Flags of Our Fathers (33 page)

The mission of Easy Company on March 2 and 3 was to advance. Their objectives were a series of low, stony ridges cut through with shallow ravines, filled with piles of rubble. Japanese shooters populated these ridges, using natural cover as well as their maze of caves and tunnels.

The weather turned raw and stayed that way: rain, gusts of chilling wind. The boys clutched their ponchos and shivered. At night the island was bathed in the lurid light of flares. “Things were going off all the time,” Glen Cleckler remembered. “You’d always wonder if the next one was going to fall on you.”

By March 3, some 16,000 of the original 22,000 Japanese defenders were still alive. The Americans had taken 16,000 casualties, with 3,000 dead. On this day, the 2nd Battalion’s feisty colonel, Chandler Johnson—who had saved the original flag on Suribachi for his men—was blown to bits, a collarbone here, another fragment there. He was one of four of the 28th’s seven officers who were killed that day.

Other heroes continued to die. Sergeant Boots Thomas, who had led the thrust to the mountain’s base and was interviewed on CBS radio, took a field telephone handed to him by Phil Ward. As he answered the call, a sniper shot his rifle out of his right hand. Thomas did not flinch. The next shot ripped through his mouth, killing him instantly.

The fighting was cramped and vicious. Five men of the 5th Division were awarded the Medal of Honor on this day, a record unmatched in modern warfare.

Corpsman George Wahlen, twenty, of Ogden, Utah, was one of those. He was finally pulled off the field after refusing to leave his comrades even though he had suffered the third of three serious wounds. The first, a grenade blast on February 26, had temporarily blinded him in one eye; he ignored it, as well as the other grenades that sent fragments through his butt and legs. On March 2 a mortar shell tore a hunk of flesh from his right shoulder; he kept on ministering to wounded men around him. Finally, on March 3, a mortar splintered his right leg. “I heard other guys crying for help,” Wahlen told me years later. “I tried to walk over to them but couldn’t. I bandaged myself up and gave myself a shot of morphine.” With his foot barely attached to his leg, he crawled fifty yards to give first aid to another fallen boy before he was pulled from the battle.

“Why?” I asked Medal of Honor recipient George Wahlen. “Because I cared for my buddies,” he answered.

It was on March 4 that the lacerated, exhausted Marines saw the first demonstration of why they were fighting and dying on the ugly little island. A crippled B-29 returning from an attack on Tokyo, the
Dinah Might,
became the first American plane to make an emergency landing on Iwo Jima. Nearby Marines watched with astonishment as the crew leaped from the aircraft and kissed the ground. The ground was shaking with artillery fire. As far as the leathernecks were concerned, the crew had just landed in hell. They got a different perspective when one of the crewmen, thankful he had been spared a crashlanding in the Pacific, shouted: “Thank God for you Marines!”

Rain and chilly winds buffeted the troops that day. Bill Genaust, who had recorded the replacement flagraising with color film and who had asked Rosenthal, “I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?” walked into a “secured” cave to dry off. The last thing he did was turn on his flashlight. He was thirty-eight and left behind a wife of seventeen years. His body was never recovered.

Joe Rosenthal landed on Guam on that day, and inadvertently created the myth that his now-famous photograph was “staged.”

As he later recounted:

“When I walked into press headquarters, a correspondent walked up to me. ‘Congratulations, Joe,’ he said, ‘on that flagraising shot on Iwo.’

“‘Thanks,’ I said.

“‘It’s a great picture,’ he said. ‘Did you pose it?’

“‘Sure,’ I said.

“I thought he meant the group shot I had arranged with the Marines waving and cheering, but then someone else came up with the flagraising picture and I saw it for the first time.

“‘Gee,’ I said. ‘That’s good, all right, but I didn’t pose it. I wish I could take credit for posing it, but I can’t.’

“Had I posed the shot, I would, of course, have ruined it. I would have picked fewer men, for the six are so crowded in the picture that one of them—Sergeant Michael Strank—only the hands are visible.”

This conversation would haunt Rosenthal for the rest of his life. Some of the correspondents listening to him assumed that he was talking not about the “gung-ho” photograph, but about the previous frame, the one that was now famous. Soon a false and damaging slur was making the rounds: that the replacement-flag photograph, now universally understood as the
only
flagraising photograph, was bogus, staged. (Lou Lowery’s shot of the original raising, delayed in its transmission to the United States, never made an impact on the public consciousness.)

The slur accelerated on the jealousy of some rival photographers, who were only too happy to see questions raised about the photo that had eclipsed all their work, and on the indifference of the news media about checking its facts.
Time
magazine, on its radio program,
Time Views the News,
broadcast the “staged” interpretation of the photograph without bothering to verify the rumor. As soon as he arrived back in the States, Joe Rosenthal did his best to set the record straight, and his wire service, the Associated Press, demanded and received a public apology from
Time
about the error. It would be the first of many false claims, followed by press apologies. Joe Rosenthal’s 1/400th-second exposure would bring him nearly as much frustration in life as it brought satisfaction.

Back on the island, Don Howell had his moment of crisis and valor. Finding himself and some comrades surrounded by Japanese in an enclosed area, Howell turned himself into an acrobatic killing machine. As he ran backward over the treacherous ground, dodging bullets, he coolly slipped a belt of ammunition from his shoulder and delicately fed it into his machine gun, sprayed withering fire into the attackers as his buddies dashed to safety. This action earned Howell a Navy Cross.

The Marines were taking terrible casualties, but at least one Japanese saw clearly how it would all end. General Kuribayashi sent a radio message to Tokyo: Iwo Jima would soon fall, the steely martinet reported, resulting in “scenes of disaster in our empire. However, I comfort myself in seeing my officers and men die without regret after struggling in this inch-by-inch battle…”

My father’s luck continued to hold. Sometime on March 4 he narrowly escaped death once again.

He was treating a wounded Marine in a shell hole, my father told my brother Tom, when he glanced up to see a Japanese soldier charging him with a bayonet.

“I shot him with my pistol,” John Bradley recalled later.

“What did you do then?” Tom asked him.

“I finished my job and ran to the next one.”

“You didn’t check to see if he was dead?”

“That wasn’t my job.”

But some of those closest to Doc were not so lucky. After this incident Doc returned to his platoon, but he could not find his special pal Iggy.

Ralph Ignatowski had been walking with Doc just before he went to help the Marine in the shell hole. Now he was gone. Doc asked a few Marines in the area about Iggy’s whereabouts. No one knew.

The next day, the 2nd Battalion was relieved. Captain Severance took Easy Company back south, toward Suribachi. He was taking them swimming. The gesture was pure Severance: one minute the stern, unflappable field leader, dispensing intelligent, low-key orders under heavy fire; the next, a sensitive and thoughtful shepherd of his boys, in the same mold as Mike Strank. Dave Severance would be awarded a Silver Star for his masterful guidance of Easy Company throughout the Iwo Jima invasion.

Now, on the western beaches, across the island from the landing side, Dave’s battle-scarred kids stacked their rifles and plunged in. It must have seemed surreal to them; it does to me, as I try to imagine it: a cadre of grimy, battle-hardened Marines facing mutilation and death in their dirty fox-holes transformed in a moment to a gaggle of naked boys swimming and splashing in the ocean. While they frolicked, the March 5 edition of
Time
magazine headed for the newsstands. It carried The Photograph, with the caption:

OLD GLORY ON MT. SURIBACHI

TO RANK WITH VALLEY FORGE, GETTYSBURG AND
TARAWA

The boys in the ocean might have felt that they had somehow slipped off the edge of the earth, into a realm far beyond the reach or knowledge of their loved ones. They would have been amazed to know the true story: that the eyes of America were upon them as they struggled. The accompanying article in
Time
made this clear: “No battle of World War II,” it declared, “not even Normandy, was watched with more intensity by the U.S. people.”

During Easy’s interlude in the Pacific surf, my father continued to wonder about Iggy. He asked around; none of the other boys had seen him lately. The mystery gnawed at him. Teamwork was encoded into the Marines’ behavior. Iggy would not have simply left the company without saying something to someone, without having a reason.

A less mysterious departure was that of Admiral Spruance. The naval chieftain sailed from the island on March 5. Twenty-one days of battle remained.

The following day, Easy Company remained near the western beach.

On March 7, Easy moved out again, headed for the northern killing fields.

Representative Mike Mansfield of Montana, a future Ambassador to Japan, took the House floor on that day with a proposal that fired the imagination of his colleagues. A national Bond Tour—the seventh since the war began—was being organized to raise money for the war effort. The governmental sale of war bonds to the public had financed America’s involvement in both world wars. Bond Tours were elaborate coast-to-coast touring shows, organized by the Treasury Department. Crowds gathered in stadiums and in roped-off city centers to hear bands play and to watch Hollywood movie stars and war heroes make pitches for the purchase of bonds.

Mansfield called for the flagraising image to be adopted as a symbol of this tour, so that “we as a people would do our part in keeping the flag flying at home as they have done in keeping it flying on foreign battlefields.” His motion carried with great enthusiasm.

On the same day, a twenty-four-year-old Navy nurse named Norma Harrison, from Mansfield, Ohio, landed on Iwo Jima—the first of seven landings she would make there. She was a specialist in treating combat wounds in an airplane. She remembered the view as her plane circled, waiting to land: “I could see the island surrounded by ships as far as the eye could see. When a battleship fired, I could feel the concussion five thousand feet up. It was like living in a newsreel.”

Once she was on the ground, Norma’s newsreel turned gritty. “There was no time to be afraid. The wounded were in a large tent, on stretchers. I had never seen such injuries.”

Norma and the other nurses (there were no doctors aboard) helped load the torn and broken boys onto the plane. “It was noisy from the shelling,” she recalled to me, “but the patients were quiet. Death was quiet on those airplanes. A corpsman and I saw a guy die, and we decided not to cover him because the other guys hadn’t noticed it. Those were quiet trips.”

Norma Harrison remembered how stunned and grateful—“tickled to death”—the wounded boys were to see a woman. One boy asked her if she had any lipstick. “Yes,” she answered, wondering why the kid would want to know.

“Would you please put some on?” the boy asked her. “I’d like to see a woman put lipstick on.”

Ensign Harrison would continue as a nurse for many years, in war and in civilian life. She saw many varieties of wounded and injured men. She administered to men of the Navy and the Army. But these Iwo Jima Marines would always be distinct in her memory.

“The difference was their spirit,” she said. “Not one of them was ever beaten. The Marines had esprit de corps. They were burned and injured and full of shrapnel. They were hurting. But they were never beaten.”

On March 8, the Marines of Easy Company found Iggy. He had been grabbed, probably from behind, and pulled into a cave full of Japanese soldiers. As the company medic, it was my father’s job to deal with what remained of Iggy’s body after three days of brutal torture. I feel certain that the shock my young father must have experienced added greatly to his near-total silence, for the rest of his life, regarding his memories of the war.