Flags of Our Fathers (24 page)

The beach rapidly turned into a salvage yard of wrecked trucks and Jeeps stuck in the sand or smashed by artillery. The dead piled up along the shoreline. “Coming in, I could see guys lying on the beach,” Corpsman Roy Steinfort recalled. “I thought, great! They’ll cover our landing. But when we drew closer I saw they were all dead.”

Annihilation seemed possible in the hideous first minutes. Radio transmissions back to command quarters aboard the ships raised that specter: “Catching all hell from the quarry! Heavy mortar and machine-gun fire!” “Taking heavy casualties and can’t move for the moment!” “Mortars killing us!” “All units pinned down by artillery and mortars!” “Casualties heavy! Need tank support fast to move anywhere!” “Taking heavy fire and forward movement stopped! Machine-gun and artillery fire heaviest ever seen!”

But it was even worse than what the transmissions indicated. No one was out of danger. A five-foot-three Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal, landing with the 4th Division, ran for his life through the hail of bullets. Later he would declare that “not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.” Corpsman Greg Emery, crawling on all fours, glanced back at a landing craft coming in; the ramp dropped down; machine-gun fire ripped the interior. Boys fell dead atop each other as they stumbled off the ramp.

The first wave of Easy Company Marines, caught on the terraces in their heavy packs, scrambled for survival. “Like climbing a waterfall,” one remembered. Jerry Smith pressed himself as close to the ground as he could, and felt bullets rip through his backpack. “Even the socks in my pack had bullet holes in them,” he recalls. The volcanic ash slowed progress and kept the Marines exposed to fire; but in another sense the ash saved lives: It absorbed many of the mortar rounds and shrapnel, muffling explosions and sucking in the lethal fragments.

Lieutenant Ed Pennel’s 2nd Platoon nearly lost its way in these early moments of deafening chaos. The unit, with Mike as a squad leader and Harlon, Franklin, and Ira in the ranks, landed far off course, north of Green Beach. Shortly after the bombardment erupted, Harry the Horse summoned Easy Company Captain Dave Severance and ordered him to stand by: “Are you ready to move out?” Liversedge demanded. “All except the Second Platoon that hasn’t arrived yet, sir!” Severance replied. “Well, you’ve got five minutes to find that platoon or you’re up for a general court-martial!” the colonel retorted.

The platoon soon rejoined the company. Its wayward landing down the beach had touched off a comic moment before the carnage. Lieutenant Pennel had thought to reorient his men with a show of John Wayne–like gallantry. As the amtrac’s ramp went down he yelled, “Come on, men!” and then fell flat on his face into the water-saturated volcanic ash. “The guys ran up my back, laughing,” he remembered.

Not everyone was laughing. “I was a very scared son-of-a-gun,” Ira wrote later. “Our boat hit solid ground and the ramp went down. I jumped clear of the ramp. About three yards away lay a dead Marine right on the water’s edge, shot in the head. He hadn’t begun to fight. My stomach turned flip-flops, and I started to get scared all over again.”

A tissue of their former lives connected many of the onrushing warriors: ironies, coincidences of place and memory, overlapping fragments of their boyhoods. Wesley Kuhn of Black Creek, Wisconsin, was nineteen years old when he hit the beach. Wesley did not know Doc Bradley, who could not have been more than a few dozen yards away; but he knew Doc’s future wife, Betty Van Gorp. Wesley and Betty had been in a school play together in the ninth grade. Wesley’s role had been that of the “Kissing Bandit,” who’d snuck up and planted a kiss on Betty, who was playing an innocent housewife.

Bodies, body parts, everywhere he looked, recalled Kuhn. “My worst memory is of the first time I saw a man with his chest blown open and dirt trickling in on his vital organs.”

There were moments of grotesque humor. Monroe Ozment of Virginia and his buddies were struggling up and over the third terrace, getting picked off by machine-gun and mortar fire, when someone yelled: “Turner got hit!” “Turner was a heavyset guy,” Ozment remembered, “and we always kidded him that if he got hit he’d get it in the butt. ‘Where’d he get hit?’ I shouted, and someone yelled back, ‘In the butt!’”

But there were many more moments of unbearable pathos. Nineteen-year-old Corpsman Danny Thomas hit the beach at 10:15
A.M.
, several paces behind his best buddy, Chick Harris. In training camp, Thomas and Harris were called “the Buttermilk Boys” because they were too young to buy drinks on liberty. “I was charging ahead and saw Chick on the beach, facing out to sea, his back to the battle,” Thomas recalled. His buddy was in a strange posture: His head and torso were erect, as though he’d let himself be buried in the sand from the waist down in some bizarre prank. As Thomas rushed past him, he yelled a greeting and saw Chick’s hand and eyes move, acknowledging him.

Then Thomas glimpsed something else that made him fall to his knees in the sand, vomiting. The “something else” was blood and entrails. “I vomited my toenails out,” Thomas remembered. “I realized that Chick had been cut in two. The lower half of his body was gone.” He added, “He was the first person I ever saw dead.”

“Buttermilk Chick” was fifteen. He had lied about his age to get into the Marines.

The big shells had blown a few holes in the ash. Guy Castorini and a few other rookies were in one behind their leader, a veteran named Lundsford. “We had no idea if this was a bad battle or not. One of the guys yelled, ‘Hey, Lundsford, is this a bad battle?’ Lundsford shouted back, ‘It’s a fucking slaughter.’ Maybe two minutes later—
Whoom!
—we got hit with a mortar. I ducked and something dropped on my back and rolled off. It felt like a coconut or something. I looked down and saw that it was Lundsford’s head. Those were his last words: ‘A fucking slaughter.’”

Somehow, the Marines kept advancing. Somehow, discipline held. Somehow, valor overcame terror. Somehow, scared young men under sheets of deadly fire kept on doing the basic, gritty tasks necessary to keep the invasion going.

The calming presence of veterans in their midst was one factor in their resolve. Another was their year of advanced Marine training in the California and Hawaii camps. “Our training taught us how to conquer fear,” was the way Corpsman Langley put it. “We knew there was a good possibility that we would die or get wounded. But we knew we had to keep going to keep from getting killed. You learn there’s an awful lot you can do while having the hell scared out of you.”

Mike Strank, true to form, was one of the steadying veterans. In the opening moments of Japanese mortar fire, when the boys of Easy Company were still groping their way toward Captain Severance’s main unit, Lloyd Thompson looked up to his right and could not believe what he saw. “There was Mike, sitting upright, emptying the sand out of his boots. Just as if nothing was happening.” Bill Ranous remembers the same sight: “I had my face buried in the sand. I looked up and saw Mike sitting straight up emptying his shoes. What a guy.”

Having made his point, Mike was soon shepherding his boys across the sands to their rendezvous with Dave Severance’s unit. Joe Rodriguez remembers him dashing back and forth among his squad members, cautioning them to spread out: “Don’t bunch up! Don’t be like a bunch of bananas!”

It was gestures such as Mike’s—probably hundreds of them, most lost to history—that enabled the Americans to withstand the maelstrom of hidden firepower, and even to begin inflicting damage of their own.

Damage against what? That was the constant question at Iwo Jima. There were no targets. The gunners were invisible, protected, creatures of the underworld. Sergeant Major Lyndolph Ward summed up the frustration: “The thing that bothered me was you couldn’t get your licks in. There was no visible enemy to shoot at.” Even when they claimed a casualty, the Marines could rarely see it: The Japanese quickly pulled their dead and wounded back inside the caves and blockhouses. Thus there was little evidence of the invasion’s impact, a detriment to morale. In the days that followed, observers of the battle in spotter planes high above the action would remark that it looked as though the Marines were fighting the island itself.

And yet the Americans did inflict damage that hellish first morning—by the same excruciating means they would continue to inflict it for thirty-six days, until all the 22,000 defenders were wiped out: by exposing themselves to fire, charging the fortified blockhouses and cave entrances, and shooting or incinerating their tormentors at close range.

One of their strategies was to identify “fire lanes.” By observing where enemy machine-gun bullets were landing and kicking up ash, a Marine could roughly judge the peripheral limits of a shooter’s range: his capacity to swivel the gun left and right from inside his cave or blockhouse. Units of boys, widely spaced, would dash along the outer boundaries of those fire lanes—a great many of them falling dead or wounded under cross fire—until a survivor reached the cave’s mouth or the blockhouse’s unprotected rear. Then a tossed grenade, an orange sheet from a flamethrower, and the nest was silent.

For a while. An early mistake in the invasion was to assume that a source of enemy fire, once extinguished, was permanently dead. It wasn’t. General Kuribayashi’s vast tunneling system assured that many Marines were shot as they moved past a “neutralized” nest that had been quickly repopulated from below the ground.

Throughout the bloody morning, fresh troops landed on the beaches. Tangible progress was achieved in the opening hour and a half of combat. By 10:35
A.M.
, a small group of men from the first assault waves—Company A of the 28th Regiment—had survived a near-suicidal, seven-hundred-yard dash across the island to the western beach. Already Suribachi was cut off from the rest of the island. The reptile’s head was alive and deadly, but it had been severed.

How they got there was a portrait of American victory in microcosm. They got there with courage best exemplified by Tony Stein’s headlong charge.

Stein was a twenty-three-year-old corporal from Dayton who became the first Medal of Honor winner on Iwo. For the risky mission he’d armed himself with a stinger gun, a light machine gun he’d taken from an airplane and adapted into a rapid-fire gun. When his comrades were stalled on their dash by concentrated Japanese fire, Stein stood upright, drawing the enemy’s fire and allowing his buddies to get into position. But Stein was just getting warmed up. His next move was to charge the nearby Japanese pillboxes, alone. He did this several times, killing twenty of the enemy in close-range combat. Out of ammunition, he threw off his helmet and shoes and hurried barefoot to the beach to resupply himself. He did this eight times, carrying a wounded man to safety on each trip. Later in the day he covered the withdrawal of his platoon to the company position, though his weapon was shot from his hands twice.

Meanwhile, other brave boys were doing grunt-work near the shoreline, work that would get the mechanized part of the assault in motion. Oblivious to the storm of lead and steel, some bent down and shoved wire mats under the treads of mired tanks; others calmly climbed into bulldozers to begin roughing out the semblance of a road system.

These were the instincts of training and courage that took hold as the first shock of battle wore off; courage fueled by a fierce kind of love. “There was an incredible bond among guys on that beach,” Danny Thomas remembered. “We knew each other and we could rely upon each other, trust one another. We had trained together and we were bonded.”

Death became demystified, an occupational hazard. The Marines quickly saw that even heroes could die. Sergeant John Basilone, the Medal of Honor winner who had helped change the course of the Guadalcanal battle, was leading a rifle unit along the beach toward a Japanese emplacement. “Come on, you guys, we gotta get these guns off the beach,” he called to his men, and then was obliterated by a mortar shell.

Moments of valor proliferated. Among the heroes were the men sent to give solace. Corpsman Emery yelled “Keep down!” to a fellow medic sitting upright in the sand. Crawling closer, he saw that the man was struggling to tie a tourniquet around the stump of his leg. “Take care of the others, I’ll be OK,” the injured medic called out. When Emery crawled back past the corpsman several minutes later, he was dead.

“Dead men were lying around,” Ira said later, “and the peculiar smell of gunpowder, smoke, and blood was in the air.”

Father Paul Bradley went in on the third wave. “I was young,” he recalled later, “and didn’t think about the danger to me. And I was too busy crawling from dying man to dying man. It was always, ‘Father, over here!’ Once I was kneeling in the sand administering to a guy who had been hit. There was a loud
thud!
His eyes closed. He’d been hit again and was dead. ‘Father, over here!’ someone called. I went on to the next one.”

One combatant met his fate with supreme elegance. The moment occurred in the air, as the first wave of amtracs headed for shore. The Marine fighter planes were finishing up their low strafing runs, and as the last pilot began to pull his Corsair aloft, Japanese sprang to their guns and riddled the plane with flak. The pilot, Major Ray Dollins, tried to gain altitude as he headed out over the ocean so as to avoid a deadly crash into the Marines headed for the beach, but his plane was too badly damaged. Lieutenant Keith Wells watched it from his amtrac, with Doc Bradley standing by his side. “We could see him in the cockpit,” Wells said, “and he was trying everything. He was heading straight down for a group of approaching ’tracs filled with Marines. At the last second he flipped the plane over on its back and aimed it into the water between two waves of tanks. We watched the water exploding into the air.”

Military personnel listening to the flight radio network from the ships could not only see Dollins go down; they could hear his last words into his microphone. They were a defiant parody.

Oh, what a beautiful morning,