Strong Men Armed

snuffed out his own life.

Casualties were mounting, and the reinforcing regiments had hunched their shoulders and come ashore. They came in riddled, forming on a battlefield more horrifying than any in the memory of the oldest salts. Death had been violent on Iwo Jima. Few indeed were the corpses not mangled. Some were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay everywhere, rarely within less than 50 feet of the body from which they had been torn. It was as though the owner of a toy factory had gone berserk and strewn handfuls of heads and limbs over a miniature island. Except for the puttee-tapes of the Japanese or the yellowish leggings of the Americans, it was hard to identify the fallen of either side. From it all rose the intensifying reek of death. It had cost the Marines 2,420 casualties to take a beachhead 4,000 yards wide from south to north, 1,000 yards deep at the left where the island had been crossed, 400 yards deep on the right. Of these casualties, close to 600 were surely dead and there were more dying.

During the night there were more casualties under the methodical onslaught of Japanese artillery. The big Japanese rockets also appeared, although they turned out to be harmless. They invariably overshot their marks and landed in the open sea, after first having terrified the Marines by passing overhead with a horrible blubbering noise, trailing showers of red sparks. The Marines soon grew contemptuous of the rockets, calling them “Bubbly- wubblies.” But the Marines were not so derisive of the enemy artillery, especially the fire falling on the beachhead from Mount Suribachi to the south.

This was Iwo’s highest ground. Atop Suribachi the Japanese could look down the Americans’ throats. The volcano would have to be taken.

Big Colonel Harry Liversedge was called “Harry the Horse” both for his size and his galloping style of attack. He had commanded a Raider regiment on New Georgia, and now he led that Twenty-eighth Regiment which had landed on the extreme left flank and cut off Suribachi from the rest of Iwo Jima.

On February 20, the second day of battle, Liversedge’s men faced south toward the volcano and attacked.

They struck down-island, two battalions abreast, while warships, rocket boats and land artillery pounded Suribachi’s approaches. Although the shelling knocked out some pillboxes, it merely unmasked the presence of many others—and the Marines had to go in on foot with dynamite and flame-throwers. There were also Navy and Marine fighters slashing the volcano’s slopes in strafing runs or dropping tanks of napalm, but the fire-bombs merely flamed and went out. There was nothing to catch fire.

The Marines gained only 200 yards. Their casualties grew. The wounded were taken to the beaches, where wine-colored bottles of whole blood swung like strange blossoms on upended rifles, and they were loaded aboard amtracks.

The amtrack Mama’s Bathtub took six maimed Marines aboard and wallowed into the sea with a roar as a Japanese rocket slobbered in from Suribachi. Corporal Bruno Laurenti and Pfcs. William Seward and Alex Hebert had been making round-trip runs since the day before. They were groggy from want of sleep. Laurenti sent Mama’s Bathtub churning out to a mercy ship. It was dark when they reached it, but they discharged their burden. Laurenti wheeled the amtrack around and made for his LST. The ship’s jaws were clamped tight-shut and the skipper would not open. them during darkness and a mounting sea.

Mama’s Bathtub came about and headed for the shore. Halfway in, a huge wave struck the amtrack, and she nearly capsized. Her engine sputtered and died. She began to drift. She floated eight miles out to sea. A Higgins boat came along and took her in tow but the rope broke. The Higgins boat turned to go ashore for another rope.

“We’ll come back,” the coxswain called.

They did not. Laurenti got the motor going just enough to idle the bilge pumps and keep the pontoons from filling with that sea water which would sink them. Mama’s Bathtub began to drift faster. The tiny craft pitched and tossed. The three Marines passed an LSM. They shouted at it, flashed lights, waved signal flags. The LSM chugged on unheeding. It was nearing midnight and it was getting very cold. Iwo Jima is in the North Pacific and this was February. In the bright moonlight the darkly gleaming obsidian waves seemed mountainous. Behind them, they could see rockets exploding in the sky.

They were not rockets, but flares. The commander of Suribachi had fired them after he had signaled his general, “We should rather like to go out of our position and choose death by banzai charges,” and Kuribayashi had curtly answered, “No.” So the Suribachi garrison stayed under cover and sent up flares marking the American lines. Down from the northern ridges came a whistling rain of shells-and the Twenty-eighth Marines passed a night almost as bad as the day.

In the morning, with 40 fighters and bombers harrying the volcano, supported by tanks, half-tracks, naval gunfire and field artillery, Harry the Horse’s regiment pressed slowly forward until by nightfall all lower pockets had been reduced and the base of Suribachi had been reached on both coasts.

That same morning, the trio of chattering Marines in Mama’s Bathtub sighted a destroyer. They signaled. They were seen. The destroyer came carefully alongside and threw them a line. They were towed back to their mother-ship, and helped aboard, exhausted. They staggered below and sank into sleep, while behind them Mama’s Bathtub sank beneath the surface of an angry sea.

The weather had turned bad at Iwo.

Wind and waves were broaching supply craft on the beaches, leaving them helpless targets, capsizing some of them.

On the morning of February 22, as the Twenty-eighth Marines attacked three battalions abreast, a drizzling rain began to fall. It turned into a downpour and Suribachi’s ashes became a clutching gray paste, a sticky goo which fouled rifle breeches and made them impossible to fire except on single-shot. Drenched, exhausted, the Marines moved around the base of the volcano, to either side, fighting all the way. Corporal Dan McCarthy alone shot 20 Japanese. Sergeant Merritt Savage killed seven as he led his platoon in a charge. One Marine was charged by a saber-swinging Japanese officer. He seized the sword, wrenched it away with dripping hands and cut off the officer’s head. Another Marine jumped alone into a blockhouse and killed its 10 occupants before he died. Corpsmen crept up to the muzzles of the enemy guns to treat wounded Marines. Sergeant Charles Harris paddled a rubber raft out in the rocky surf to come in among the enemy bullets and rescue two Marines lying helpless on the west side of Suribachi.

By dusk Suribachi was surrounded.

All but a 400-yard strip on the west coast was in Marine hands. Already it had become obvious that the Japanese defenders were cracking. A language officer had come forward with a loudspeaker to broadcast surrender appeals. Shortly after, the Marines saw Japanese leaping to their deaths from the lip of the crater. It was a sure sign.

“At dawn,” said Harry the Horse, “we start climbing.”

They started at dawn and went right up.

Sergeant Sherman Watson and Pfcs. Ted White, George Mercer and Louis Charlo climbed to the summit without spotting a single Japanese. Watson reported back. Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson of the Second Battalion made a decision. He rounded up a 40-man patrol under Lieutenant Harold Schrier.

“If you reach the top,” Johnson said, “secure and hold it.” He handed Schrier a square of colored cloth. “And take this along.”

It was an American flag. Lieutenant George Wells had brought it ashore from the transport Missoula.

Schrier’s patrol picked its way up the northern or inner slope of the volcano. They climbed through the debris of shelled positions, through an eerie silence. Battle sputtered to their rear, but here there was no sound. They worked past the Japanese defenses and came to the crater where they spread out and charged.

Nothing—nothing but the lava pit yawning beneath their feet.

Suribachi had fallen.

At half past ten the American flag was raised above it, flown from a hollow pipe someone had found and jammed between rocks. It was raised by Schrier and Sergeants Ernest Thomas and Henry Hansen, by Corporal Charles Lindberg and Pfc. James Michels. It fluttered while Sergeant Louis Lowery photographed the event, and Pfc. Jim Robeson snorted, “Holly-wood Marines!” and wisely kept a wary eye peeled for Japanese.

They came. Even as the tiny flag brought forth a cheer from the Marines below, an enraged Japanese