the vanguard of the attack. Immediately, Japanese shells and bullets began cutting the Americans down. Amidst the din, the air was cut with kids’ strangled voices calling, “Corpsman! Corpsman!”

Officers and enlisted men crumpled together under the hail-stream of steel; were blown to bits; were machine-gunned where they crouched; were sliced open by hot shards.

Clusters of men were raked, and raked again. In Corporal Richard Wheeler’s area, a mortar shell killed Corporal Edward J. Romero, an ex-paratrooper from Chicago. Wheeler dove into a crater and had scarcely recovered his wits when another shell exploded, ripping the future writer’s left jawline apart. As the blood spurted, Corpsman Clifford Langley—who had treated a jaw wound on D-Day—hurried to Wheeler’s side and applied compresses. Then Langley gave aid to a wounded man nearby. As he was closing his pouch and preparing to leave the crater, Wheeler’s rifle in his hand, yet another mortar shell burst upon them. This one ripped Wheeler’s left calf apart and drove shrapnel into Langley. The young corpsman ignored his own wounds and once again dressed Wheeler’s laceration. Then they both realized that the shell had done its worst work on the wounded man nearby; both his legs had been ripped open, and he lay on his stomach, conscious but slowly dying.

It wasn’t over yet. Now a fourth mortar hurtled in; it landed with a thump—a dud. Had it been live, it would have killed everyone near it.

Corpsman Langley—his clothing now soaked with his own blood—once again methodically closed his pouch, grabbed Wheeler’s rifle, and went on his way.

William Wayne saw a bullet take a buddy’s face off. “His teeth were just lying there,” Wayne said. “If I’d thought about it at the time it would have driven me crazy.”

Yesterday’s heroes became today’s dead. Don Ruhl’s eccentric bravado finally got the better of him. It happened early on. Ruhl and his platoon guide, Sergeant Henry Hansen, were in the forefront of a charge that reached the brushy fringe of the mountain’s base. They rushed past bunkers that had been blasted by the bombing, but soon found themselves at close quarters with active defenders. The two leaped atop a disabled pillbox and emptied their rifles into a cluster of Japanese who were hurling hand grenades. As they blasted away, a grenade clunked down between them.

Eyewitnesses recalled that Ruhl, who was near the roof’s edge, could easily have slid over the side and escaped harm. But that was not his nature. He sized up Hansen’s position—helplessly isolated near the center of the roof—and acted: With a shout of warning—“Watch out, Hank!”—he flung himself on the charge.

Sergeant Hansen recalled seeing the charge land, realizing he was trapped, flattening himself out (“hoping the fragments would pass over me”) and hearing Ruhl’s warning almost in the same instant. “I heard [the] muffled explosion,” Hansen said in his official report of the incident. “I pulled Ruhl off the bunker, but he was dead. I am positive that had it not been for the self-sacrifice of his life, I would have been killed or seriously wounded.”

Among the first to reach Ruhl’s body was Doc Bradley, who held the dead boy in his arms while he examined him for signs of life.

For his bravery, Don Ruhl received a posthumous Medal of Honor.

The chain reaction of slaughter continued on. When Wheeler received his jaw wound, a comrade named Louie Adrian, a Spokane Indian, scrambled out of that foxhole and dove into another. There crouched his best buddy, Chick Robeson. The two Washington boys had enlisted together, traveled to Camp Pendleton together by train, and shared a tent in training. On liberty in California one night, feeling no pain, they fell asleep on a beach; they awoke when a huge wave crashed over them.

Now the two comrades were shoulder to shoulder, firing and tossing grenades, taking turns popping up and down in the cold, driving rain. “I came down to reload and Louie went up,” Robeson recalled. “Then a bullet got him right in the heart. He fell and turned yellow with death. Louie was my best friend. My link with home. I was staring at him when our corporal yelled, ‘Move, Chick! Move! Move!’”

And so seventeen-year-old Chick Robeson stood up and charged forward. He was a Marine, and he had work to do.

The 2nd Platoon, fighting hard on the left, found itself under a concentrated mortar barrage. Ira, Franklin, Harlon, and Mike zigzagged from one shell hole to another as they bore forward, looking for any sort of protection. Around them, their friends were suffering and dying as Easy took a cluster of casualties. A mortar round blew two boys to bits. An artillery round landed near Tex Stanton. The concussion blew Tex ten feet in the air; he fell to earth with deep burns on his legs and hips.

And still they advanced. Even as their casualties mounted at a rate that would have caused panic and retreat in nearly any other attacking force, these Marines remembered their training at Camps Pendleton and Tarawa and kept moving forward. Stoically, they followed their assigned roles and maintained the intricate teamwork of the great assaulting organism. The riflemen and machine-gunners who survived the charge aimed their fire at individual blockhouse ports, often mere slits in the hardened igloos. And as the enemy ducked (if the enemy ducked), the surviving demolition squads and the flamethrowers moved in through the chattering cross fire to get close enough for extermination.

In the midst of the carnage, Doc Bradley ran through the chaos, doing what he could in this landscape of blood. Just thirty minutes into the charge, the wet terrain was strewn with American bodies. Now the peaceable newsboy ignored the bullets and tried to save lives.

He watched a Marine blunder into a cross fire of machine-gun bursts and slump to the ground. Doc did not hesitate. His telltale “Unit 3” bag slapping at his side, my father sprinted through thirty yards of saturating cross fire—mortars and machine guns—to the wounded boy’s side. As bullets whined and pinged around him, Doc found the Marine losing blood at a life-threatening rate. Moving him was out of the question until the flow was stanched. The Japanese gunfire danced all around him, but Doc focused his mind on his training. He tied a plasma bottle to the kid’s rifle and jammed it bayonet-first into the ground. He moved his own body between the boy and the sheets of gunfire. Then, his upper body still erect and fully exposed, he administered first aid.

His buddies watching him from their shell holes were certain that he would be cut down at any moment. But Doc Bradley stayed where he was until he thought it was safe to move the boy. Then he raised a hand, signaling his comrades not to help, but to stay low. And then my father stood up into the merciless firestorm and pulled the wounded Marine back across the thirty yards to safety by himself. His attention did not flicker until the Marine was safely evacuated.

This action—so heroic that two sergeants and Captain Severance came forward to report it—earned him his Navy Cross, an honor he never mentioned to our family. It was one of the bravest things my father ever did, and it happened on one of the most valorous days in the history of a Corps known for valor.

Among the many heroes on the field, none surpassed the sustained courage of Lieutenant Keith Wells, Don Ruhl’s 3rd Platoon leader and the man who had stood up to inspire the initial charge.

Wells took a terrific hit in the early fighting. It happened as Easy, slogging with ferocious intent toward the entrenched defenders, outpaced the unit on its right flank and began taking fire not only from the front but from the side as well. Soon the company was pinned down by grenades and bullets from a blockhouse in its path. Worse, it came under a pinpoint barrage of close-in mortar fire. Two kids volunteered to the rear for more grenades; they were gunned down from the blockhouse. Flamethrowers Chuck Lindberg and Robert Goode rushed to the scene but could not get through the mortar fire to the emplacement. Then a shell burst near Lieutenant Wells, wounding him and four other men, including William Wayne.