Flags of Our Fathers (27 page)

Wells suffered shrapnel wounds to his legs and lost some of his clothing. Doc Bradley darted to his side, injected him with morphine, and told him to get the hell to the rear. Wells would have none of it. His unit had begun the morning with forty-two men; twenty-five now remained. No one could be spared. The feeling had returned to his legs and he decided to stay in the field, in command.

Lieutenant Wells’s determination drove his men to new heights of valor. Lindberg and Goode arose with their deadly flamethrowers and, ignoring the sheets of fire directed at them, stalked toward the pillbox. Soon the two were squirting their molten fire streams in all directions. They not only incinerated dozens of Japanese—the smell of burnt flesh floated on the damp wind—their liquid fire turned several pillboxes into infernos, causing Japanese ammunition to explode in great bursts.

Chuck Lindberg later recalled the hazards of lugging a tank that carried seventy-two pounds of jellied gasoline—napalm—under twelve hundred pounds of pressure. “The shot only lasted six seconds,” he recalled. “We fired in short bursts. It was dangerous work. A lot of guys bought the farm trying that.” Lindberg’s steely calm and ferocious concentration led him to heights of accomplishment that few others attained. His day’s work earned him a Silver Star.

The roar of tank treads now competed with the din of artillery all along the Marines’ front, as dozens of them belatedly joined the front line. Shielded by the armored bulk, infantrymen could rush ever closer to pillboxes and bunkers without being exposed to fire. The inhabitants of those hovels—those who were not gunned down or scorched to death—began to flee toward the mountain. The Japanese first-line defenses were crumbling.

But the price of this victory remained high, and heroes continued to suffer. Five of the flagraisers fought side by side, led by Lieutenants Wells and Pennel. And now Pennel himself was a lacerated casualty, needing rescue. He was dashing from shell hole to shell hole when a shell landed between his legs and blew him a distance of thirty feet. His left heel was blown off, his right buttock and thigh gouged out, and his left shin pierced by shrapnel. Half a century later, Pennel told the story with detached humor:

“I was semiconscious. I heard someone screaming. Then I realized it was me. I felt liquid running down my butt and I thought my life-juices were running out. I looked between my legs to see what I had left. It was OK. It was my damaged canteen leaking.

“A medic came by and gave me a brandy and a shot of morphine. I took my helmet off and put it over my genitals. I laid there in a depression like a soup tureen for hours—parts of my body blown off, no clothes, helmet over my privates. I laid there with everything exploding around me.”

An amphibious tractor tried to reach him. It hit a mine and blew up, killing the boys inside. Several hours later, four Marines approached him with a poncho. They rolled him onto it, each grabbed a corner, and they set off for the beach. A bullet wounded one of the carriers and Pennel toppled heavily to the ground. The remaining three men dragged him to the beach.

He lay there on a stretcher until darkness. “I felt exposed,” he said, “like I was on a platform for all to see. Those flat-trajectory shells would skim straight in, making a roaring sound in the dark:
Foom! Foom! Foom!
Guys were being killed all around me. It was complete chaos.”

Finally Lieutenant Pennel was loaded with some other wounded boys onto a long pallet. An amtrac rushed them to an offshore hospital ship, where the pallets were hooked with wires and winched up to the main deck. “A wire broke that was pulling the pallet just before mine,” the lieutenant remembered. “Those guys screamed and just sank to the bottom.”

Lieutenant Pennel’s ordeal was not yet over. As a doctor examined him, a Japanese shell crashed onto the deck and skittered into the fuel bunker. The doctor turned and stood with his stethoscope pressed to the bunker, listening to the shell as it rolled around, doubtless wondering whether he and everyone nearby was about to be blown up. But it was a dud.

“It had been a long day,” Ed Pennel told me later.

Soaked with blood, nearly immobilized by pain, Keith Wells continued to direct the 3rd Platoon’s attack through the late morning. But he grew weak. He fell once, dashing to elude gunfire, and reopened his festering wounds. Immediately Doc Bradley was at his side. Doc dosed him up with morphine again, meanwhile screaming, “Enough! Get out of here!”

Wells willed himself to stay in the field another half hour, directing assault groups and rallying his men. Finally, half delirious with pain and confident of victory, he turned his command over to Platoon Sergeant Ernest Boots Thomas and made for an aid station in the rear. He got there by crawling. He was awarded a Navy Cross.

As rainy morning wore into afternoon and the fighting bogged down, the Marines continued to take casualties. Often it was the corpsmen themselves who died as they tried to preserve life. William Hoopes of Chattanooga was crouching beside a medic named Kelly, who put his head above a protective ridge and placed binoculars to his eyes—just for an instant—to spot a sniper who was peppering his area. In that instant the sniper shot him through the Adam’s apple. Hoopes, a pharmacist’s mate himself, struggled frantically to save his friend. “I took my forceps and reached into his neck to grasp the artery and clinch it off,” Hoopes recalled. “His blood was spurting. He had no speech but his eyes were on me. He knew I was trying to save his life. I tried everything in the world. I couldn’t do it. I tried. The blood was so slippery. I couldn’t get the artery. I was trying so hard. And all the while he just looked at me, he looked directly into my face. The last thing he did as the blood spurts became less and less was to pat me on the arm as if to say, ‘That’s all right.’ Then he died.”

The near-misses were nearly as ghastly, especially the ones that resulted in other deaths. Donald Howell’s buddy Walter Gust took a piece of shrapnel in the side of the head. It did not fracture his skull, but for a moment he was incoherent, flailing around. Howell and some buddies tackled him and were taking him to a corpsman when another round exploded, blowing Howell into the air and nearly taking Gust’s arm off. The Marines reloaded Gust onto a stretcher; then a machine-gun burst killed the stretcher-bearers and ripped apart Gust’s other arm. “I was watching this,” recalled Howell, “and there was nothing I could do about it. Walter survived. He lived near me for years. I was the best man at his wedding.”

By late in the bloody afternoon, the conquest of the mountain seemed within the Americans’ grasp. Marine discipline and the sacrificial bonding of ardent young men was prevailing over concrete, steel, and thick volcanic rock. But the Japanese—even as their ingenious fortifications crumbled or were scorched hollow—were not quite done with their own desperate resolve. As the 28th continued to inch forward, Navy observation planes above the battle radioed that a swarm of Japanese had emerged from inside the mountain and was forming up for the dreaded banzai attack.

Within minutes, American planes were swooping in low to strafe the area. Their tremendous roar, and the concussion of exploding rockets, reverberated among the close-by Marines.

Finally the planes banked and vanished, and for a few moments the battlefield was silent, tense with expectation.

It was Sergeant Mike Strank, with the 2nd Platoon now on the left side of the line, who broke the spell. Leaping to his feet, the Czech-born Marine bellowed: “Let’s show these bastards what a real banzai is like! Easy Company, charge!”

With that, the bone-tired, battle-scarred Marines got to their feet and once again slogged forward into the line of fire. To the right of the 2nd Platoon, the 3rd, commanded now by Boots Thomas, joined the footrace to Suribachi.

Boots Thomas was the next hero to shine. With rough terrain stalling the tanks some seventy-five yards to the rear, the twenty-year-old Floridian saw that his riddled unit was grievously exposed once again. In the thick of battle, a daring solution came to him. He sprinted back, through fire, to the nearest tank, and, still out in the open, directed its fire against the stubborn pillboxes. Then he dashed back to the front to exhort his men. A bit later he headed for the tanks again. He repeated this action several times.

His example paid off. The 3rd Platoon virtually annihilated the very enemy that had been massing for devastation of its own. As darkness on this triumphant, bloody day was setting in, Thomas himself identified the weak spot in the defensive line and personally led the breakthrough to Suribachi’s steep flank, waving his knife aloft in victory. Boots was recommended for a Navy Cross, which was awarded.

Suribachi had not fallen, not quite, not yet, but victory now seemed inevitable. The wet day ended with the 28th Regiment poised in a vast semicircle around the battered volcano’s base, gathering its strength for the finishing assault, expected to come the next morning. For Easy Company, it had been a day of grievous loss and historic valor: For its day’s work, the badly decimated unit would receive a Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, two Silver Stars, and a number of Purple Hearts—one of the most decorated engagements in the history of the United States Marine Corps. These honors were paid for in blood: Casualties for the day amounted to thirty percent of Easy’s strength.

Easy Company had actually moved a little too far and too fast for its own nighttime protection. Dave Severance’s boys had penetrated past some active Japanese units, and spent the night isolated from the battalion. They huddled on a strip of jagged, rocky terrain at the southern base of Suribachi, the roaring surf of the Pacific below them on the opposite side. Dave Severance set his command post as close as possible to the mountain, so that he would have a line of sight up its flank. In the late evening, searchlights from the offshore destroyer-escort ships revealed something that looked like Japanese moving into view above Easy. As the ships began tattooing the volcano’s flanks with 40mm shells, Captain Severance moved his command post back thirty yards to the water’s edge, for a better view of the volcano’s slopes. It was a good thing he did: The next morning’s light would reveal that the original CP site lay buried under several tons of rocks from a bombardment-triggered slide.

Low on ammunition and food, Easy’s troops munched what was left of their chocolate bars and waited for yet another dawn on Iwo Jima.

The Marines had paid for their advances across all fronts on the island with heavy losses. Official casualties for the battle now stood at 644 killed, 4,168 wounded, and 560 unaccounted for. Howlin’ Mad Smith himself was sobered by what he had witnessed. “Watching the Marines cross that island,” he later told a newspaper reporter, “reminded me of the charge of Pickett at Gettysburg.”

But the horrors of this day’s fighting did not end with the darkness.

Just as dusk fell, an air raid signal alerted the ships offshore. To Don Mayer of Portland, nineteen then, it made a spectacular show: “Every ship was firing thousands of tracers,” he said. “It was more beautiful than any Fourth of July you’ve ever seen.”

To the boys on board the task force ships, the sight was not quite so beautiful. Cecil Gentry, a radio operator on the USS
Lawrence Taylor,
could not move when the order to “Hit the deck!” came from his captain. “I was transfixed,” he said. “I just stood there. One plane flew right over my head. I could see the face of the Japanese pilot. You could see the fear of death on his face. His lips were pulled back over his teeth.”

This pilot immolated himself against the USS
Bismarck Sea,
adjacent to the
Lawrence Taylor
. Four of the ship’s own torpedoes detonated in the concussion, and the great ship exploded in huge sheets of orange flame and rapidly sank, its bow turning straight down as it slid under the rough waves laced with rain. The men of the
Taylor
managed to rescue about 120 of the 800 crewmen from the water. Other rescuers managed to save hundreds more. Cecil Gentry recalled watching corpsmen amputating sailors’ legs with razor blades, saws, and meat-cutters from the galley. But more than 200 were lost as the Japanese planes strafed the waters.

Back on land, the chilled, hungry, and exhausted Marines faced a different kind of nocturnal menace. Fear of infiltrators—the fear of the dancing shadows—had preoccupied the Americans on each night since D-Day. On this night, the fear took on more justification than ever before. On this night, the madman in the haunted house unleashed all his ghouls.

“Prowling wolves” was the name that General Kuribayashi had given his teams of stalking, crawling night-murderers; now, desperate to save their mountain fortress, they crept out in force.

At around nine
P.M.
, up north with the 26th Marines, Thomas Mayers of the Bronx was surveying the terrain from his foxhole when a flare exploded in the mist. It illuminated a horrible sight, accompanied now by screams: Two Japanese slashing two helpless boys in the next foxhole with bayonets. Their names were Crull and Dortsch. Mayers and his buddy leaped to their feet to take action. One of the “wolves” wheeled and hurled a grenade at them; it was a dud, but it struck the other Marine in the head and knocked him unconscious. Mayers squeezed off one round before his rifle jammed. The predators were now advancing on him. The twenty-year-old private groped for his hand grenades. The Japanese were so close that throwing the explosives was out of the question; Mayers ripped out their firing pins, scattered them at the edge of his foxhole, and ducked.