by boat to Mindanao. He joined the guerrillas. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, then a first lieutenant. In 1943 a submarine took him to Australia. He was flown to the States to receive a Distinguished Service Cross for what General MacArthur described as “extraordinary heroism.” He could have remained there to take the bows he deserved, but he resigned his Army bars in exchange for a Marine sergeant’s stripes and requested combat duty. They sent him to the Third Division. There he trained with those men who marched over dusty roads bellowing the song they had composed to the tune of “McNamara’s Band.”
Training ended and the Third boarded ship to join the armada of 495 vessels “steaming in” to Iwo with the “Anglo-Saxons.” And yet, when the assault Marines did go ashore on February 19, some of them had in their pockets copies of the prayer of a seventeenth century Anglo-Saxon general. One of the chaplains had given them cards bearing Sir Jacob Astley’s plea before the Battle of Edgehill in 1642:
4
It was a bright clear day.
Superforts were bombing, Hellcats were strafing, all the warships and rocket ships were thundering, but Iwo Jima lay deathlike and quiescent—Mount Suribachi squatting toadlike to the south, the black beaches and hummock-speckled sands silent and menacing in the center, the jumble of ridges and hills vaguely visible north.
“Very light swells,” broadcast Vice Admiral Turner’s flagship Eldorado. “Boating: excellent. Visibility: excellent.”
It was a day made for invasion and the Marines went roaring in.
They hit the beaches at about nine o’clock and within an hour both divisions had all their assault battalions ashore and fighting.
One hour.
That was all that Tadamichi Kuribayashi gave the American Marines. Then his gunners struck at the invaders with all the fury of their formidable armament. Shells shrieked and crashed among the invaders, every hummock spat automatic fire and the very beaches erupted with exploding land mines. But the American Marines had had the opportunity to move inland from 200 to 300 yards and that was all they needed.
On the left flank, the Fifth Division was battling to carry out its mission of crossing the island.
“C’mon, you guys,” Manila John Basilone called to his machine-gunners. “Let’s get these guns off the beach.”
They sprinted inland, sinking above their ankles in that hot loose sand, the soles of their shoes turning warm, the calves of their legs protesting against the unfamiliar strain—but Manila John would never see Dewey Boulevard again. A mortar shell crashed in his very footprints and Basilone died with four other Marines.
Below one of the highest terraces barring the path of tanks and amtracks, young Lieutenant Norman Brueggeman jumped erect and shouted to his men:
“If you want to win this war let’s get the hell up there!”
He swung an arm at the top of the terrace, and fell dead —while his men crawled and clambered over the sands and swept inland. In their ears, in everyone’s ears, was the constant crashing of enemy shells, the sighing of bullets, the soughing of the big projectiles, the whizzing of shrapnel. Concussion lifted them and threw them down. They dug foxholes for cover, but the buckshot-sand slid down and filled them in. No hummock could be trusted. A captain sat on one and called out an order to advance. The blasting of a five-inch gun beneath him knocked him unconscious.
Still the attack on the left pressed forward, and with the passage of every new obstacle a new Marine hero was born—too often in his death.
Captain Dwayne ( Bobo ) Mears went after a pillbox blocking his company’s advance. He knocked it out, but a bullet opened a gash in his neck. He waited until it could be bandaged. He moved on. Another bullet tore through his jaw. Blood poured from the ragged hole. He kept on. At last he sank to his knees, his huge vitality ebbing from his big body. Bullets dug spurts of sand around him. A private tried to hide him from sight of the enemy.
“Get the hell out of here,” Mears gasped. “I’ll be all right.”
The corpsmen found him, but he died aboard ship.
Tony Stein did not die until he had fought perhaps the most incredible single fight of the landing. Weighted with ammunition and his stinger, Stein covered his entire company as it moved into position. When it was pinned down, he jumped erect, drawing fire and spotting the enemy guns. Alone, he struck at pillbox after pillbox, killing 20 Japanese. He ran out of ammunition. He threw off his helmet, shucked his shoes, and sprinted back for more bullets. He did this eight times, each time pausing en route to help a wounded Marine to an aid station. At last the Japanese forced his platoon to pull back. Stein covered their withdrawal. Twice his stinger was shot from his hands. But he retrieved it and fired on—until at last the inevitable bullet found him and he died.
It was with such men that the Fourth Division bucked across the island, cutting off Mount Suribachi to the left—while to the rear of both divisions the Japanese gunners made a bloody, burning, smoking shambles of the beachhead. For perhaps two hours after the Japanese had opened up, only a few landing craft were able to pierce that curtain of fire drawn along the shore. Tanks in lighters, amtanks and amtracks sank or blew up on the beaches.
Early in the invasion Lieutenant Henry Morgan brought his tank, the Horrible Hank, into the left-flank beaches—only to have its lighter founder and sink in the surf. Morgan radioed his commander: “Horrible Hank sank.” He went on to have two more tanks blown out from under him. Many of the vital Shermans were stalled before the terraces. They could neither climb nor find traction in the loose sand. Amtanks were forced to back out into the surf to take pillboxes under fire from the water. Bulldozers were needed to cut paths through the terraces. Marston matting was needed to build hasty roadways of steel mesh. But that could not be done until the Fourth Division on the right stormed the high ground from which much of the Japanese fire was coming.
On that extreme right for which Major General Cates had shown so much respect, the “ghouls”of Jumpin’ Joe Chambers had fought into their Gethsemane. They called themselves “ghouls” for the ghostly antiflashburn cream they had smeared on their faces in anticipation of close work with demolition charges. But the cream was not proof against bullets and shell fragments as Chambers led them against the high ground above a rock quarry. They took it. They beat off Japanese attempts to throw them off, but they had only 150 front-line men left when the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth, relieved them that night. By nightfall, the regiment had suffered 35 per cent casualties, but the right flank was nailed down, and on the left of the Fourth Division’s zone the Marines of the Twenty-third Regiment had fought up to the eastern edge of Airfield Number One.
Sergeant Darrell Cole got them there as much as anyone. He led his machine-gun section toward the field and into a network of pillboxes and a storm of fire. He knocked out two positions with hand grenades himself. A trio of pillboxes pinned his men down. Cole directed a torrent of machine-gun fire on the nearest to silence it. The Japanese retaliated with grenades. Cole counterattacked. He slipped forward, armed with a pistol and one grenade. He tossed his bomb and withdrew to get more. He attacked again, hurling grenades—again running back. Still, the Japanese fired. Cole struck a third time. He knocked out the Japanese strong point, and then a bursting grenade
