Flags of Our Fathers (28 page)

The enemy soldiers howled and collapsed, their legs full of shrapnel. Mayers climbed from his foxhole, and with his knife cut their throats. Then he sprinted to the other foxhole. Crull was dead. Mayers shouted to the lacerated Dortsch: “Do you have any guns?” “Yes,” the boy murmured. “Crull has a .45 in his shirt.” Mayers snatched the weapon. It was slathered with Crull’s blood and would not fire.

Two more Japanese were now upon Mayers. He rolled a few more grenades at them and ducked through the explosions, and then finished them off with his knife.

Thomas Mayers received a Navy Cross for his actions. He has never forgotten the moment-to-moment sequence of that bloody episode. Crull, a freckle-faced Irish boy not more than eighteen years old, was screaming as he died. And his words would forever haunt Mayers:
“Mom! Mom! He’s killing me! Mom, he’s killing me!”

Ten

D-DAY PLUS THREE

It wasn’t a matter of living or dying or fighting. It was a matter of helping your friends.

—CORPSMAN ROBERT DEGEUS

A LULL AFTER THE HELL-STORM of the previous day. And a terrible day for capturing a mountain. The heaviest and coldest rains since D-Day lashed at the surviving Marines. The surf, whipped by twenty-knot winds, rolled in on nine-foot crests. The rain made a black stew of the volcanic ash underfoot and waterlogged many of the Americans’ weapons.

Easy Company, clinging wetly to its isolated post, began D

3 by nearly getting wiped out by friendly fire.

“The Navy sent their carrier bombers in to bomb the volcano,” as Captain Severance recalled it. “The pilots must have seen us as ‘live Japanese targets,’ and started dropping hundred-pound bombs on our positions.”

Severance ordered red flares fired to warn the bombers off. No one could find cartridges for the rifle grenade flares. The bombs fell nearer. Radio connections to battalion headquarters had gone dead. More explosions. Desperate for relief, Severance put in a call to Harry the Horse himself, on the colonel’s private radio frequency.

“Redwing Six!” the captain shouted. “This is Bayonet Easy Six! Friendly planes are bombing the hell out of us! Over!”

Back came the courteous reply from one of the colonel’s radiomen: “Bayonet Easy Six, this is Redwing Six. You are not authorized to come up on this frequency. Out!”

Luckily for Easy Company, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson happened to be standing near the radio operator. He personally saw to it that the Navy planes were diverted before they caused any casualties.

Now that it was wide-awake, Easy Company prepared for a day of consolidation as the American ground troops waited out the weather. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson ordered Severance to reorganize and resupply his unit. The captain sent a patrol around the southern base of Suribachi to seek a linkup with the 3rd Battalion and to probe for enemy soldiers in the caves along the base of the volcano.

As the day progressed, sporadic firefights broke out around the volcano’s base on the west side. Easy’s peerless flamethrowers, clicking death in six-second bursts, scorched out some caves on the south and east sides.

Suribachi was surrounded now by American troops, and the invaders’ heavy equipment operated almost without resistance. Tanks, howitzers, and other big-bore weapons slammed “Hot Rocks” as though it were a target on a firing range. Battalion officers moved their command posts up to the brush-line at the base of the slopes. Amphibious vehicles churned back and forth between the beaches and the front, bringing food and ammunition at will. Demolitions specialists converged on pillboxes and bunkers with a vengeance, relishing their payback for the volume of slaughter those emplacements had dealt out.

Sometimes a concealed Japanese soldier, seeing that his position was overrun, would make a sudden desperate break through the Marines for safety. His fate would usually be an M1 rifle bullet. One Japanese officer brandished his samurai sword as he made his break for it: a bad mistake. A Marine, seething with four days’ worth of grief and terror, grabbed the blade out of the samurai’s hands and sliced its owner to death with it. The Marine’s hands were badly lacerated but he held on to the sword as a souvenir.

Many of the enemy simply remained in the ground. Their muffled voices, and the sounds of their movement, added an eerie note to the mopping-up exercises. “We could hear them talking and moving right under our feet,” one Marine recalled. “Right under what we’d thought was solid rock. We’d dig down and find a rafter. Then we’d lower explosives or pour in gasoline. Then they made a lot more noise.”

The combat-weary boys dealt in various ways with the memories of what they’d seen and done. Some talked to chaplains. Some lost themselves in their duties. For Ira Hayes, it was his edgy gallows humor that provided the shield against utter darkness. As Easy Company regathered itself at the base of Suribachi, Ira grew absorbed in shaping little mounds of earth with his hands. To Joe Rodriguez, they looked like fresh-dug graves, and in fact that seemed to be what Ira intended. When Franklin Sousley wandered past, Ira made a show of playing “Taps.” Then he said to the Kentuckian: “This is just in case I’m not around when you get it.”

“Franklin just kicked the mounds over,” Rodriguez recalls.

The impending conquest of Suribachi was far from the only action on Iwo Jima. To the north, the main force of Marines had been battling with equal valor and sustaining equally severe casualties.

By the end of D3, the volcano known as Hot Rocks was surrounded, except for a four-hundred-yard gap on the western coast. Surrounded, but still dangerous: Some of the defenders who remained were still determined killers, and no one knew when or where one might emerge with a grenade or a machine gun. As night fell, however, the Japanese themselves greatly reduced that danger via a highly uncharacteristic action: voluntary abandonment.

It involved only half the remaining force, but it amounted to an acknowledgment that the mountain fortress was finished. The order was given by Suribachi’s commanding officer, Colonel Kanehiko Atsuchi. As one hundred fifty soldiers burst from the mountain in a desperate race to join up with the forces to the north, they were cut to pieces by Marines only too happy to deal at last with a visible enemy. Only about twenty-five made it through the gauntlet. When they arrived at the headquarters of the Japanese navy guard, their reception was not much better. The captain in charge, Samaji Inouye, accused their lieutenant of being a traitor and unsheathed his sword to behead the man. The lieutenant meekly bowed his neck, but a junior officer stopped him before he could swing his blade. Captain Inouye then collapsed in uncontrollable sobs. “Suribachi’s fallen,” he moaned. “Suribachi’s fallen.”

Earlier that afternoon, the American command had reached the same opinion, in a different frame of mind. Harry the Horse Liversedge received orders that the mountain be seized. Harry paid a visit to Colonel Johnson at his 2nd Battalion headquarters and issued a terse command: “Tomorrow we climb.”

Eleven

“SO EVERY SON OF A BITCH
ON THIS WHOLE CRUDDY
ISLAND CAN SEE IT!”

I saw some guys struggling with a pole and I just jumped in to lend them a hand. It’s as simple as that.

—DOC BRADLEY

IT HULKED ABOVE THEM STILL, before daybreak on the fifth morning, this primitive serpent’s head that had struck them down in swaths. Amputated from the body, bombed, blasted, bayoneted, burnt, Suribachi at last lay silent after four days of being killed. But was it dead? Was the grotesque head finally a carcass, or was there venom still inside, and strength to lash yet again? There was only one way for the Marines to find out. They would tread on the head, and see whether it writhed.

February 23, 1945, dawned cold and stormy like the other days on Iwo Jima; but by midmorning the rain had stopped and the skies were clearing.

Hot Rocks glowed early. Navy planes lit it up with napalm at dawn. “It was a sheet of flames,” remembered Donald Howell, who had relaxed with
House Madam
before the invasion. “An amazing pounding,” agreed Max Haefele. But around nine
A.M.
the pounding stopped. The serpent’s head lay mute and enigmatic. And the dangerous probing by foot began.

The pugnacious Colonel Johnson, wearing his trademark soft cap with the visor flipped up, called for two four-man patrols to reconnoiter routes up the northern face of Suribachi. Only Fox Company’s patrol made it to the top. The leader was Sergeant Sherman B. Watson; the others were George Mercer from Iowa, Ted White from Kansas City, and Louis Charlo from Montana.

Tensely, grabbing at roots and rocks for balance, braced for ambush at every step, Watson’s patrol felt its way upward amid the smoking rubble. The serpent lay dormant; the hostile fire never materialized. With the courage and discipline born of combat, Sergeant Watson and his boys ventured all the way to the volcano’s lip and even risked a look into the crater—a satisfying mass of wreckage—before scrabbling back down to the base and reporting to Chandler Johnson.

As he observed Sergeant Watson descending, Colonel Johnson calculated he could risk a larger force and grabbed a field telephone. He cranked it to full battery power and yelled an order through the fuzzy wires to Dave Severance, who was bivouacked with Easy Company, still hugging the rocks on the southeastern point: “Send me a platoon!”

Severance surveyed his troops. The 2nd Platoon—Mike with Harlon, Franklin, and Ira—was off on a probe around Suribachi’s base. The 1st was encamped several dozen yards away. So Severance chose the survivors of the 3rd (Doc’s platoon), the closest to Colonel Johnson’s command post, to become the first American platoon to climb the mountain. The ranks of the 3rd had been shredded by combat, so Severance augmented the platoon with twelve men from his Machine Gun Platoon, and several 60mm-mortar section men. This increased the platoon strength to forty men.

Harry the Horse Liversedge himself picked the leader: First Lieutenant H. “George” Schrier, Severance’s executive officer. Liversedge had known Schrier when they served in the Marine Raiders together, admired his combat experience, and valued the lieutenant’s knowledge of how to direct air, artillery, and naval fire by radio. No one was ready to believe that the serpent had finished striking.

Just before the forty-man patrol began its climb, Chandler Johnson turned to his adjutant, Lieutenant Greeley Wells, and asked Wells to hand him something from his map case. Then Johnson called Lieutenant Schrier aside and gave him the object.

“If you get to the top,” the colonel told Schrier, “put it up.”

What Johnson handed the lieutenant was an American flag, one that Greeley Wells had brought ashore from the USS
Missoula
. The flag was a relatively small one, measuring fifty-four by twenty-eight inches.

Dave Severance never forgot the wording of that command. “He didn’t say ‘when you get to the top,’” the captain pointed out. “He said ‘if.’”

The platoon made ready to start its trek. I imagine my father looking around for his buddy, Ralph Ignatowski. Iggy. A Marine staff sergeant named Louis Lowery, a photographer for
Leatherneck Magazine,
asked permission to come along and record the ascent. The boys in the unit glanced upward, measuring what lay ahead.

It was Boots Thomas—appropriately—who got the unit moving: “Patrol, up the hill! Come on, let’s move out!”

“I thought I was sending them to their deaths,” Dave Severance would later admit to me. “I thought the Japanese were waiting for a larger force.”

As the forty-man line snaked upward, gained altitude, and grew visible against the near-vertical face of the mountain, it attracted attention. Marines on the beaches and on the flat terrain to the north turned to watch. Even men aboard the offshore ships put binoculars to their eyes to follow the thin line’s winding trek. Nearly everyone had the same thought:
They’re going to get it.

The men on the march shared this sense of dread. Harold Keller happened to glance at the two stretchers being sent along as the platoon fell into line. “I thought to myself,
We’ll probably need a hell of a lot more than that,
he recalled.

Doc Bradley, shouldering his Unit 3 bag, was another who wondered how many would return alive. “Down at the base, there wasn’t one out of forty of us who expected to make it,” he told an interviewer not long after the battle. “We all figured the Japanese would open up from caves all the way up to the crater.”

And my father had an additional concern: “All the way up, I kept wondering, how the devil was I going to get the casualties down?”

Don Howell marked the slow, wary progress. “We inched our way up,” he recalled, “blowing caves as we went. We’d see a cave ahead of us, pull the pin on a grenade, and throw it inside.” As he passed the cave entrances, Howell could see that they were strewn with empty sake bottles—the Japanese liquor of choice—and bags of plain rice.

Phil Ward never forgot how the platoon wound its way cautiously, single file. “There was no trail, and there was a lot of blasted rock. We zigzagged our way up. We had to get on our hands and knees and crawl a couple of times. We had heavy weapons and two men had heavy flamethrowers on their backs. We were all scared.”

One of the flamethrowing Marines was Chuck Lindberg. Even he was braced for instant bloodshed. “We thought it would be a slaughter-house up on Suribachi,” he later said. “I still don’t understand why we were not attacked.”

As the Marines climbed, they beheld Iwo Jima for the first time from the perspective of the Japanese. Spreading below them in panorama were the landing beaches and the armada at anchor in the ocean; the narrow neck they had secured at such cost; the enemy airstrip; and the rising terrain of the main bulk to the north. And the small figures that were their comrades, gazing back up at them. How close, how intimate, how eerily serene it all must have looked to them.

About two thirds of the way up, Lieutenant Schrier sent out flankers on either side of the main unit for cover. “We were tense,” said Robert Leader, “thinking the enemy would suddenly jump out, or one of us would step on a mine. But it was completely quiet. Not a shot was fired. It took us about forty minutes to get to the top.”

Sergeant Lowery documented the ascent with his cumbersome camera. At one point he asked a Marine to unfold the flag, so he could get a photo of it being carried up.

The patrol clawed its way to the rim of the crater at about ten
A.M.
Looking down into the bowl, the boys of the patrol saw devastation: Japanese antiaircraft guns fused together by the heat of American bombing; twisted metal; pulverized rock. Robert Leader could not suppress a smile of glee as he spotted two large drop-tanks—jettisoned fuel tanks from Navy planes. “I got a chuckle thinking of the Japanese watching those tanks come down,” he said.

Leader’s next impulse probably expressed the attitude of every young Marine who had faced the mountain: “I said to Leo Rozek, ‘Gee, I have to pee.’ Rozek said, ‘Great idea.’ So we both peed down the hill. I said, ‘I proclaim this volcano property of the United States of America.’”

The spit-and-polish Hank Hansen took this in, and was indignant: “Knock that off! Who do you think you are?” Leader had a ready answer: “I’m an American citizen!” Hansen changed the subject: He relayed a request by Colonel Liversedge that Leader, as the platoon’s unofficial artist, make sketches of everything around him. Leader set to work.

Then Boots Thomas came up with an order of his own: “See if you can find a pole to put the flag on.”

Leader set aside his sketchpad—he’d bound his drawings together with surgical tape supplied by Doc—and he and Rozek scoured the rubble at their feet. The Japanese had constructed a catch-system for rainwater on the crater’s surface, and fragments of pipe lay scattered about. Rozek, rummaging in the mud, found a fragment of usable length. He and Leader lugged it upright. The two discovered a bullet hole in the pipe. The rope could be threaded through that. They “manhandled” the pole, as Leader put it, up to where Thomas was waiting.

Then, knowing that this was an important moment that would be photographed, the patrol’s brass took over.

Lieutenant Schrier, Platoon Sergeant Thomas, Sergeant Hansen, and Corporal Lindberg converged on the pole. They shook the folded flag out and tied it in place. Lou Lowery documented the proceedings with a steady succession of camera shots. He moved in close, suggested poses, cajoled the boys into self-conscious grins with his patter.

Louis Charlo joined the four. At ten-twenty
A.M.
they thrust the pole upright in the gusty wind, the first foreign flag ever to fly over Japanese soil. Lowery, wanting added drama for his shot, motioned to Jim Michels, who crouched dramatically in the foreground with his carbine.

Then, a glitch: Lowery shouted, “Wait a minute!” to the posing Marines. He’d run out of film and needed a second to reload. Lindberg scowled and grunted at him to hurry it up: Men holding flags were easy targets.

With a fresh roll of film in his camera, Lowery called for a final, posed shot: Hansen, Thomas, and Schrier gripping the flagpole as they stiffly circled it; Lindberg and Charlo watching them from a couple of paces off; Michels adding drama in the foreground with the gun.

As Lowery clicked this exposure, an amazing cacophony arose from the island below and from the ships offshore. Thousands of Marine and Navy personnel had been watching the patrol as they climbed to the volcano’s rim. When the small swatch of color fluttered, Iwo Jima was transformed, for a few moments, into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Infantrymen cheered, whistled, and waved their helmets. Ships offshore opened up their deep, honking whistles. Here was the symbol of an impossible dream fulfilled. Here was the manifestation of Suribachi’s conquest. Here was the first invader’s flag ever planted in four millennia on the territorial soil of Japan.

Chuck Lindberg, a man not much given to sentiment, would remember it as a big wave of noise washing over them; it gave him a happy chill, the likes of which he’d never experienced before or since.

Robert McEldowney of Roanoke, Illinois, had watched the patrol’s ascent from the landing beach; now he joined the wild hooting and yelling as he savored the crowning moment. “It was a thrill,” he said. “When they put that flag up, I’ll never forget—the entire island erupted with cheers. It sent a chill up and down my spine.”

Max Haefele watched too, through his binoculars. “It felt great,” he said. “When the flag went up, there was a lot of noise all over the island.”

Many of the young Marines, in their giddiness, assumed that the battle of Iwo Jima was over. In this they were drastically mistaken. Robert Leader was one combatant who did not make this assumption. Amid the jubilation, he experienced a chill of a darker sort than Lindberg’s or McEldowney’s. “When I saw the flag I thought it was a bad idea for us up there,” he remembered. “It was like sitting in the middle of a bull’s-eye.”

Leader’s misgivings quickly proved prophetic. Just moments after the Stars and Stripes went up, Hot Rock’s summit got hot again.

The first Japanese emerged from his tunnel with his back to the Marines. Harold Keller spotted him at once and fired his rifle three times from the hip. The fallen figure was yanked back into the hole from where he’d come. Another sniper immediately popped up and aimed his rifle at the Marines; Chick Robeson gunned him down. Next was a maddened Japanese officer, who leaped into view with a broken sword; an alert Marine dropped him.

Now the crater briefly came alive with ordnance. The serpent was not completely dead after all. Hand grenades started to arc out of several enemy caves. The Marines took cover and began hurling grenades of their own.

Photographer Lou Lowery was standing near the flag when a Japanese soldier stuck his head out of a cave and lobbed a grenade. Lowery dove over the volcano’s rim and rolled and slid about forty feet down the steep, jagged side before he could break his fall. He suffered several cuts to his flesh, but was not seriously injured. His camera was broken, but his film was safe. Lowery decided it was time to head back down to find another camera.