Last Muster: Edward Curylo (1923 – 2015)

Ed Curylo smokes a cigarette following the Tinian campaign.

Edward Curylo, late of Baker Company and Headquarters Company, 1/24^th Marines, passed away in January. A lifelong resident of Michigan, Mr. Curylo was born in Hamtramck in 1923 and enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of nineteen. He served as a rifleman in the battles of Saipan and Tinian, then re-trained as a scout prior to the landing on Iwo Jima. Prior to that battle, Mr. Curylo recalled being told “We’re sending you into the jaws of death, and we want you to bring back the jawbone.” Last year, Mr. Curylo was interviewed for the Veteran’s Oral History Project. His hour-long recollection is available online, with a brief excerpt below.

I got hit with a big piece of a shell right in the back of my leg. And I laid there while we were changing positions, we were in a single file, and I’m laying there up on the ground hollering for the corpsman. And all of these guys walking by, nobody wants to stop to help me? So I finally got nerve enough to sit up and take a look at it and I says “Goddamn, the leg is still there!” Another time, we were on Saipan maybe a few days, I had the sole of my shoe cut in half. It stung like hell. I’m laying there again calling for the corpsman, none of my buddies are stopping to help me, so I sat up and fortunately the foot was still there. The only thing was the shoe was cut in half. When I got into a rest spot somewhere, I took my poncho off my gun belt, from carrying it in the back, and the poncho was just riddled with shrapnel. Fortunately none of it reached my body—though maybe it should have. Because I come out far worse. I come out paralyzed.

On Iwo Jima—I hate to say this against the military—but I’ve got all kinds of letters from them, and one states “the military does not make errors.” Okay. They show me up on my discharge papers out of Klamath Falls, Oregon, that I hit the beach on Iwo on the 19^th and they carried me off on the 20^th. Well if that’s the case, how the hell did I get called in for a scouting mission on the 22^nd, looking for a six foot mortar that the Japanese had?

I came back from that patrol trying to find the mortar, which we couldn’t find, reported in to my CO, told him what we saw of course. Coming back, we got into it with a few of the Japanese, four or five or six or whatever. I think we shot a few of them, if we killed them I don’t know, we didn’t stop and ask. When I came back, all my buddies were up on top of the rocks, and I said “well I’ll go up and see them guys.” I got up there, we started talking, and everybody hit the deck except me. I got hit by a shell maybe three or four feet away. I went up in the air, I don’t know how far, but when I came back down I was paralyzed. The only thing that moved was my right arm and my head. I could get up my body a little bit, but everything else was dead. That’s how I missed out on the parades they had on Maui and things of that sort.

As they lifted me up to the hospital ship, all of the guys up on the beach were in a joyous mood. Hooraying and all that kind of baloney, you know? “What the hell’s wrong with these guys, they crazy?” I managed to lift up—I was in this sort of wire cage, and I managed to lift my head up and I took a look at ‘em and they’re dancing around and things. And I looked to Mt. Suribachi, and I saw the flag. Nobody believes that I saw it. And yet how could I not see it if I was there?

And from that point on, my life was completely changed.

Mr. Curylo eventually recovered from his wounds—enough to experience “one of my greatest moments as a Marine,” dancing at the Palladium with Yvonne De Carlo—but concluded “war is hell, I would not recommend it to nobody.” He returned to Michigan and settled in Detroit with his wife, Anna, and three daughters. These photographs were submitted to the 4^th Marine Division Association Newsletter by Mr. Curylo, and appeared in the October-November-December 2013 issue.

Semper Fi, Marine.