WAR STORIES: The Battle of Iwo Jima
PFC Arthur Thomas LaPorte was eager to be tested in combat against an enemy who, he was assured, “couldn’t see the broad side of a barn.” The eighteen-year-old Marine from Whitehall, New York, served as an ammunition carrier in C/1/24th Marines on Iwo Jima – where a Japanese bullet almost cost him his left leg.
Although he later served in Korea (where he was again badly wounded), LaPorte’s memories of Iwo stayed with him for the rest of his long life. In this undated manuscript, he relates the horrors of battle in grim detail.
Editor’s Note:
The original typewritten manuscript, a copy of which is in the collection of Crandall Public Library, is fifty pages long and minimally formatted. This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity. The narrative has also been separated into sections based on when Mr. LaPorte recalls transitions between day and night, although he does not mention specific dates in his writing. Where possible, the author has attempted to add dates and names that can be confirmed by other primary sources.
Mr. LaPorte was interviewed by Matthew Rozell in 1998, and by the New York State Military Museum in 2005. An account of his time on Iwo appears in Mr. Rozell’s book The Things Our Fathers Saw, Volume I: Voices from the Pacific Theater.
To read the full battalion’s story of the Iwo Jima operation, start here.
The Prelude To The Landing
It was February 18, here on the boat, and it was just getting dark.[1]
Some of the boys and myself played Monopoly until about twelve o’clock. Then another buddy and I went topside to the main deck to see what was going on around us. Almost directly ahead of our ship and a great distance ahead we could see ships firing salvos, apparently at some solid ground. We knew then that we had come within sight of Iwo Jima, and what we were witnessing was the preliminaries of the main bout that was to be staged the next day.
We watched for some time and then we went back down below decks. Some of the boys suggested playing poker as they were like me – tomorrow was their first landing, and they couldn’t sleep if they wanted to. (I should say today, for this was the day we were to hit the fatal beach.) We were lucky in one way: we didn’t have to hit the beach with the first waves, and it was the first waves that usually got the hell pounded out of them. This was not supposed to be a large deal, though. It was classed as a very small job that was to take us only four days. The island was only about eight square miles, and we were supposed to attack it (so the word came around to us) to get the men who had never seen battle a little taste of it. Then, immediately after the island was secured (in four days) we were to embark on a large-scale attack on some larger island – probably Okinawa.
The boys and I played poker until about three or four o’clock in the morning, when we had a steak breakfast. We then returned to our own quarters to await developments. The day dawned clear, and we managed to go topside and watch the Navy pound the devil out of the beachhead with everything they had, softening it up for the men who were to land at 0700. We could see airplanes wheeling all over the sky and watched them go into dives on some target that they had seen, loosing their screaming bullets, rockets, and bombs. Perhaps you wonder what Iwo looked like early in the morning. To us it appeared as a low, flat stretch of sand immediately in our line of vision. To the left: the lofty summit of Mount Suribachi. To the right: some slight cliffs. The island was shrouded in smoke and flying dirt, so we couldn’t make out too much.
We went down to the mess hall where they had a powerful radio set and listened to the flyers talking to each other. Nine o’clock rolled around; we went topside and watched the landing boats of the assault waves going into their preliminary circles before the signal that sent them in an assault line toward the beach. As they approached the beach, hell met them in full force in the form of bullets and shells fired by the enemy. They went through this kind of hell until they were well on the beach and less like ducks in a shooting gallery. Once they had landed, they moved out fast to accomplish their mission – to take the huge beachhead and, I believe, the first airfield. Despite heavy opposition they won the ground to the first airfield quickly… and then they started to get stopped up.
It was between ten and eleven hundred, and we were ordered to get our gear and stand by. Before we went below, we saw some of the first casualties from the island. They were brought to the side of the ship in a landing craft and lines were passed and bound to the stretcher which were slowly hoisted to the top deck. We stood there silent and grave as we watched the first victims of this bloody campaign, and I’m afraid we were not so cheered up by the sight. One of the Marines had a Jap flag clutched in his hands, and it was probably the first souvenir taken on Iwo.[2]
We filed down below decks and put our gear on. We got the order to go to our stations and there we climbed down the rope ladder to the landing craft below.[3] We shoved clear of the ship and waved so long to the sailors we had known so short a time – and yet so long in this hemisphere of seconds and minutes of hell. We started into the circles and awaited the order to move in a line that made up the wave. I could see them on both sides cutting a white wake in the beautiful blue ocean. We went past all kinds of ships from transports like our own USS Hendry to huge battlewagons.
“I was learning things awful fast here."
We approached the beach. A few shells were flying around, but otherwise there was not much to speak of. I had that butterfly feeling in my stomach but felt pretty good considering this was my first landing. Our helmsman was kind of jittery, though, and the rest of his buddies were talking to him, trying their best to calm him down a bit. Our Corporal told Zebley (another man in my squad) to take charge of the machine gun nests behind the helmsman.[4] We went back and crawled in the cockpit-like places and got the guns ready for trouble. There was a crate of apples in the bottom of my cockpit and the boys told me to take all I wanted. They were the boys on the ship I had spent much time with (and were the only sailors I as a Marine had a good chance to mix with) – I can say here they were a good bunch of guys. I filled up my pockets with the apples.
Standing: Frank Zebley, Harold Bowman, Sandy Ball (squad leader)
Kneeling: LaPorte, Harvey Williams
The corporal [Sandy B. Ball] yelled for me and Zebley to come out of the machine gun nests and prepare to land.[5] We jumped down into the bottom of the boat and stood ready to land. The boat grated on the beach, and the next minute we were running like mad over a slight ridge and hit the deck. The boats pulled off and headed for the ships. We then made another charge that took us nearly to the first airfield and hit the deck. About that time, I heard bullets flying all around and making the remark to one of the boys that “there was a flock of bees around.” I started my right foot working and soon had a foxhole dug and crawled back into it. I had never had any instructions in digging a foxhole with my feet, but I was learning things awful fast here. I began to look around and observed that we were on a sloping beach about five hundred yards wide and close to a mile long. Sand pocked with shell holes – nothing much to protect the men laying there from the shells and bullets flying all around.
On the left of this beach was Mt. Suribachi, where the courageous boys of the Fifth Division were to make one of the outstanding pictures of the war within a few days: raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi. In front of us lay the first airfield with its sloping sides. To our right lay high cliffs containing gun emplacements.[6] The enemy had the advantage of altitude all around us, and were using it to the best advantage. Even then, we were doing better than was expected of us. It was about 1115 in the morning and our boys had the beach up to the airfield directly ahead and the Fifth Division was getting well started on Mt. Suribachi, while our A and B Companies had moved to the base of the cliffs with their gun emplacements.[7] This was to be a four-day affair: judging from the fact we had already gone further than had been expected for the time, it looked like it would be lucky to last four days.
While I was looking around, I saw a shell burst on our left where a Marine had been standing. After the smoke and sand cleared away, there was not a trace of him or his equipment. At about the same time, I noticed a Marine running off the airfield toward its slope. Suddenly a machine gun chattered (much like the noise of a fast-moving typewriter) and the Marine fell rolling down the slope. Marines were running from the airfield and diving down its slope, so I guess things were getting kind of hot up there. I looked back toward the water, and the beach which had been clear of everything except dead Japs and Americans was now littered with halftracks and Amphibs. Two caught my attention: they were both on their sides and within five feet of each other.
The sky was filled with our planes, and every now and then one of them would go into a dive and let loose with everything he had: rockets, bombs, lots of machine gun bullets. I used to enjoy watching them throw in the rockets. The plane usually carried six, and the pilot would go into a dive letting off the first two (the outside ones) followed by the middle ones and then the inside ones. The rockets would make a sort of screeching sound and then explode with a large roar. The Navy was pounding the island with everything they had. In all, it was a bloody and noisy mess.
We remained in our present position for quite a while and, feeling hungry, I decided to try out one of the apples I had brought with me. I reached into my back pocket only to find a mushy mess of what had been several apples. I guess they were the first casualties of our company on the island.
Toward the end of the afternoon, we were ordered to move back to a position about a hundred yards from the base of the cliffs on our right. We got up and moved to the place indicated and lay there for some time until instructed to dig in for the night. All the men tried to get some sleep except for the watches. We worked this system of always having watches on the gun while I was on Iwo, but even then, I was unable to get much sleep because of the bitter cold at night, with the occasional rains and the terrific noises from the Naval bombardment and other shell fire.
I think this is a good time to talk about the rockets, although I am not sure when they were first used on Iwo. They were about the size of an airplane (Hellcat or Corsair) with no wings and a tail to guide it a little. They were sent off from a wooden ramp that was very movable, and this enabled the Japs to fire it and get the ramp back in a cave before the position was spotted. It was sent off with a horrible screeching noise that filled the air and made your hair stand on end, and I think it was a very efficient weapon for working on the men’s nerves. I know that when one of those babies started screeching, we all started for the nearest hole like a bunch of squirt rabbits – although it usually came through the air at a very low speed and usually hit the airfield or went beyond Mt. Suribachi into the ocean. When they hit, they would shake the whole island. (After I had gotten off the island, our company had one land close to it and some of the boys got buried alive and had to be dug out by their buddies.) I am glad to say that my company finally had a hand in taking the sites from which those rockets had been launched. The Navy was great at keeping those rockets from firing, though – when one of them would go off the Navy would throw in a barrage in the area the rocket was seen coming from, and that would keep the rocket launchers from getting off too many of them in a day.
The first night on Iwo was quite a thing for me, with our side and the Japs both throwing flares into the air that lit the whole battlefield almost as good as day. There was only one trouble, though, and that was the shadows would keep the men on edge. Up here it was easy to imagine a shadow as a Jap moving. There was a shell hole directly ahead of us, and because of the way the shadows were thrown it looked like the mouth of a cave. We strained our eyes out all night trying to see the first Jap that would try to get us as he came out of the imaginary cave. We did not feel easy until next morning when we saw our mistake.
“Expecting a shell to land in my lap at any moment."
With dawn and the second day on Iwo beginning, we could see how things were after the long night. To us, this day was like watching a movie. We did not move, but just stayed in our position and watched the battle roll on.
When I think it over, I find I am wrong, though, for the sergeant asked for some volunteers to search some half-beached Jap boats down on the beach, and I and a couple of others volunteered.[8] It seems that a Jap sniper had fired from one of them and shot some of our boys in the back (up toward the airfield, part of the 23rd [Marines] I believe) and our orders were to search the boat and finish off any we might find there. We moved down to the boats. One that we were going to search looked as though it had sustained a direct hit from a bomb. The forward part had been almost ripped from the rest of the ship, and the whole ship looked like it had been blown up on the beach from the force. It [looked] something like our destroyers and had a bridge on it with a huge telescope probably used for observation. We sneaked slowly aboard and went through the first door as though we expected a Jap to open fire. Inside, we saw the Navy beach party had already taken over and were very much at home. We decided that things were okay and went back to our outfit.
From where we sat, we could see the great array of boats that filled the horizon. It was quite a sight. We could see all the front lines from our position from Mt. Suribachi behind us to the cliffs in front. Things were the same as usual with the shell and bullets flying all around but not enough to get us skirt [sic, scared] – that is, until the air was shattered by the sound of many explosions near the cliffs. The explosions started getting nearer and we could see that the enemy was blanketing the beachhead with shell and mortar fire. We lay in our foxholes watching it come and feeling helpless as it approached. There was no way of getting away from it. I don’t know how the rest felt inside, but I started getting skirt [sic] laying there expecting a shell to land in my lap any moment. Our company was lucky, though, and no one got so much as a scratch.
Toward nightfall, we watched B Company start to take the cliffs ahead. As B Company stormed up the side of the cliffs, we saw men running alongside of the cliffs and I don’t know yet whether it was some of B Company’s men who had been sent out to make an encircling movement against the cliffs and the pillboxes on top, or whether it was some Japs who were retreating to a new position.
Target Area 183WX – one side of the cliffs near the Quarry.
The four "pillboxes" once housed 120mm guns.
When the cliffs had been taken, we could see the men of B Company laying out their air panel (a bright orange cloth that showed our planes where the front lines were). After this had been done, they all stood around on top of the cliffs in front of the pillboxes. A Company had also laid down their air panels – just even with the bottom of the cliffs and the beach on the right, which was their assigned position. Just about that time, one of our airplanes went into a dive and machine gunned the boys on top of the cliffs as they stood there helpless. Some of them ran for cover while others just dropped. We all cursed the pilot to high heaven for the mistake he had made. We found out after that he had gone into a dive and as he pulled out of the dive he saw A Company’s air panels – and seeing the men on the cliffs, he had pulled or pushed the controls to his machine guns before he had seen B Company’s air panels.
A request came back for stretchers and stretcher bearers, and some of the men from the rifle platoon went up the cliffs to give them a hand. I don’t know how many got wounded but word got back that some thirteen of our boys had been killed.[9] Our lines suffered all through the battle from the Navy firing, but these things couldn’t be helped because of what was known as short rounds and many other things that must be overlooked.[10]
Night rolled on, and it was the same as any other night on Iwo in that the Navy fired all night long. After the battle had gotten well on its way, though, the Navy ceased firing a steady routine at night. One of those nights the Jap air force paid us a visit, and the Navy pulled in as close to shore as they could and sent up a barrage of shells and tracers that would make many a kid’s eyes back in the States glow. The air was literally filled with tracers as they pathed their way upward, and I wondered if a mosquito could get through it. I later heard that one of the Jap planes did not. It seems that the Navy thought it would be a great advantage if word was got by the Japs that we already had anti-aircraft installations set up on the beachhead. When some of the stuff started coming down, it gave some of the boys a scare trying to duck it.
“I'm afraid I didn't enjoy life on the front line very much."
Next day, like all the days on Iwo, was one to remember.
We were instructed to move out about noon. We moved to the base of the cliffs where we saw what remained of some airplane motors the Japs had planned to use against us. In the right-hand base of the cliffs, there were some cave mouths which had already been worked over by B Company. Directly in front of us, there was a narrow path that wended its way up the face of the cliffs. We were ordered to move up this path to the top of the cliffs.[11] About halfway up, the battle line up on top of the cliffs was stopped by enemy action, and [the] word was to pass up mortar ammunition to the front where it was badly needed. We started the ammunition up to the front and were doing fine until word came up that there was no more available until an LST brought some in. If the Japs had attacked at that moment, they might [have inflicted] heavy losses on our ranks and driven us back – but as they did many times on Iwo, they were content to let us remain where we were, only throwing in a few mortar shells and bullets. We on the face of the cliffs were somewhat protected from this, but the men at the base of the cliffs received direct hits and we watched the stretcher bearers come every now and then and take one away.
While we were stopped up, we could get a good look at the battle lines. At an angle between the first airfield and the cliffs, several tanks were moving against the enemy, trying to open the way for the infantry. Suddenly shells started pouring around the tanks. The tanks started backing up and I remember one clearly, it would back up a little way and then stop. The enemy would put a shell where the tank had just stood. The tank would go through the same motions again. After this happened several times, the tank received a direct hit. It started exploding and continued all the rest of the day. This I guess was the result of ammunition aboard the tank. Several of the tanks received hits in this way; I think, and have always thought since that day, that they were like a bunch of ducks in a shooting gallery – getting picked off but seeing nothing to shoot at in return.
(I might say here that most of the Marines and other personnel on Iwo were in about the same position. I know that during my time on Iwo I saw only two live Japs that I was sure were Japs and not our own men.)
They had quite a considerable dump built up on the beach and just about that time I saw it receive a direct hit and start to go up in loud explosions and bangs.[12] An LST with firefighting equipment aboard went in close to try and put it out but had to pull back as she immediately caught fire. The dump kept exploding for the rest of the day and it made us uneasy as we were very nicely exposed to flying shrapnel if any should take a notion to fly this way. None did, though, and we were very thankful.
Resting half in the water and half out near the base of the cliffs along the beach were several large boats, and we noticed something peculiar about them. The water around the boats was steaming as though they were in hot water. We later found out that this was due to large deposits of sulfur.
A photographer was taking pictures of us men on the sides of the cliffs. Just about that time, a sniper from somewhere toward the first airfield was getting over-anxious and winged some bullets off the rocks that gave us protection. Because of these rocks he couldn’t hit us, and so we weren’t too worried. We could see that Mt. Suribachi was getting the devil pounded out of it. I think that Mt. Suribachi was one of the most shelled spots on Iwo, as they pounded it day and night. They put powerful searchlights on it at night from the ships and threw in everything possible.
(I might say here that Iwo was pounded thoroughly, an example being what one mortarman said to us guys: “We threw in twenty thousand dollars’ worth of shells into one small area alone.” That was what one mortar did alone.)
We got the order to move out and advanced to the top of the cliffs just in front of the pillboxes. The ground in front of the pillboxes was very broken with huge boulders, and [it] was hard to move. As we stood there, we could see some of the unlucky victims of yesterday’s mistake. Someone had done them the mercy to cover them with their ponchos. We studied the pillboxes carefully and could see that they were about four or five feet of reinforced concrete and were rather large. They had probably been well camouflaged once, but due to the terrific punishment they had undergone from the naval guns they stood out like a sore thumb. Their armament consisted of a large gun, which I was told was about a 4.7″ and very similar to our five-inch which we mount on our destroyers. These guns were now pointed at crazy angles because the tops of the pillboxes were so shot up that they fell on the guns. Others looked as though they had suffered a direct hit. There were about three or four pillboxes in all. Since our path was directly through the last pillbox on our right, I got a chance to get a good look at the inside of it. I looked the gun over as I passed through and noticed it had a telescopic sight on it about two feet long. The sight must have been a powerful one at one time, but now its lenses were no more. The size of the pillbox seemed about eight feet square and about eight feet high. On the floor lay two dead Japs, who by the looks and smell had been dead a very long time. They probably had been the operators of the gun. One of them had a watch; my buddy searched him, found it, and put it in his pocket.
As we moved out of the pillbox, we saw before us [some] very rugged terrain, a haven for the enemy and a hell for the attackers. We moved to the left of the pillboxes and away from the edge of the cliffs that continued all along the island. I noticed that we seemed to be standing on what might have been a land bridge, for about ten feet down a road (or what seemed like a road) ran into its side, and a truck sat with its hood half buried in the slope. The truck had taken an awful beating from airplane strafing. Beside the truck stood a motorcycle that also was pretty badly beaten up, but by its paint job I would guess it was not too old a model.[13]
We had moved [to a point] about fifty yards from the pillboxes, angled toward the center of the island and the front lines. About us lay many dead Japs. I noticed one in particular: he lay on his back with his stomach exposed and had one bullet hole in it. He was a target for all the men who passed. When I passed the spot where he lay a couple days later, I saw that they had pumped bullets into his stomach. It was now a bloody and cut-up mess, and if any of the men wanted to take up the study of internal organs of the body, they had here a very good specimen.
About ten yards from him and on our right was a big pile of rice which was immediately put to fire in case it was poisoned. There was a scrawny looking chicken running around, and because his [prospects] did not look so good (and because he might have been eating the rice) we let him live.
The terrain ahead was extremely rough; an enemy might be within twenty feet of you and you might not see him. There were trees here about ten feet high, or maybe a little higher. In one of them there was a rag flying; probably was put there by the Japs to try and draw our fire because it might look like a sniper. [They hoped] that we would waste our ammunition.
We moved up on line and the boys who were there fell back to get a rest. The whole battle line seemed to be stopped up here, so we just stood around and shot the breeze. I noticed a Marine laying on his stomach, so another buddy and myself moved over to him to see if he might have any life in him. We didn’t have to look long, though, for just between his eyes was a little round hole. We would have liked to have taken him back and had his body taken back for burial, but the Japs might have already booby-trapped his body – because of this, we didn’t dare to move him in the least or touch anything he had on him.
I forgot to say that as we first got on line that a Jap in what looked like our naval working clothes suddenly jumped up from some twenty feet in front of the lines to our left and started running like a skirt [sic] rabbit. All along the lines, the men opened up on him but he never missed a stride, so I guess no one hit him. I threw my carbine to my shoulder and took beautiful aim and pulled the trigger – but nothing happened as the safety was on. I threw off the safety and started to try for another shot, but he had disappeared. You may wonder why I had my safety on in battle – it was an unwritten law that everybody observed because if left your safety off and got shot, you might pull on the trigger as you fell because of the reflex nerve tension. Even though you were already dead [you might] kill or wound one of your men by this blunder. This was learned through experience, and not through somebody’s pipe dream.
We found that our present position afforded us a good field of fire for the night, so we were ordered to stay there. Even though this was the front lines, we stood around as though we were in a lounge and not within twenty feet of the enemy. Suddenly one of the boys dropped dead with a bullet hole between the eyes, and our platoon leader decided that it was about time that we got in our holes and acted as though a war was on.[14]
We got the order to dig the gun in for the night, and as one of the men was leaning over it a shot rang out and he dropped. The boys examined him and found he had got shot through the side. He didn’t make any sounds but took the wound and its pain in silence. The stretcher bearers came and took him back immediately and I guess he pulled through okay.
We kept two men on the machine gun all night long. All the carbines of the squad were placed in the machine gun pit: the men on watch, who were sure to be awake all night, would have lots of firepower if something came up in the night – and yet not risk the revealing of our machine gun position unless it was absolutely necessary.[15] Our greatest worry was on the right. Our lines ran all the way from Suribachi to the cliffs on the right – or should I say, within approximately forty or fifty feet of the cliffs. This section gave us great worry because [there] were numerous caves that ran down into the earth out of sight. The caves were in shadows; it was hard to see their mounts at night, and we already knew that they formed a system of networks some distance under the surface. We worried all night wondering if the yellow devils would sneak out and pick us off from the shadows. We had no way of sealing the entrances to the caves, and they were a worry to us as long as we stayed in that position.
About ten feet to our right was another machine gun squad from our company, with a tall Marine about six feet two who had plenty of guts and who had seen three previous battlefields and gone through them alright.[16] He was tough enough so that he took on and knocked out two men at once back in Maui, our home island because they were trying to get around a twelve-year-old girl. None of the men in the company dared to say a wrong word to him and that should show what a guy he was. It was about this time on Iwo though that he suddenly became afraid of every little sound. When a bullet was fired, he would hide his head in the bottom of the foxhole and just shake. I was told later by one of the boys in his squad that he had a brother who had gone through the three other battles at his side and that his brother had been killed on Saipan. This was beyond doubt the reason this man who had so far come through everything before with flying colors to suddenly crack up here on Iwo when we were just getting started. Because of the loss of his brother at Saipan, this man was turned from a hero into a physical wreck.[17]
Another incident happened in A Company at about this time that caused another man to crack up. One of the boys decided to go into a cave to see if he could find any souvenirs, about that time another man in his outfit posted himself outside of the cave as the cave had not been neutralized yet, and the Marine was covering the cave in case any Jap showed his head. Out of the cave walked the souvenir hunter only to receive his last one right between the eyes. The Marine who had posted himself outside the cave entrance and shot the souvenir hunter ran up to his side to get a look at what he thought was his first Jap. When he saw it was one of his own men, he went out of his head immediately and had to be sent back to the hospital ship as a casualty.[18]
The nights on the front lines were far different than behind the lines. Here you not only had to duck artillery, mortars, and other killers, but you had to keep a sharp lookout all night long or you might find a Jap crawling up on you wanting a chat. The language the Jap used up here was the deafening blast of a grenade and his banzai as it ripped your stomach open. Or maybe he would rather do a cleaner job with the edge of a bayonet. I remember one Jap who tried to crawl up on us and present us with a grenade. He managed to get close all right, about twenty feet, but thanks to one of the rifle platoon sergeants who seemed to have cat eyes at night, he didn’t get any closer.[19] We saw him next morning laying out there on his back with one hand still in the air. The sergeant had presented him with one of our own grenades, and he had accepted it and kept it. He was dressed in his finest and had died as I am sure his ancestors would have wanted him to.
I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy life on the front lines very much. It had too many ups and downs to it – especially downs. I remember my first night on the gun; I was pretty jittery, and every shadow I saw I imagined to be a Jap after my hide. I got so jittery once that I swore [one shadow was] moving – I took the chance of revealing my position by opening up with my carbine. Another thing that caused me to sweat my watch out was the fact that our machine gun was set on a rise of about five feet. When shells exploded or a flare fell short somewhere behind our lines, I knew that we couldn’t help but be silhouetted and thus afford a good target for some Jap who may have been out in front. Sometimes late in the night, if you listened carefully, you could hear some Japs jabbering away to each other. More than one time I sweated when the flares would die down and they would fail to send up another right away. During these times, I was practically begging the Navy out loud to send up more flares.
The night passed without too much trouble except the usual. Up here I got less sleep than before, as I not only stood my own watch but usually stayed awake most of the night in my own foxhole. I didn’t hanker to have some Jap crawl up while I slept and finish me off.
“Some guy was losing his nerve or cracking up."
The day dawned clear, finally, and we were all grateful. With it came shells, bullets, and mortar fire, but no Japs.
About noon, though, a couple were spotted and immediately fired upon by our machine gun. They jumped into a shallow depression in the ground, safe from our fire. They could not get out of the depression though, and we kept them pinned down. They fired a few shots back to knock the machine gunner out, but the shots were some inches over his head. A couple of boys broke out some rifle grenades and laid in on the depression. After a few rounds [they] laid one right in square. Needless to say, the Japs didn’t bother us anymore.
Night came on and was like most nights on Iwo except that some guy was either losing his nerve or cracking up. All night long, at regular intervals, he would toss out a grenade and had the whole line around him awake and in jitters looking for the Japs. We shouted at the guy to find out what he saw, but he never answered back. Another one threw a grenade just back of the line because he swore that he heard a Jap back there and had us thinking that we were getting cut off and were going to get wiped out by attacks from all sides.
There was a Jap tent in front of us about twenty to fifty yards, and rather than stand the chance of it being used by some sniper or observer, we decided we would have to destroy it. Our platoon leader ordered the mortars to open fire on it (they were back at the pillboxes, I guess) giving them the dope. After many tries that brought many near misses, he decided that it was a waste of ammunition for the mortars, so he then ordered some of the boys to lay in with rifle grenades. This too was useless as the rifle grenades would not hit anything solid enough to explode. Our Corporal asked the platoon leader if he thought we could not set it afire with our machine gun, as we had tracers every few rounds. The platoon leader said it was [okay], so we then laid in with the machine gun and soon had the tent afire. It proved a big problem to us all night long as the smoke kept coming back into our eyes. If the Japs had tried to sneak up very much that night, they would have had a great advantage.
“Lucky so far."
The next day brought us early action. Grenades started to land among the foxholes of the men on our left, and several of them were wounded quite seriously. We could not tell where they were coming from, but the only place that looked suspicious was a shack just in front of their lines. We all opened fire on this shack and threw a few grenades at it. Our guess might have been right for no more grenades came. We didn’t bother to investigate the shack, though, even when we moved out by it later.
We were ordered to move out somewhere near noon. One of the boys searched the Jap who had been killed by the sergeant’s grenades (speaking of the sergeant, he came down with some sickness that left him helpless and had to go back to the beach) and found a knife and a few other trinkets on him.[20] He gave me the knife to keep as a souvenir. We had to pass the shack and just beyond it were several Jap mortar shells laying around the ground. We came upon what looked like a natural culvert with two openings, it was just about large enough for a person to crawl into. Inside it were several Japs, how many we didn’t know. One of the men covered one end and shot at a Jap he saw ducking back out of sight. We threw in several charges of C4 and then a flamethrower was turned into the opening.
Just then a barrage of airburst, probably from some AA batteries, exploded just above our head and some of the men were wounded. Our squad, lucky so far since the first night on the line, didn’t receive a scratch.
We were ordered to move back to our previous positions as the lines on our left had not been able to move out.
“I don't know if we killed him outright or not."
The next day we moved out and the first thing I saw was one of the biggest machine guns I had ever seen. It seemed about six feet long and must have been a wicked thing to have to carry around. Just beyond the machine gun was a sort of natural foxhole in the terrain and in this some of the boys found some souvenirs. We cut straight back toward the cliffs on the right as we had been moving at an angle away from them. Along the cliffs were several nests of what looked like twenty-millimeter guns: smooth-looking jobs enclosed in a well-constructed circular dugout. The sides of the dugout were built up, or I should say reinforced, with large rocks or sandbags – I forget now just which one it was. A Jap was laying in the bottom of one with the whole side of his helmet torn away, and part of his head with it. By the Jap lay an opium pipe which I immediately pocketed for a souvenir. In depressions in the sides of the dugout were ammunition for the twenties and some grenades. This stuff we left entirely alone.
In front of the dugout lay two Japs that a couple of the boys in the rifle platoon had caught. The Japs had been playing a smart trick: they would fire a few rounds from the twenties and hightail it out of the dugouts as fast as they could to some foxholes they had dug about twenty feet back. When the barrage from the ships would lay in the position, they were safe in their foxholes; after the barrage lifted, they would do the same thing over again. It was after they were returning to their foxholes from their favorite game that the two boys had caught them.
One of them lay on his back, and since so far I had not gotten too many souvenirs, I cut his pockets open. The reason I cut the pocket open and did not put my hand in was that you could not tell what devilish device the Jap might have rigged up in his pocket in case he was killed like he had been. By cutting the pockets open I could do it slow and see what remained in the pockets without taking too much risk of setting off a booby trap. In his pockets I found a piece of some very rich-looking paper, neatly folded. I unfolded it and inside was another piece that looked like rice paper. Both papers had Jap writing all over them, but this was far different from the scrawling writing I had seen so often, this was neat and looked as though it had been done with a machine instead of by hand. At the bottom of the large sheet was what looked like either official seals or the seals of a censor. I hope someday to have them read and find out what they do contain.
By the Jap’s body was a triangular, cylinder-like object. Upon examining it I found it to be an explosive molded into a cone. It was enclosed in some dead stuff like straw. I don’t know what its primary use was, but my guess was that it was an anti-personnel mine once it was hooked up.
I feel I should say something for the Japs here. They were not the cross-eyed, near-sighted rats that couldn’t see the broad side of a barn, [who] we needn’t be afraid of as they couldn’t see you to shoot you. (That is what we had heard all the time until we hit this place.) They might have been slanteyes, but they could still shoot like mad. I remember one incident were one Jap shot some fifty-five Marines as fast as they showed their heads from approximately six hundred yards. He was causing such confusion and holding up a whole line that they decided to blast him out after his position had been located.[21] Our men had to use shell fire to get rid of this little man who “couldn’t hit the side of a barn at twenty feet.” I think that if a survey were made of the men who had been killed by rifle fire on Iwo that a great percent of them would have been found to have bullet holes right between the eyes. They were the little yellow bastards (or I should say big ones, for these were the Imperial Marines of the Japanese – these babies were far from little; many were well over six foot tall that I saw), the cross-eyed monkeys, and the stinking rats that I have often heard them called, but they were not the bum shots that they were given credit for being. They were also smart little devils, as our boys had found out in many Pacific engagements.
I might say, though, that the Japs were not good soldiers. They were not like our forces who could take any man from the upper ranks down to a private and let him be the leader and still make out okay. The Japs were far different in this respect, for if their officers and leaders were killed off or lost, they did not have the intelligence to carry on without him, but only knew one thing: banzai and to die for the Emperor.
We moved out some fifty feet. On our right, a five-foot ridge formed sort of a wall. On our left the terrain was very rough. There were a few dead Japs lying around here; the remains of one [were] hanging on sort of a post. He looked as though he had received a direct hit from a shell and all that remained was an outer wall of flesh.
We were out of chow, and since we were to remain in this position for a while the platoon leader asked for some volunteers to go back and get some. I and a couple others volunteered our services and started back to the foot of the cliffs where our supply cache was. As I drew even with the twenty-millimeter dugouts, I saw a Jap with something red by his head on the ground. I reached down and swooped it up as I walked. I started unfolding it and saw that I had a Jap flag. It was a beautiful job, real silk, and was not the kind with the sun’s rays but just a red ball that was to represent the sun on a white background. It had several small shrapnel burns in it and some blood that the Jap had shed. I put it in my pocket and felt well pleased for I had been hoping for a long time to get one – but since I had seen only three so far out of the whole invasion, I had kind of lost hope.
We went back and got the food, but not the food that most people would have thought. We brought back cases of pineapples all sliced up like the kind you buy back home in any of the grocery stores. We were allowed I think two cans to a squad, and since the number in our squad was [odd] and the slices even, we would each have the same amount – except one man, who would have the juice.
After we had eaten, we sat or stood around and waited for the word. A machine gun opened up and one of the men who was sitting on the ridge suddenly yelled in pain and doubled up. He fell to the ground and rolled all over in agony; he had been shot in the personal parts of the body and the pain was overbearing. We could do nothing for him, for this was something unusual and we didn’t know what to do. We tried to talk to him and see if we could soothe him somewhat. A stretcher came up and they took him away.[22]
We got the order to move out and did so very slowly, for here the terrain was exceedingly rough and dangerous. I don’t know just how to describe the terrain we were going through now. The ground seemed to be made up of five- to ten-foot hills with narrow passages running between them. The cliffs were jagged and treacherous, for they made good hiding places for the Japs. We moved up steadily and had to stop for something. I moved out on sort of a ten-foot peninsula that edged out from the face of the cliffs. I was well hidden by some low-growing bushes and laying under these I was able to get a good view of the land. From my position, I could see the sides of the cliffs, masses of large rocks or boulders. The beachline was jagged, and about a hundred yards to the front was what was known as the “Boat Basin.” There were the remains of some small boats that looked like they might once have been fishing boats. I looked back along the cliffs to see where the boys had stopped. They were about twenty to thirty feet up front of me, and lay in front of a ridge that cut across the land at a little above seven feet. The ridge looked about five to ten feet wide.
I looked on the other side of the ridge, something the boys in front couldn’t see, and was amazed to see a Jap standing there with a big grin on his face and making a motion as though he were telling some others beside him that our men were just the other side of the ridge. I don’t know what he was up to, but I knew he didn’t have long to live. He couldn’t see me, so I had a great advantage. I motioned for one of the riflemen to come over, and I pointed to the Jap. At first, he wouldn’t believe that one could be so close in the daytime, standing up making such a beautiful target of himself. I pointed to our men and told him that they were our front lines and that it was a Jap on the other side of the ridge. We then both sighted in, and [at] the count of three we both shot, the rifleman once and me twice. You may wonder why I shared the privilege of getting a Jap – I didn’t believe in the killing power of my carbine too much, and I wanted to make sure that we bagged this Jap. After we had shot, the Jap sort of slid sideways and disappeared from sight. I don’t know if we killed him outright or not, for we never did get up that far.
The rifleman ran up to the men on the front lines in front of the ridge. I could see him making motions, and soon a few grenades sailed over the ridge and exploded. I guess that took care of any Japs on the other side for we didn’t receive any trouble from them again. I felt pretty big now that I had sighted in on my first Jap. It was the second live one I had seen in the whole campaign.
We moved up [nearly] even with the front lines, about twenty feet from the cliffs, beside a small one-room shack with a woodshed attached. I had a great desire to search it but was afraid of possible booby traps. Several men ran through it, so I decided to take the chance. I saw on my left what looked like an icebox. There were no chairs in the room, for the Japs here didn’t use chairs. On my right was a small cabinet about two feet high with a drawer. I went through the drawer (after I had carefully opened it) and found some Jap money. I also found some Jap books with a Jap soldier on the front cover trampling on an American flag. I could not read the writing, but in the back of the book were pictures of women working in what looked like factories, and some beautiful Jap women who were probably to the Japs much like our pinups were to us. I judged from the books that they were strictly propaganda. I also found some lenses to scopes, which I stuck in my pocket.
Beside the cabinet was a long table made of some kind of black wood, which I was told was very valuable – I think it was ebony. The table was long and low-built, and I would [have liked] to take it home, but it was a little big for my pack. (I also used my pack for food. My gas mask I had ditched after some three days.)[23]
I moved back out of the shack and hit the deck [some five feet] behind the machine gun. The Japs were laying in mortar shells all over the place now, and one of the boys in the rifle platoon got a piece in the arm. On our left, I could see Marines moving very cautiously ahead trying to spot the Jap positions. One of the best guys I had ever known was killed about this time by mortar fire. I remembered him on the ship as he played cards. I think he was one of the coolest gamblers I ever saw play, and I would watch him by the hour on the ship on the way to this forgotten hole playing cards. I have seen him bet forty dollars on a single card many a night and not bat an eyelash. He was just as cool as a leader and made a damn good sergeant. When I heard of his death, I’m afraid I felt very bad.
My squad leader told me to relieve the man on the gun, and I got a great scare because of my own blunder. As I moved into position behind the gun my hand accidentally touched the trigger – and my hair stood on end as I might have shot some of my own men as the gun was on free gun and pivoted with the recoil. No one seemed to have gotten hit, so I breathed easier.
It was starting to get darker, and I heard men coming up on our right. The corporal came over and told us to get the gun ready to travel as we were being relieved and were going back to the pillboxes on top of the cliffs where we were to have a rest. We didn’t take long to get started and soon were back at the pillboxes.[24] We dug in fast, and the leaders agreed on a system by which the whole company would contribute men to stand watch during the night. It was during the night that one of the men came near getting shot as the result of a sentry getting an itchy trigger finger and nervous. One of the men who had to relieve this sentry stood up in his hole to stretch before he moved to the position to relieve the other sentry. The sentry on watch saw his shadow against the horizon and took a shot at him. The shot only grazed the man’s face, though. The sentry claimed that he thought he was a Jap and had tried to kill him.
“I hope that God will forgive me, under the circumstances."
The night passed swiftly for we all got a good night’s sleep, and the morning came cool and moist. I went down to the foot of the cliffs and looked for chow. They had a pile of rations here and other supplies. I saw a shotgun laying there and was awful tempted to trade it for my carbine, for I had very little faith in my carbine and at the distance we were coming from the Japs the shotgun would have been a very deadly weapon. I managed to get some chow and some pills to put in the drinking water. The water we had to drink was about three months old and was black with black particles in it. We put pills in it to keep from getting diseases from the water. We were only supposed to put in a couple of pills, but I usually put in five or six because I didn’t intend to get sick if I could help it.
I went back up to the pillboxes and got into a conversation with some of the boys, and I found that we had to date lost more men than the other two companies combined. (That is A and B Companies.) That explained the reason that we had been relieved from the front lines, we didn’t have enough men to hold our portion of the lines.[25]
I guess it was about noon that we received the order that we were going to work along the sides of the cliffs and seal up the caves if possible.[26] We went around by the way that A Company had made its push. We were now between the start of the cliffs [between] the pillboxes and the ocean. As we moved out, we passed a Marine that had been hit by one of our phosphorus shells. His whole body was burnt deep. A rifle was jabbed in the ground bayonet first, and I guess that they had tried to give him plasma in an effort to save his life. It was sights like these that made a man wonder if mankind were really [so] civilized [if] he had to use such tools….
Just beyond the Marine was a pillbox made of sandbags and wooden stakes. Some Japs lay in its recess in some of the strange positions that only death can produce. (Speaking of strange positions, I remember one Jap I saw who was kneeling and had his forehead on his hands and looked like he was praying. That was the position that death claimed him in.) Some of us found a bottle near the pillbox and it looked like it might have been sake. It had a picture on its side with steps as though it were some kind of explosive device. Not caring to take the risk of having the large cork being a firing device and the content being something explosive, we let it remain where it was found.
Our platoon leader decided that we should go to the top of the cliffs and seal up the caves that had given us so much trouble the first night on the line. I have something to add here, and that was that we were carrying supplies for our work, so instead of breaking apart a crate of ammunition for the machine gun and let each ammo carrier like myself carry our customary two boxes of ammo, we decided that it would be better if one man would carry it and change off as he got tired. I took the crate (which contained several boxes of ammunition and weighed somewhere near a hundred pounds) on my shoulder and started up the cliffs. When we had gotten halfway up and stopped to get our wind, I put it down as another man in our squad wanted to give me a rest. He got the crate on his shoulder and let it drop on the deck immediately with a loud curse. I guess he found it kind of heavy, and I don’t blame him! The only reason I had been able to bring it up okay was the fact that I have always been well-muscled and fairly strong, and back at our main base I kept in good condition. The man wanted to bust open the crate and every man take two boxes – but since this would foul up things, and I had gotten my wind and felt good again, I put it on my shoulder with his help and brought it to the top. The sweat was pouring off me before I reached the top and I wondered if I was going to make it.
It was hot here today and the sweat would pour out of a person with little effort. This was the character of the weather on Iwo. Once the dampness and coolness had left the air, the day would be nice and warm. The nights sometimes were unbearable, though, since there were [few] cloud banks to hold the heat to the earth, [so] at night was usually cool. I had picked up a rubberized jacket aboard the transport, though, and it came in handy – I wore it all the way through Iwo. At night I would pull up the hood and place my helmet over it. I remember one night that I was particularly glad I had it. It was one of the first few nights on the line, I don’t know which, but it rained like a deuce. With the hood up I was well protected.
One comical part of the deal, though, was that the water was filling up my foxhole. I had in my dungaree pocket a bar of chocolate, known as a D-bar. I rather liked them, and I was saving this one till some time when I would feel the hunger for candy (or just plain hunger). As the water advanced toward the top of my foxhole, I would straighten up trying vainly to save the bar. I saw I was licked after a while; I didn’t dare to straighten up too [far], as some Jap might accidentally pick my head off with his rifle. On seeing that I was licked, I ate the bar rather than let the water spoil it. I’m afraid I did some rather fancy cussing while I was doing that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some Japs on the far end of the island committed hara-kiri thinking that the devil was after them.
I guess there was not only a lot of shells and bullets shot at Iwo but a lot of curses, especially from me. I cursed the Navy for firing all night long when I was trying to get some sleep; I cursed the Marine Corps for putting me, a peaceful man at that, in this hell hole; and I did a lot of cursing for many other things too numerous to mention. I hope that God will forgive me under the circumstances, for it made me feel a lot better and a lot braver.
We approached the caves and I wondered how man could dig them so deep and so big. We would put in a charge of C4 and cause the entrance to cave in. We cleaned all the caves in that sector and moved back to clean up any that might be along the edge of the cliffs. The terrain changed slightly here: we found that a twenty-to-thirty-foot piece of ground started to rise between the beach and the cliff. We followed this rise. Huge rocks lay on our right, and we found ourselves in a narrow place between these rocks and the cliff. It was here that one of the boys discovered a cave at the base of the cliff, and they decided to use the flamethrower on it. The flamethrower had no sooner shot into the cave than an explosion was heard, and flames shot out of the cave to the top of the cliffs. We all bolted like a bunch of scared rabbits. One of the boys dropped everything he had in his hands, including his rifle, and ran for the beachhead like a track star. He didn’t stop until he was halfway back, either. We all thought the cliffs were going to blow up all over the place as we thought we had set a dump afire. I guess it was only a little gasoline inside the cave, for the flames died down almost immediately. We went back and the man who had run was given the devil – not for running so far, for all of us were scared, but because he had dropped everything he had in his hands instead of carrying it with him.
I don’t know whether it was before or after this incident, but we were all standing around waiting to move out after a rest when suddenly a shell landed some ten to fifteen feet from us and went off with a deafening roar. No one was hurt from it, though, except for some sore ear drums and paralysis of the hair.
We moved out and came on a clearing about fifty feet long and thirty to forty feet wide. As we advanced on the clearing, we passed a dead Jap laying on a stretcher and two others who had been the stretcher bearers. The Jap on the stretcher had bandages on him and was probably being brought to an underground hospital when he had gotten caught along with the stretcher bearers by an airplane and strafed. Some of the boys from the rifle platoon had a chance to explore one of these underground hospitals and he later told me that it was a huge affair with Japs lying all over the place, dead from uncared-for wounds.[27] He showed me a pair of silver trinkets (I forget now just what they represented) and some artwork (the kind you can buy here in the states if you know the right people, only these involved Japanese) done on rice paper.
The clearing here might be called a plateau for it rose some ten to twenty feet from the beach and was walled in on the right by the cliffs which rose to quite a distance. We moved along the beach side of the plateau, and some of the boys sighted a cave from which machine gun fire was spouting at Company A. They dropped some charges in an effort to knock it out. Our machine gun squad had set up in front of the plateau, so I went back with them. There were about five Marines standing there looking down at the cave when suddenly a Jap machine gun opened up on them. They scattered and hit the deck, all except one. He sort of lost rigidness in his body and fell to the ground. Since he did not move in the least at first, we thought he was dead, and no one tried to crawl to him. He started to roll around after a while and some of the boys crawled up to him and dragged him back out of harm’s way. Upon examining him they found he had received three bullets in a row across his chest and two in his head. There was no hope that he would live even to get back to the beachhead, but they loaded him on a stretcher and carried him back in an effort to save his life.[28]
That was what was swell about those guys, they would go through hell and hot water to save your life, and I felt proud to be with them. I looked at the boys on both sides of me and they looked as though they were on a hunt instead of a battle. They were joking and talking as though they enjoyed the whole affair. They had lots of guts and I sure felt proud of them. I could see why we had never been beaten in a fair fight. One of the men, a red-headed corporal, held up his hand; it was bleeding as a result of a graze from the machine gun that had fired upon him and the rest. (I guess this goes to show the difference between our guns and the Japs. The Japanese machine guns I think by observation did not spread out like ours did, and therefore did not have the killing power that ours did. If our gun had fired on a bunch of Japs lined up like our men had been on the edge of the plateau, I think beyond doubt that all of them would have been casualties instead of one getting it all and one getting a graze as had been the results here.)
Near me, a Jap was laying on his stomach, dead. I saw a paper sticking out of his rear pocket and I decided that I would see what it was – that is, if it came out of his pocket easily. If it pulled hard, I didn’t intend to try and take it as it might be attached to a booby trap. I took a little tug on it, and it pulled hard, so I left it there. Beside the Jap was a round plastic ball. I asked some of the boys what it was and found out that it contained gas in case the Japs intended to use gas. I kept far away from it and almost lost my complexion when one of the boys came walking across the plateau and just barely missed stepping on it. The Jap’s rifle lay beside the body, and I picked it up and carefully pulled out the bolt and threw it away so that any Jap who might come out of a cave in the future could not use it. I managed to rip off the sight which I put into my pack to take home someday – if I ever got off this rock and back to civilization. I thought to myself it would make a good sight for my .22 back home. My squad leader took the gun and broke it in two.
Our gun was set on the edge of the plateau, and the squad leader opened fire on a cave that looked like it might house a machine gun nest. We also opened up on the machine gun nest that had taken one of our men. It was a well-like [structure] in the ground, and we could not hurt it in the least, but around it was what looked like dried straw. We tried to set this afire with the incendiary shells we had in the belt. We could not get the stuff to burn, though, so we gave up.
I must tell you a little of what A Company had put up with. You have already gotten an impression, no doubt, what the terrain was like along the cliffs. In all the time so far, A Company had been able to advance only two to four hundred yards because of this rough terrain. We were about fifty yards ahead of A Company, and we could see why the going was so rough for them and why they were going to have it even rougher. A Company had a tank, but even with this armament they were unable to advance rapidly. The tank could not go ahead of the troops too far because it needed their support to keep from getting knocked out by some Jap who might attack them with a demolition charge and blow the tank up and himself. The men would not advance too fast with the tank because of the numerous caves with machine gun nests. Right now, A Company was trying to take the part of the beach on our right but it was virtually an ambush for both tanks and infantry. There were caves along the cliff which the ships could fire on and knock out, but there were two rock fortresses about fifty yards apart and some fifteen to twenty feet high and very thick. The caves in these fortresses were facing inland so the ships could not hit them. Situated as they were, they could cause a crossfire and could cover any part of the beach near them. I don’t know how A Company finally managed to lick this problem, but it sure was a tough one and must have cost a lot of men.
We got the order to move back to the beach for a well-earned rest. We moved out in a long line back to the beach. We just passed the foot of the cliffs when I saw a buddy of mine who was in A Company heading back toward where we had come from. We had stopped to rest and I had quite a talk with him. He asked me about a pair of field glasses I had managed to obtain the wrong way back in our home base and asked me if I hadn’t brought them with me. We had quite a chat and had to split up when his outfit moved back to the lines. I had first met him in Oahu and we had become fast friends, he originated from Albany, New York, and I shall not tell his name here for obvious reasons. We had remained good friends on Maui even though we had a terrific fight over nothing that really mattered. We fought till we got tired, and then quit and shook hands, and were friends just the same as usual. I must say here that it took me a couple of weeks to get rid of my two black eyes and the other bruises that I received in the fight.
That was the last time I saw him. He was killed very shortly afterward by a Jap sniper who got him between the eyes. I am glad to say that he didn’t suffer in the least because he was dead before he hit the ground.[29]
We got the word and moved out about even with that part of the beachhead where we had come on the first day, and about midway between the beachhead and the first airfield.[30] This was to be our resting area for the next two or three days. There was a three-foot drop in the lay of the land here, so a couple of the boys and me dug into the side of this drop and pitched our poncho over this foxhole which was big enough to house the three of us. This way we could keep the rain (if any) out because of the sloping roof the poncho made, and with three in the foxhole it was just that much warmer.
We kept watches on the gun just the same as the Japs were infiltrating the lines often now. The Japs had set up purification systems, as there was no [natural] water on the island. The Japs were cunning; some of them could talk English, and this helped them a lot. Many were shot after getting through and getting cans of water from our supply. Thanks to the fact that our boys were on the ball, I don’t think many of them got back to the Jap lines with our water. They could never say any word that started with an “L” and many was the Jap who got himself shot trying to pass off as an American. (I also wonder how many Americans got shot because they could not talk good English.)
“All that one had to worry about were the shells..."
The next day came and the first thing we did after eating was to go looking for packs that men who had been hit or killed had abandoned and see if we could find any razors or other shaving equipment. I found about six razors and divided them among the company. We used our helmets for wash bowls and C4 (an explosive that would burn very good but would not explode if heat were used on it) for fuel to heat the water. While my squad leader was shaving one of the boys, a photographer asked them to hold it a minute and took their pictures. None of us had shaved since we had hit the island and we had grown pretty good beards in that time. I was glad to get rid of my beard as it was getting very itchy. After we had gotten rid of our beards and gotten cleaned up, we all felt good.
Some of the boys in the rifle platoon [occupied] a large sixteen-inch [shell] crater which was six or more feet deep and perhaps ten feet wide. They crowded in there making stew in their helmets, and everybody was going into the crater enjoying the stew. It was like a party or picnic with everybody talking at once and eating.
A buddy and I went down to the beach to have a look around, and what a sight it was. We were approaching the left part of the beachhead when an MP got in front of us and said we could not go any further this way as it was Seabee territory. It seemed kind of a laugh to us who had fought for this island [to be] suddenly denied the right to walk on some parts of it because these parts belonged to someone else. When one has time to think it over, he can see why, though, for if all the Marines on the front lines were to suddenly invade the Seabee territory, they would be in the way so much that the Seabees would not get anything done. We were allowed to go through the rest of the beach, though, and that is what we did.
USMC photograph by TSGT. Byrd Ferneyhouh.
At about the place where we had hit the beach the first time, they were laying a sort of metal track for the vehicles to drive on so they would not get bogged down in the loose volcanic ash and sand. The water was filled with all kinds of boats bringing in supplies. They had a PA system set up here and a man sitting in a chair was giving the boats orders to come in and unload when their time came. One boat started to pull in at the wrong time and boy did he get his ears rattled from the man in the chair. It must have been a tiresome job sitting in that chair all day like that hollering away to take away some of the confusion that persisted on the beachhead.
Down the line were food supplies, and we headed there the minute we saw them. There were colored Marines here who did the unloading and stacking of these food supplies. I went over to them and started talking about the island. They wanted to know how tough it was on the front lines; they had heard it was a tough and bloody mess. I started giving them quite a story that blood flowed like wine on the front lines and so forth. (I thought that I really was giving them a snow job, and I really didn’t know how bad the battle was until I got off the island and had time to think of it.) I asked the colored Marines if they had any more invasion candy (a package of hard candy) as I saw them eating some. They practically ran to get some for my buddy and me and boy did it taste good. We had been given a package to take into the island with us, but it had been gone [for] a long time.
I saw an MP walking around the ten-in-one rations, and I was told that they were to see to it that no one took any. I said to my buddy, “these look good – you make off with one and I’ll get the MP into a conversation, so he won’t see you.” I walked over to the MP and started talking about what we had seen on the front lines. All the while I kept moving so that the MP (who had become very interested) turned with me and had his back toward the rations. I watched my buddy pick up a ten-in-one and start off with it, while I kept the MP in earnest conversation. When I saw that my buddy was well away from the beach and headed back toward the campsite, I told the MP I had to go back to my outfit. As I started to move out, my eyes fell on a gallon can of tomatoes just behind the MP’s feet. I remarked to him that it sure looked good and would taste good. He bent down and picked it up and handed it to me, saying to take it and enjoy it. I often wonder if he would have been so nice if he had known that I had just taken him for a ten-in-one ration.
I hastened back to the camp, and they had the ten-in-one already opened. Inside it was bacon, good crackers, butter, hash, candy, cigarettes, and many other things that we could enjoy. We decided to open the bacon and have some, using an empty can for a frying pan. I put a lot of butter in, thinking how swell the bacon would taste fried in butter. There is where I got the surprise of my life, the butter wouldn’t melt even when it was held over the open flame. It would burn up before it would melt. I heard a lot about that butter later; it seemed that they were working on a butter that would not melt in any temperature. Take my word for it, they certainly found it.
We really enjoyed that meal, and that was what we had for our chow while we were in the ration area. The only thing wrong was they had to ration it out as the name indicated.[31] We didn’t get enough to eat then and would usually go snooping around the shell craters looking for cans of rations or some other kind of chow that some Marine might have dropped or left behind.
Night approached and here they were enjoyable because we didn’t have to worry about a Jap crawling up. All one had to worry about was the shells and other things that were flying through the air. They threw the flares into the air all the while, and I managed to get a parachute from one to use to keep my carbine clean. (One of the boys told me to keep the hell in my hole at night before I got shot for a Jap.) Some of the boys used these parachutes for handkerchiefs. We enjoyed watching the Japs as they fired upon the boats in the harbor at night, they used twenty millimeters and tracers. The bullets would go bouncing off the side of the ships, and sometimes they exploded. They came from the direction of the airfield and were only some ten feet over our head when they went by. With the tracers it was like watching fireworks.
“He called us souvenir hunters and a few other names..."
The next day came, and we looked forward to another day of rest. There was one thing that bothered us here at the resting area, and that was the Jap rockets. They fired them night and day, usually at the airfield or over Mt. Suribachi into the sea. At night you would see a long fiery tail as they went off and hear a loud screech as they went into the air. When they hit, they would rock the island and the explosion seemed to spread out rather than penetrate the sandy soil. Whenever we heard a screech in the daytime, all one saw was the disappearing heels of all the Marines in sight as they made a dive headfirst into the nearest crater or foxhole.
One of the boys asked me if I would like to accompany him back to the artillery outfit to see some of his buddies. We started back and about halfway there we came upon a bulldozer cutting a smooth place in the soil. When we caught sight of what was on the other side of the dug-out place, we didn’t have to ask what it was for. There, laying in rows were between 450-550 of the 5th Division men. I guess we both found our eyes overflowing with tears as we looked at these men who had suffered every possible way a body could be torn or destroyed in battle. We found our throats choked up and kind of sick. We stood there a few minutes and watched the men as they brought the dead [in] on stretchers and put them in an appointed place and covered their bodies with their ponchos or whatever else was handy. It was a sight that I shall never forget, and I don’t think my buddy will either if he is still alive in this fouled-up world.
We both felt as though we were interfering in these dead Marines’ privacy and the air seemed to have the atmosphere of a place of holiness, so with tight throats we walked quickly away.
As we approached the artillery batteries, I could see that they were well fortified against possible enemy barrage. I guess the howitzers were on the right and the heavier guns on the left as we walked down through the center of the artillery emplacement. The protection for the crewmen was sandbags around the front and side of the guns. We saw this friend of my buddy’s, and they had quite a talk. We decided instead of going directly back to the camp site we would swing around up over the airfield and back that way. We approached the foot of the airfield which looked as though it had been built quite extensively, for its back sloped at a great angle to us. I would say that the slope was some twenty feet high at this point. There were planes all around the base of the slope, we had been told they would be here before we hit the island, so they were no surprise. We had been told on the boat that the Japs had pushed them off the airfield when they had gotten shot up or destroyed to keep the airfield clear. They were a mass of tangled fabric and metal. As we stared through the tangled mess I happened to look down and there by my outstretched foot was a whitish, grayish matter that I had no problem recognizing. The Jap that it belonged to lay some five feet away.
We started up over the slope of the airfield and there before us stretched a long, flat airstrip. The strip on the side of the slope was covered with planes of all descriptions and sizes. Some of them were total wrecks while others looked as though they could be again flown after a little work. We saw everything from a big bomber to a twin motor fighter (that is what it looked like, anyway). My buddy went to what looked like a compartment in the side of one of the planes and searched it. He found some kind of a tool and pocketed [it]. I was going to rip off a piece of one of the wings but didn’t have no way of doing it so I didn’t bother.
Before us was the skeleton of what at one time must have been a huge plane. The entire floor of the plane was covered with melted lead that had hardened. It must have been set afire. Directly across the field from the plane was the foundations of what had once been a barracks for the pilots. We moved over to these foundations, and we could see that this had once been a pretty good barracks, but all that remained was ashes and the foundation of cement and steel. Directly ahead of us was what looked like the front lines of the 5th Division. We started to walk off the airfield and some Marine who looked like an officer the way he went about his business told us to get the hell off of there and out of sight as this was the front lines. He called us souvenir hunters and a few other names that I shall not put in here. Needless to say, we didn’t stay to argue with him but got the hell out of there as fast as possible.
We swung back toward our own camp site which was some distance off. We came upon a tank that had been hit by something pretty powerful, for its turret had been ripped off and thrown some twenty feet beyond and the tank itself had been turned completely over and smashed up pretty well. My guess was that it had received a hit from one of those big rockets. I found later that the occupants had been killed very quickly. Near the tank was a shell of a halftrack that was beyond recognition. It was [even] hard for us who had been near them so much to recognize [the wreck] as once being a halftrack. This too was the victim of something with a powerful blast. We started back over the sand to our camp. When we had gotten halfway there, I saw a Jap in a crater with the upper half of his body buried in the sand. I grabbed hold of his legs with the intention of dragging him out where I could search him, but I stopped as I was afraid he might be booby trapped. When I grabbed his legs, I felt a funny feeling as though he was going to come to life again and come at me. Not liking the feeling, I left him alone. We went back to our camp site.
Many other things happened to us while we were back at the rest camp. One day I went back toward Suribachi looking for some cans of rations, and had started back [to my unit] when the accident happened. The Jap machine guns could fire on the beach even though they were some distance off, and every now and then they would. While I was walking back, I heard one of their guns chattering but didn’t pay attention as the bullets didn’t sound close (and the Japs usually fired a short burst and quit). Looking out of the corner of my right eye I saw a Marine suddenly fall and I could hear the bullets singing as they started coming closer. The Jap was not firing a short burst but was really going to town on the beach this time. When I heard the bullets starting to whistle close, I took a head dive right into a crater almost into a cup of coffee that a Marine in the crater was holding over a fire to get warm. That Marine was more scared than I was at my sudden appearance. I told him that I was sorry and looked over the side of the crater to see if everything was clear now as the firing had stopped. I did not dare to get out of the crater until they had brought a stretcher and picked up the Marine and took him away. Seeing that they had not been fired upon, I continued on my way.
We had received replacements while we were here resting, and we had to train them how to use a grenade and a machine gun. Some of them were only seventeen, and I kind of felt sorry, at least I was eighteen as were most of the men in our company. It seemed a shame to have to lead these men into battle so young, and not having enough training at that.[32]
There was a sixteen-inch dud near our camp site, and we watched the demolition squad neutralize it. I also got to see a land mine near our position. It was a huge round ball with tits about six inches long that was supposed to be filled with acid. When one of these tits was broken, the acid would start eating on some kind of metal, and by some method this would set off the mine, which would make a shambles of a tank or halftrack.
Down near the beach directly in front of our camp site was a dummy gun that the Japs had set up to look like a gun position. It looked pretty good, and I thought it was a real job before I got up close to it, but I guess our men had not been fooled in the least as the gun and its false pillbox cover had not been fired upon from the looks [of it].
From our position we could see all the ships good, and we liked to watch them by the hour as they threw in everything they had at the island not yet taken. Way out was the battlewagons and what a roar they would make. They usually sent two shells at a time into the island. There were the rocket ships with their rocket loads firing into the island like rain. These rockets must have been a great terror and a killer to the Japs, for they hit hard and there were so many of them shot at a time.
I don’t remember just when it was that the trucks with their rocket racks on the back first opened up on Iwo, but I remember the results to us and to the Japs. We were laying in our foxholes one day when we heard a noise like escaping steam only a thousand times as loud. It made us all jump, for we didn’t know what was coming off – and by this time I’m afraid some of [us] were ready to crack.
The rockets rose into the air from the base of the cliffs and poured down like rain in front of our position. Some of the boys up where they could see good said that the Japs had been so surprised and scared by the noise [that they] were running out of their caves all around. When the rockets hit, it was like popping popcorn in a popper.
Getting back to the fleet, I think that we used to get our greatest enjoyment out of watching the little destroyer escorts firing on the beach. They were armed with a five-inch gun in front and one in back and would come directly at the island with their front gun roaring away. When they would come so close to the island that we wondered if they were going to land and turn amphibious, they would about face and as they pulled away the rear gun would let go. When I watched them, I thought of the little yellow jackets back home – so small, but yet so formidable.
While we were watching the fleet we saw a plane that was flying low over the fleet suddenly fall into the sea, we never did find out what happened to it. Sometime earlier in the battle, a plane that was flying between us and Suribachi. As we watched, we suddenly saw what looked like smoke pouring from the back of it. It disappeared from view, and we thought for sure that it had received a direct hit from ack-ack. We found later in the day that it was DDT that they were spraying the island with to protect us from our worst enemy – the flies who would walk over some dead Jap and then over our food as we ate it.
The last night of our rest we went to sleep as usual, not knowing that we were to go back on line the next morning.
“All the fight was out of me."
About four or five o’clock we were awakened and told to get ready to move out.[33] We got our packs on our backs and were ready in a few minutes. We moved out in a long line toward the spot where the tanks had taken such a beating the third day. We stopped near the hulk of these tanks for a rest, and though it was still too dark to see clearly, we could make out at least two that had been well shot up. We again moved out and had not moved far when we were again ordered to stop. We got the word to take cover as this was a very hot position.
I started to move into a foxhole. I saw the legs of a Marine and followed the legs up. As I followed up his body, I could see that he was in a sitting position with his rifle beside him ready for instant use. My eyes followed up his body, over his chest, to his neck – and there stopped, for there was no more. Some way or other he had had his head shot off from the neck as clean as though it had been done in an operating room. Rigor mortis must have set in right away, leaving him in this way, still watching and guarding even though in death. I felt my hair stiffen on the back of my neck and I got the devil away from there. I jumped into a foxhole in front of me and nearly broke my leg. Whoever had dug this one must have been really scared, for I could almost stand in it without being observed.
While we were there the word came back that we were to relieve some company who had been so shot up that they could not hold their portion of the line.[34] Judging from what I had just encountered, I well believed this was a very hot spot. We had gone about a hundred feet when we saw what had once been a house and a well. This was supposed to have been part of a village or something on Iwo.[35] There were lots of dead Japs among the rubble, and I guess the Company we were relieving may have gotten well shot up, but they did a good job on the Japs, too.
There were huge boulders ahead, and we passed through them. Ahead was flat ground that must have been all of a hundred yards or more wide, and I wouldn’t try to guess how long. We moved into the very middle of it and made a line there. We then waited for morning light.
As the sky started to light up, some stretcher bearers started out over the airfield and beyond looking for the men who had been shot in yesterday’s battle and left behind.[36] They found one Marine and put him on a stretcher. They had gotten about halfway across the airstrip when some Jap snipers opened up and the stretcher bearers had to abandon their load and get into the nearest hole or crater. As it grew lighter, the Japs threw in a mortar barrage and one of the men in the last machine gun squad of our platoon was hit by shrapnel quite seriously and they took him back as fast as possible for he was not expected to live.
Soon after that, we heard the roar of an airplane and looking over our shoulders toward that part of the island that had not been taken, we saw one of our planes flying rather low trying to spot some target. Suddenly an ack-ack- burst hit him just between the tail and the cockpit, causing little splinters to fly. The plane continued on its way for some hundred yards apparently unhurt, when suddenly the front end twisted right off and went crashing to the ground while the tail went tumbling to earth. I was kind of glad then that I was on the good old solid earth.
The ground here was heavy with sulfur deposits, and it was nice and warm. It was also dangerous as some of the boys received rather serious burns from this soil.
Seeing some dust at the edge of the airfield and hearing shots, I saw I had spotted a sniper’s position – but try as I may to get the Jap himself spotted, I could not see anything of him, only the dust when he shot. I had a very strong feeling of wanting to go to the head, and not knowing how long we were to remain in this position, looked around to see if anyone was standing up. One of the boys in my squad was just walking up from the rear and seeing how nothing was flying at him, I decided it couldn’t be too dangerous. Perhaps the Japs had decided to take a rest out there. I took off my pack and left it in the bottom of the crater and taking my rifle (which I would never [leave laying] around) I moved back to a shallow crater some 25 yards to the rear of our lines.
While I am busy in my newfound head, I shall tell you what we were up against. Up ahead perhaps a couple hundred yards or more was a little hill that had already proved itself a trouble spot. It had done this specifically yesterday when it had cost the outfit we had relieved about half its men. To attack it, we had to cross open country with no cover or concealment. This hill had many names before it was taken, but the one that I have heard most often was Hill 382. It was a regular Gibraltar with caves and machine gun nests throughout its interior. Behind it were also heavy emplacements that protected the hill from attack.[37]
I had just started buckling my belt in my cramped quarters when I felt a bullet zing by my face. It had come so close I could feel the wind. Because the shot was so direct to my head, the crack of the report hurt my eardrums. Several more followed, and I knew that a sniper was after my forsaken life. I knew that I couldn’t stay here; I was supposed to be up with my own outfit in case they moved out, and the crater was too shallow to protect me very much. I decided that the only thing to do was to run like hell to a crater midway to the line, and then from there to the line. I kept looking ahead trying to spot the sniper. I could see nothing, and the zing of the bullets told me he was still after me. I figured that if a sniper could miss that many items (as they usually got their victims between the eyes the first shot) that I had nothing to worry about for he couldn’t shoot. (I guess that was the attitude I had taken toward the end of our time on the line before. I remember many times that a Jap would tear the ground up by me and I would get up and expose myself laughing at the Jap because he couldn’t hit me. I guess I must have been cracking up.)
I sort of hunched myself up in the crater and, taking a deep breath, I started running like a maniac straight toward the crater. I did not hear the machine gun talking, so intent was I on the crater. The only thing I knew was that I had my weight on my left foot and had my right in the air ready to jump into the crater, when suddenly something hit my left leg like a huge fist, and I was thrown head first into the crater. My carbine went flying and I never saw it again. I lay flat in the position I fell, and feeling a burning sensation in my left leg, I looked down at it. My legging was all chewed up on the inside of my leg and only about half of it hung on my leg by threads. It was no job to take it off, and below it I saw a sight that scared me thoroughly. Just below the muscle of the left leg there was a hole big enough to put my fist into, and the blood was coming out of it in a flood. The blood ceased after a few seconds, and I found out later from a Doc on the boat that this was due to the collapsing of the blood vessels, so rapid had been the flow of blood. I could see the bone of my leg quite plainly and it was unhurt. I could almost see around the bone, so deep was the wound. Above it was a burn that had been caused by the creasing of a bullet.
Needless to say, I was scared, and without thinking of the corpsman’s safety I shouted to some of the boys who were in a sixteen-inch crater just even with me, and probably ten feet away at most. I lay there a couple minutes before I heard running feet and felt a sudden weight land right on top of me. The machine gun bullets worked the landscape over the top of my crater for a while. I saw it was one of the sergeants of the rifle squad. He asked me how bad I was hurt, and I raised my pants leg up a little. His eye caught sight of the crease and did not see the big wound. He then told me it was just a scratch and nothing to worry about. I said, “It isn’t? Well, take a look at this.” He kind of whistled and shook his head, and the next minute he took a quick run into the crater next door.
I heard the old faithful machine gun, and again a body landed on me. It was the corpsman [Virgil Deets]; he had been just a step ahead of the machine gun for he had no sooner hit the [deck] than the bullets were cutting up the dirt on both sides of the crater. The corpsman lay with his head by my feet and tried to fix me up, but because he didn’t dare to raise [himself] in the least, he could not fix my leg. He then told me it was impossible to take care of me in this shallow crater, and if I would like to take the chance [he would push] me across the open ground to the sixteen-inch crater where he could fix me up properly. I said yes, it was okay with me. He shot me with a shot of morphine and then yelled to the men in the next crater to stand by to grab me.
Taking hold of my good leg (I was helpless by this time from the results of the wound and the morphine shot) he shoved me up over the edge of the crater and across the open ground to the waiting hands of the men in the next crater. (I met one of these men later at Springfield College, which was used as a rehabilitation hospital, and he told me that old faithful machine gun had chattered away while they moved me, and he showed a graze he had received when he had reached out to grab ahold of me.) They then dragged me down to the bottom of the crater.
The corpsman fixed up the big wound and the graze after rolling my pants leg (or what remained of it) to my knee. The boys took my canteen and laid it beside me and tried to leave things as comfortable for me as possible for they were now going to try their luck against old man Hill 382.
I lay there fully dazed, not caring what was happening, and did not get out of this dazed feeling until about noon. (I had gotten hit about eight thirty in the morning.) I started to come out of the morphine and started to feel better. I became conscious of a funny feeling in my left leg, as though something liquid was running down it. I bent over and looked at it and noticed that the upper part of the bandage was wet with fresh blood, and that blood was running down my leg. I had just enough life in me to figure out that there must be another wound above the others. I then rolled my pants leg above the kneecap – and there coming out of the kneecap was the cutest little fountain I had ever seen. The size of the flow was about the size of a .22 [wound] and was some three inches high.
I didn’t have any bandages on me for they had been used up for other wounds, but in my pockets I found some toilet paper. I put this against the wound with pressure and soon the blood caked and held the paper to the wound.
Feeling the great desire for a drink, I opened my canteen and took several large gulps which had no more hit my stomach than they came right back up. I threw up until I thought my internal organs were coming up, too. When I was through, I could only lay there so weak I could hardly move. This happened many times throughout the day. All I could think of at the time was a can of chicken I had left with my pack to save for some time when I would be hungry. I cursed myself all over the place for not eating it that morning before we headed for this hellish spot.
I regained a little of my strength and kind of wondered what was happening to the boys and how they were making out. I couldn’t make out anything up ahead, except there was a lot of firing and some of the bullets were zinging over my area. I looked back toward the large boulders where we had come through that morning, and seeing a group of Marines there I tried to motion them so I could be taken the hell out of there. They didn’t see me, so I slid back to the bottom of the crater as I didn’t want to get hit by one of those zinging bullets. I’d had enough for one day.
I lay in the bottom of the crater until about four thirty when I heard an increase in the tempo of the firing. Looking up I saw the men of my company walking quickly by.[38] I kind of lost my nerve, for I thought they were going to go back to the boulders and leave me all alone out in the middle of the airfield. The sergeant in charge of our section of machine guns came walking by the crater and looked down. Surprise showed on his face when he saw me, and he asked me why I had not been taken out. He thought I was out on the hospital ship long ago. He went back to the boulders and tried to get the men there to risk some stretcher bearers, but they refused saying it was too risky. The sergeant came back and asked me if I could crawl, I told him I couldn’t – partly because I was afraid to try, and partly because I knew I couldn’t.
The sergeant then asked me if I could stand on my good leg. I told him I could, and he told me to grab hold of his rifle with one hand and around his neck with the other. He then raised me up on his back and ran with me back behind the boulders and laid me down.[39] A corpsman came over and put a bandage on my kneecap. I saw my squad leader sitting on a rock in front of me with a tired, worried look on his face. I didn’t blame him for he lost two more men out the squad besides me that day, and that left only him and another man.[40] I still don’t know how he made out, some told me he cracked up later in the battle and others told me he was killed. I probably will never know.[41]
I had not been there long when an ambulance jeep pulled up and I was loaded into it. The jeep headed for the base of the cliffs, and it seemed with every bump that the pains shot up through my leg. The jeep stopped at the base of the cliffs and there laying on the ground were several other wounded Marines. A corpsman came over to me and I asked him if he knew anything about any of our boys. He told me that the corpsman who had fixed me up and the other one in our company we had known as “Doc” who I had been good friends [with] had been killed at 1130 that morning by bullets between the eyes and that we had lost about half the company before they retreated back to the airfield for they couldn’t remain where they were.[42] I’m afraid that I started crying at that time because I was tired, and all the fight was out of me and the news I had just heard practically broke my heart. The corpsman stroked my head and walked away, for I guess he was hurt by it too.
A jeep pulled up and a couple of the wounded and me were loaded into it and started for the beach. The ride down was exceedingly rough even on the metal tracks, and I far from enjoyed [it]. We were taken out of the jeep and put in a large tent where there were several wounded in rows. They took my helmet away from me and tried to make me comfortable.
I guess while I am waiting for the transportation, I should tell you about the corpsmen. As far as I am concerned, they are the greatest guys that ever walked on a beachhead. Theirs was one of the toughest jobs in battle, for if a man was wounded, they had to try get to him and fix up his wounds regardless of how thick the lead or shells were flying. I have talked to many a Marine, and they all felt as I did.
An amphibious tractor came chugging to shore, and some of us were loaded into it. I looked around as I lay in the bottom of the amphib, and the floor was covered with wounded on stretchers. Near the end of the tractor a Marine was sitting on his haunches and he sure was a pitiful sight. He was covered with blood and was crying like a baby. His eyes looked directly ahead with a vacant stare seeing nothing for their owner had cracked under the terrific strain he had gone through.
We pulled alongside the big hospital ship, and lines were lowered and wound around the handles to my stretcher. I felt the stretcher lifting and grabbed a hold of the line for fear that the stretcher would slip, and I would fall. A couple of corpsmen grabbed ahold of my stretcher, and I was taken to a sack just in front of the operating room. They cut off my clothing and took the souvenirs out of my pocket. I gave everything to the corpsman except the flag, knife, and papers I had described earlier. They put me in one of those contraptions that the hospitals have for patients, and I lay in the sack watching the operation go on. The doctor worked on about three Marines before he took care of me.
Here I shall describe the operating table. It was flat like all operating tables, only this one had sort of a trough built around it filled with blood which moved back and forth with the roll of the ship. I had heard that the doctors worked twenty-four hours a day and these ones certainly looked tired. I decided then that when it became my turn to be worked upon, I would not make sound if I could help it and therefore make it easier on the doctors.
They put me on the table on my back. I said, “I’ve got a beauty for you, Doc,” and tried to smile. I sat hunched up on my elbows and watched them operate for a while until I got tired and had to lay back. I saw the first part of the operation where they took a sort of tool like that used to put on a tight shoe and scrape the wound out thoroughly. That was all I saw for I was tired out by that time.
After they had finished with me, they took me to a sunporch on the side of the ship, and there I got my last good look at Iwo. We set sail that night, and I left Iwo with all its hells behind.
Thus ended twelve days of hell on “HELL’S ACRE!”
[1] LaPorte and the rest of BLT 1-24 sailed to Iwo Jima aboard the USS Hendry (APA-118).
[2] Hendry received her first battle casualties at 1110.
[3] According to the Hendry‘s war diary, these orders arrived at 1448.
[4] The Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP or Higgins Boat) had two machine gun mounts just aft of the crew compartment.
[5] While exact squad assignments are difficult to recreate, photographic evidence suggests that the other members of LaPorte’s squad were Corporal Sandy B. Ball (squad leader), PFC Harold A. Bowman, PFC Frank F. Zebley, and Private Harvey E. Williams. LaPorte was an ammunition carrier.
[6] This area was generally known as “The Quarry.”
[7] LaPorte’s estimation of time is off here. The first units of C/1/24 arrived on Iwo Jima’s Beach Blue 2 at around 1630 hours.
[8] The area to the northwest of the BLT 1-24 landing zone was known as the “East Boat Basin.” Able Company was conducting cave clearing operations in this sector.
[9] Baker Company suffered 29 casualties in the day’s action (two killed, 27 wounded). Casualty records do not specify which of these were suffered in the strafing attack; estimates run between ten to sixteen.
[10] Adding insult to injury (and likely some actual injuries besides), Baker Company was targeted by American warships immediately after the strafing incident.
[11] Charlie Company deployed one platoon early in the day’s fighting to keep contact between Baker and Able Companies. By 1500, the entire unit was on the line.
[12] This was the 4th Marine Division ammunition dump on Beach Blue 1.
[13] LaPorte’s squad leader, Corporal Ball, was a motorcycle aficionado. Other veterans recall him tinkering with a Japanese motorcycle on Iwo, but the machine would not run.
[14] The identity of this man is not known. Charlie Company suffered three fatal wounds on 21 February: PFC Joseph F. Borges (shrapnel wound in chest) was killed outright, while Corporal Raymond A. McAdoo and PFC Richard R. Rusher were evacuated with skull fractures that eventually killed them.
[15] As a rule, machine guns were not to be fired at night except for extreme emergencies.
[16] Corporal Howard “Junior” Cooper.
[17] PFC Carl Edward Cooper was killed in action at Roi-Namur in February 1944. The Cooper brothers enlisted together and served together in D/1/24 until Carl’s death.
[18] Although LaPorte says this happened in Company A, other primary sources indicate that the shooter and the victim were both from Company C, and the event happened on 24 February 1945.
[19] Possibly Sergeant Joseph B. Cowan.
[20] Sergeant Cowan was evacuated with dysentery on 28 February 1945. (Cowan returned to duty after LaPorte was wounded, and served through the rest of the battle.)
[21] LaPorte may be referring to an event on 20 February 1945 when an Able Company platoon entered a draw and was beset by extremely accurate rifle fire. An accidental gas alarm started a stampede to the beach, and snipers picked off several more Marines. However, the casualty rate is exaggerated and the “lone gunman” aspect appears apocryphal.
[22] Probably Corporal Patrick T. Curran. According to his casualty card, Curran suffered “gunshot wound, left testicle” on 25 February 1945; not surprisingly, he was also diagnosed with combat fatigue. He survived and went home to raise a family.
[23] Gas masks were cumbersome, but the bags were often kept as they were handy for storing extra food or souvenirs.
[24] Charlie Company was relieved after suffering heavy casualties on 23 February and sent back to reserve positions.
[25] Charlie Company’s casualties, while hefty, were not so bad as the other two rifle companies by this point in the battle.
[26] Charlie Company was pulled back out of reserve and placed on mop-up detail on 24 February.
[27] A platoon from Charlie Company knocked out a Japanese hospital facility in a cave on 24 February 1945. Second Lieutenant Jack C. Manning received a Bronze Star for his work on this cave; he might be the “platoon leader” LaPorte mentions repeatedly through his narrative.
[28] Possibly Corporal Carl Lloyd McNeally, KIA by gunshot wounds, head on 24 February 1945.
[29] Probably Private Norman F. Lamphere of Albany, New York. Lamphere was slightly wounded on 2 March 1945, returned to his company, and was killed on 9 March 1945 by a gunshot wound to the head.
[30] BLT 1-24 was placed in reserve on the evening of 25 February 1945; this rest period would last until 28 February.
[31] A “ten-in-one” was supposed to feed ten men for one day, or one man for ten days.
[32] BLT 1-24 received 147 replacements on 27 February 1945. Thirty-three were assigned to Charlie Company.
[33] BLT 1-24 returned to the front lines on 1 March 1945.
[34] Charlie Company relived Fox Company, Second Battalion, 23rd Marines.
[35] Remnants of the mining village Minami.
[36] LaPorte is probably referring to Motoyama Airfield #2, a secondary airstrip, rather than the main Motoyama #1 nearer the landing beaches.
[37] LaPorte is describing a series of Japanese defenses that became collectively known as “the Meat Grinder” – Hill 382, the Turkey Knob, and the Amphitheater.
[38] After three repulsed attacks, Charlie Company was forced to fall back to its starting positions for the night.
[39] Unfortunately, the name of LaPorte’s rescuer is not known. He may have been Sergeant Silvio Paulini, Platoon Sergeant Charles Czerweic, or Platoon Sergeant Mike Mervosh (although Mervosh does not mention this event in any of his many post-war recollections).
[40] PFC Harold Bowman (gunshot wound in chest) and PFC Frank Zebley (evacuated as “sick”). Zebley returned to duty on 3 March and was slightly wounded the same day, and subsequently seriously wounded on 8 March.
[41] In fact, Corporal Ball survived the battle – he was slightly wounded on 8 March 1945 but returned within two days. He died in 1989.
[42] BLT 1-24 suffered two corpsman casualties on 1 March 1945. PhM3c Joseph E. Miller was wounded in action, while PhM2c Virgil D. Deets was killed. “Doc” Deets was attached to Charlie Company’s machine gun platoon, and earned a Silver Star for gallantry on this date. Among their Marines, Charlie lost seven killed and 19 wounded, including two successive company commanders.