3
The hated Anglo-Saxons?
Though there were indeed many men of that racial strain among the force forming to come against Iwo Jima, the Japanese who had mistakenly assumed at the war’s outset that their chief opponents were to be the British Army and Navy had again erred in identifying the foe.
They were Americans. There were Anglo-Saxon names such as Erskine or Gray or Chamberlain. But there were others such as Schmidt or McCarthy or Stein or LaBelle or Basilone, and there was that commonalty of the Smiths which could be any or all of these.
Chief of the Smiths was old Howlin’ Mad, now a gruff lieutenant general of sixty-three years. He was commander of the expeditionary troops mounting out for Iwo, a position which was purely titular. Kelly Turner commanded at sea and Major General Harry Schmidt would be in charge ashore once the Fifth Corps had landed. Smith sought to explain his presence with the quip: “I guess they brought me along in case something happens to Harry Schmidt.”
Actually, he was along because the admirals wanted him to be. Smith and his staff were the most experienced amphibious commanders in the Pacific. Even so, the admirals’ admiration for Smith did not preclude a recurrence of the dispute over the volume of preinvasion bombardment to be delivered by the Navy.
The Navy planned three days of preinvasion shelling timed to coincide with the Fast Carrier Forces’ first strikes on Tokyo. These raids would neutralize enemy homeland air strength. If they began, say, four days before the invasion, and were interrupted in two days or less by either bad weather or enemy resistance, then Japan would have enough time to recover from them and strike American shipping at Iwo. If they began only three days before the landings, as planned, and were interrupted in two days or less, then Japan would not have enough time to recover. The Navy’s other reason for restricting the preinvasion bombardment to three days was that this was sufficient and that anything beyond it would be subject to the law of diminishing returns.
The Marines, still mindful of how little was knocked out at Tarawa and Peleliu, as well as how much was destroyed at Roi-Namur, made four separate requests for extended shelling, one of them asking for ten days of it.
The Navy refused, for the reasons cited, the most telling of which was the one concerning the law of diminishing returns. Three days’ shelling did get the Marines safely ashore. After that they had to go against Kuribayashi’s masterly defenses the only way possible: on foot with a hand weapon. Events proved that nothing else but target pinpointing by troops
Harry Schmidt also spoke, scowling heavily to conceal his inner tension. “The landing force is ready for combat,” he said. “We expect to get on their tails and keep on their tails until we chop them off.”
It was Schmidt who had done most of the planning for the Iwo assault, but the man who had contrived the masterpiece at Tinian had found no lonely unguarded beaches on Iwo Jima. Here it was either east beaches or west beaches with only the forecasts of wind and tide to suggest which might be easier. Schmidt chose the east. The Fourth Division would go in on the right or north, the Fifth Division on the left.
Commanding the fledgling Fifth was Major General Keller Rockey. He had been Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps before taking over his division a month after it was activated in January, 1944. Though big Keller Rockey’s outfit was new to battle, neither he nor many of his men were. Rockey had fought in World War One and could wear the French
Sergeant Basilone could have spent the rest of the war making War Bond tours in the States. “But it was like being a museum piece,” he explained, when his astonished new buddies in the Fifth asked what had possessed him to come back to the islands. “I kept thinking of how awful it would be if some Marines made a landing on Dewey Boulevard on the Manila waterfront and Manila John Basilone wasn’t among them.”
So Sergeant Basilone and other veterans such as Corporal Johnny Geddings—the parachutist whom Brute Krulak had called “The Pineapple Kid” on Choiseul—were back leading untried youths like Pfc. Jacklyn Lucas or Corporal Tony Stein.
Stein was a youth of unusual good looks, and he was tough and bold as well. He had passed the time in Hawaii learning to use a special weapon he had devised. It was an air-cooled machine gun stripped from a wrecked Navy fighter. It was called a stinger. Stein had it with him as he left Camp Tarawa with the Twenty-eighth Marines and the regiment began boarding its ships.
Stowed away aboard another ship was young Jacklyn Lucas. He was not yet seventeen. He had enlisted at fourteen, lying about his age. It was easy to believe he was older, for he was a young bull at five feet eight inches and 200 pounds. Jacklyn Lucas had been in the brig twice already. The first time for fighting; the second for being absent without leave, for being in possession of a case of beer which was not his, for beating up the MP who sought to shut off his frolic. Two sentences of thirty days’ bread-and-water were enough to convince Lucas that he was stuck in a “chicken outfit.” He went down to the docks where his cousin was boarding ship with the First Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines. He went aboard with them. On January 10, 1945, his own outfit—the Sixth Base Depot in Hawaii—declared him a deserter. But Jacklyn Lucas couldn’t care less. He was off to Iwo to fight with the Fifth Marine Division.
The Fourth Marine Division was also mounting out of Hawaii to fight at Iwo Jima. It had been only a year since the Fourth sailed straight to Roi-Namur from the West Coast, but the division was already as salty as outfits that had “been out” three times that long. It still had its old salts, men as radically different as Jumpin’ Joe Chambers, the hell-for-leather leader of Third Battalion, Twenty-fifth; as tight-lipped, taciturn Captain Joe McCarthy, still commanding Company G of the Twenty-fourth Marines with a Silver Star from Saipan and two battle stars to his credit; and as little Sergeant Ross Gray, still moving quietly along with Company A of the First Battalion, Twenty- fifth. They called him Preacher Gray. He had studied for the ministry. He read his Bible constantly. He had held church services before the guns of Roi-Namur had ceased and been a carpenter on Saipan until his buddy was killed. Then he changed. He volunteered to fire a BAR on Tinian and now the Preacher was going to lead a platoon on Iwo.
Commanding such men was the oldest salt of them all. Major General Clifton Cates had been in Belleau Wood and had come out of France loaded with American and French decorations. He commanded the First Marines the night the Ichikis shuffled off to annihilation at the Tenaru; he had commanded the Fourth Division when it was the spearhead at Tinian. He was a leader of invincible aplomb. His division had drawn the toughest assignment of landing on the right beneath the guns of the northeastern cliffs.
“You know,” Clifton Cates said slowly to a war correspondent, “if I knew the name of the man on the extreme right of the right-hand squad of the right-hand company of the right-hand battalion, I’d recommend him for a medal before we go in.”
As the Fourth was making the 3,800-mile voyage to Iwo, the men of the Third Marine Division on Guam prepared to follow in floating reserve—under the new commanding general they called “The Big E.”
Graves Erskine had been Lieutenant General Smith’s chief of staff. Now, at forty-six, already wearing two stars, he led a division. His men had named him well, not so much for his physique, which was strong, but for the strength of his will, for the disciplined intelligence evident on his handsome face. In France during World War One, Erskine had taken a patrol of 38 men into no man’s land and had come back with four. His commanding officer said: “Go back out there and throw a rock at that machine gun so it will shoot at you and then we can knock it out.” Erskine went back and threw the rock. He was soft-voiced and his smile could be gentle, but his eyes were green and cold. He was stern. On Guam, he had courtmartialed artillerymen for firing short rounds that killed Marine riflemen. But he had the respect of his men—of men such as Sergeant Reid Carlos Chamberlain.
He had been Lieutenant Chamberlain once. That was in the Philippines, where he had fought as a guerrilla for a year and a half. Before that he had been a corporal with the old Fourth Marines. He had fought on Cavite, Bataan, Corregidor. Five hours after The Rock fell, suffering from malaria and multiple wounds, he made his escape
