CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Iwo Jima
In February 1945, while the 1st Marine Division recovered on Pavuvu, the 5th Marine Division sailed for its first and only fight of the war on the volcanic island of Iwo Jima.
CLARENCE REA
We had no idea where we were headed. They called our destination “Island X” until the day they summoned us noncoms and officers into a room on the ship. There, they had a map of Iwo Jima. That was the first time we had heard of the place. They told us we were going to win Iwo in three days and then board ships to meet the 1st Marine Division. We were supposed to take Okinawa together. This would have been a good deal for Basilone—that was his old unit.
CHUCK TATUM
Colonel Butler came on the loudspeaker and told us we were going to fight on Iwo Jima. It was going to be the closest battle to Japan so far in the war.
It took forty-two days for us to get there, aboard ship. We were on the LST on the way to Iwo Jima, and I don’t know why but they had us on guard duty, guarding the ship’s deck, that far out at sea. Anyway, it was my turn. The LST had all our gear on it, including our seabags. I was getting sleepy and lazy and I lay down on a seabag. One of them wasn’t very comfortable, and I said to myself, “Golly, that’s a bottle of whiskey in there.”
Well, I liberated it. Sure enough, it was a fine flask of Old Taylor bourbon whiskey. After I got off duty, I took it up to where the guys in the machine gun platoon were. I hid it until the next day, and showed it to my friend Herb. He had two bottles of Coca-Cola. So we mixed it together and all had the biggest party as long as the whiskey lasted.
Everybody had some anticipation. Some nervousness. But I don’t remember being afraid then. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. What were they going to do—let me off ship? I didn’t know what to do except do whatever I was told to do.
CLARENCE REA
On the way to Iwo, there was some sniper activity on Saipan. So we stopped there. I was assigned to take a team out into the mountains and get the sniper who’d been causing trouble. We were out on a mountain at night and had a dog handler with us. The idea was that these dogs could spot a sniper in the dark by smell. Man, those dogs were great. One of my squads was with me. We were out about two o’clock in the morning. I’d worked with dogs a lot before, back at Pendleton. The idea was that a dog points in the direction he thinks the sniper is, just like a bird dog would. You have to get close to the dog in the dark to see which direction he’s pointing.
The dog alerted. I walked up to the handler and pointed to where the dog had alerted to. He was on about an eight-foot leash, and as I turned around and walked back to my squad, this dog came around and bit me in the stomach. I have no idea why the dog did that. It was a Doberman. That was kind of a scary thing that happened. But luckily because of my cartridge belt, the dog didn’t hurt me. But if I hadn’t had that belt on, my stomach would have been all over that mountain. Oh, and we got that sniper.
CHUCK TATUM
A religious service was held two days before we landed. They had a sailor guy who had some religious training, I guess. He talked pretty good on the Bible. He conducted a service, maybe thirty-minute sermon. My favorite hymn was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” They used to sing it in Bible class as a kid. I didn’t tell anyone this was my favorite hymn, but I remember we sang it that day, and I liked that they did. The guy quoted from Psalm 23—you know the one that goes “The Lord is my shepherd,” and that’s pretty much my favorite passage from Scripture. So that made me feel better, too. All the guys were there for that service. I don’t remember anyone being an atheist.
Sure, I believed in God, but I never had any sense that God was going to single me out for protection. You couldn’t pray for yourself. You had to pray for everybody. That’s how I felt. I had read this book just before joining the Marine Corps, Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd Douglas. It’s about this guy who needs to use an ambulance right when this famous doctor did. He lives, but the doctor dies. To pay everything back, his obsession becomes to always do better. That’s how I wanted to live my life—selflessly like that.
CLARENCE REA
They bombed Iwo for thirty days before we ever got there. Bombed. Shelled. Everything you could think of to soften it up. These battleships were firing these big shells on the island. The bombers flying overhead. You’d think none of the enemy would ever survive. We were supposed to take Iwo Jima in three days then go on and take Okinawa. That was our mission.
Well, it ended up being thirty-two days on Iwo, and a hell of a lot of people killed.
CHUCK TATUM
February 19, 1945, was D-day for the invasion of Iwo Jima. What do I remember? Oh heck. I slept in my dungarees, woke up about 4 A.M., and got my gear ready. Our last meal on board was steak and eggs early that morning. The eggs were powdered. The steak was worse than gasket material. But the coffee was good. One thing I remember—it was morbid—but I kept thinking that a lot of these same people wouldn’t be eating tonight. The guys I knew so well. It was true.
CLARENCE REA
We waited as the island was being shelled. As daylight came, we could see the bombings and the smoke from the shellfire coming from the battleships. Everything was firing all around us.
CHUCK TATUM
They lashed wooden boxes full of C rations along the edge of the amtracs. Steve Evanson, the assistant gunner, and myself had the job of operating the big .50-caliber guns going in. Our other job, as soon as we got to shore, was to cut the ropes of the wooden boxes and kick the food overboard.
CLARENCE REA
I was a platoon sergeant by this point, some thirty-two men in my charge. We started getting into our amtracs. I had one assigned to me, Basilone had one, Clint Watters had one. That’s where we parted. John, Clint, myself, and our buddies shook hands and said, “See you later.” We got in our amtracs. Then we headed for the beach.
CHUCK TATUM
We were in the first landing wave. Going into the beach, there was nothing to shoot at, but Steve and I shot every now and again to bolster our courage. All around us was smoke and noise and confusion. Heavy guns from the ships out at sea pounded the island. Overhead flew Corsairs and Hellcats on bombing drops. The island was really getting hit hard.
Our tractor came into the beach and turned. They lowered the rear ramp, and all the guys ran out except Steve and me. We started to kick the stuff off. But very quickly the guy in the tractor took off while we were still up there. We screamed and hollered at him to stop, but he couldn’t hear us. By now we’d gone a long ways down the beach. We were way, way gone from the rest of our guys. Finally, I got the driver’s attention. I jumped off the edge of the tractor. Steve tossed me the machine gun and jumped. It was a nine-foot drop off the top, plus we had the machine gun and tripod. Both of us ended up on the sand. Unfortunately we never got all the C rations kicked off.
Ahead, we saw these big sand dunes. We started running off the beach toward these terraces. The first danger we saw was this Marine Corps bomber coming parallel to the beach. The pilot had been shot and was dead at the controls. I could see his face. He was only about a hundred yards away. He was shooting the sand right in front of us. The plane turned and headed out to the ocean. It hit one of those tractors and it exploded.
CLINTON WATTERS
When I landed on Iwo, I didn’t feel any fear. That incident with God I’d had at Bougainville had changed my life.
The Japanese had made terracing out of the volcanic ash on the beach, and as we landed the footing was just terrible. Every time you took a step, it filled in with ash. You couldn’t run. You couldn’t hurry to get up and over the banking. Even when the tanks came to shore, they got mired down and stranded on the beach. The drivers had to wait so grading could be done before they could get up and over the terracing.
CLARENCE REA
People say that the initial landings on Iwo weren’t that bad, but don’t believe it—it was bad. We hit the Red Beach One under heavy fire. They opened up on us with big guns on Suribachi and others at the other corner of the island. Immediately, there were guys dying all over. My first lieutenant had just gone ashore and had his left arm blown off at the shoulder. He wasn’t more than ten feet from the boat. He was evacuated right away. I hated watching the kids of my platoon get hit. That’s how I thought of them—as my kids. And I called them that.
Your training tells you to keep moving forward. That’s what you’ve gotta do. It’s like if you’re in a race car, you don’t think about getting killed. You’ve got an objective before you. That’s all you do.
We tried to move up over the black sand bank that was in front of us. We got over it and we lost another man, my squad leader, who was to my left. I heard one of my other guys yell, and I looked around, and the only thing left of my squad leader was his one boot sticking up out of the sand.
CHUCK TATUM
They’d told us to get off the beach as soon as possible. So Steve and I climbed these big terraces. When you’re climbing those sand dunes with a machine gun, sixty pounds of ammo, and everything else you’ve got on you, you’re really struggling. We finally got to the top of one, but then there’s three or four more to go. We finally got to the last one, and Steve and I were exhausted. We were also all by ourselves. We looked around for our unit, but couldn’t see any traces of the rest of our guys. Between Steve and me we only had five hundred rounds of ammo in two boxes. With our machine gun, that meant we had less than two minutes of firing time. Being separated from our platoon was the last thing we wanted just then.
Just then I looked back to the beach and saw the third wave was coming in. John Basilone was leading that wave, and I recognized him. The forward motion of that third wave carried Basilone close to where Steve and I were.
A Jap shell shwish-shwished in and hit with a blast off to our right. Up exploded a huge mound of black sand. All hell broke loose. The Japs dropped mortars, artillery shells, one right after another in a huge bombardment. Jap shells cascaded from the sky, and big showers of sand fell all over us. Men tried to dig in, but that’s pretty hard to do when you’re still on sand dunes. We all hit the deck and hugged the earth.
One lone Marine wasn’t digging in. He was running back and forth between soldiers, shouting, yelling, kicking butts. “Move out!” he kept saying. “Get your butts off the beach!” A group of men followed him. It was Basilone.
CLINTON WATTERS
We were taking quite a lot of mortar shells and fire and lost a lot of men right from the beginning. I was maybe three-quarters of the way up the banking, maybe fifty yards up and stalled, when Basilone came running up. By that time, we’d already lost several men. Basilone got us all moving and up on the banking. We fought our way up toward the airport.
We ran into pillboxes with the enemy firing out—concrete bunkers with sand way up over them so even if shells hit, they weren’t wiped out. We soon learned there were lots of underground tunnels in that area, too. The Japanese came at you from behind when you weren’t expecting it.
CHUCK TATUM
Basilone saw our machine gun and ran right over to me. He whacked me in the head, the signal to go into motion at his command. I couldn’t see anything, but by looking down his arm, I could just see the aperture of this big, giant pillbox. Basilone had seen it from behind, while he was still coming up the beach.
“Fire on that target!” Basilone yelled. Steve and I set up the machine gun. But it was so full of sand it wouldn’t work. I tell ya—right on the beach in the middle of battle all our training kicked in, and we cleaned the machine gun right there. It only took about thirty seconds, but it felt like a year. The second time we tried it, our machine gun fired. We were in business.
Basilone directed the fire into the pillbox. I can still see our tracers hitting it. Then Basilone found a guy from the demolition squad to run right along our line of fire up to the pillbox without us hitting him. The guy ran to within fifteen feet of the pillbox, and Basilone whacked me on the head again, this time the signal to quit firing. The guy ran the last few yards to the pillbox and threw ten pounds of Composition C in the aperture of the pillbox. Well, this blew things to kingdom come. Big chunks of concrete. When all the debris had fallen, Basilone had me open up again. I shot some more.
Then he found a corporal named Pegg, a flamethrower operator, who ran up to the pillbox and gave it several bursts of napalm. I’d say napalm is one of the most dangerous weapons in war. Basilone made me quit again, hit me on the head, and Pegg got out of the way. I was lying on the ground, operating the machine gun, and Basilone was behind me. He reached down and unhooked the machine gun from the tripod. The ammo belt was still on it. He picked up the machine gun with the bail* on it and screamed in my ear to get the belt. So we ran forward. Basilone carried the machine gun in his hands. And I carried the belt. He’s running, and I’m running with him.
We got to the top of the pillbox. Basilone knew those Japanese would exit the pillbox. Sure enough, when we got to the top, here were eight or so Japanese running out the back. Basilone mowed them down with the machine gun, firing from the hip, me still holding the belt. They were on fire, from the flamethrower, yes. It was a mercy killing more than anything.
This is the first up-close kill I’ve seen. I could give you a pound of adrenaline. It was a hell of a war going on, that’s what I was thinking. We’ve been here less than thirty minutes and already we’re right in the thick of things.
We climbed up a slope and found ourselves at the very end of the airstrip, where they turn the planes around. We were still under intense fire. Later we learned the fire was coming from a nest of Jap gun emplacements on the slopes of Mount Suribachi, about a mile away.
We were also taking fire from our own ships. We’d moved ahead so fast that we’d come right up under our own shells. It was a very bad place to be.
CLINTON WATTERS
When we got up to the start of the airport, we could see a lot of revetments where they parked the planes. I led my people to the first revetments—it was a bank of lava-type stuff, about eight feet high, that wrapped around where the plane would be, except there were no planes because they were smashed up along the field. We went over the banking and down into the flat part of this revetment where the plane would be. We were going south to north, and then crossed over the north bank when Basilone stopped us. He hollered and said, “Bring the men back on this side—you’re out too far in front! I’m going back to get a tank or something to see if we can get some artillery in here!” Then he went running to get us support. That was the last time I saw him.
CHUCK TATUM
Basilone turned around and handed me the machine gun. I thought we should get back with everybody else from our unit. But Basilone wouldn’t let us retreat. He stopped me right in my tracks and said, “You guys gotta stay here come hell or high water. I’m going back to get more troops. We can fight our way across.” Then he took off, back to the beach to get more troops.
Basilone placed Tatum, Watters, and the others on the edge of the airfield strategically. He knew they had come far enough and had to hold this critical terrain with a field of fire across the airfield.
CLINTON WATTERS
I directed my men to go back across the revetment and stay there behind the south bank. I waited until they got back over there before I started back. I was in the flat area in the base of that revetment, when a mortar shell dropped in there. It was just like someone hit me in the base of the spine, with a hammer. The blast knocked me down and felt like it hit my back when actually the shrapnel hit me in my thigh. Grains of coarse black sand also got blasted in my right eye and it was bleeding. That was it for a while. After I was hit, I crawled over the banking and lay there. I couldn’t stand.
CHUCK TATUM
I couldn’t tell you in real time how long he was gone. But pretty soon I looked back the way we had come, and I saw Basilone and three or four other Marines running back to where we were. He was seventy-five yards from me, less than a football field. I heard this incoming mortar shell come in. That mortar shell hit right near Basilone and the other Marines.
I didn’t see anyone moving. I knew they were all dead. That’s when I realized we had lost Basilone. Word went down the line from hole to hole. “They got Basilone.” It was ten-thirty in the morning.
CLARENCE REA
My good friend John Basilone, who was off to my left with a machine gun platoon, was killed. I didn’t see his death, but one of the guys told me later about it. I miss him an awful lot, even now.
CLINTON WATTERS
Soon enough the corpsman came over. He wrapped up my leg and gave me a shot of some dope. “Sorry,” he said, “but there isn’t anybody to help you get back to the beach. I guess you’re going to have to do it on your own.” So I started crawling back to the beach. It was maybe a third of a mile away. The ground was sandy, hard to move. I ripped the bandage off my leg and found that easier going. I crawled a long ways, and my leg bled quite a bit.
I was maybe halfway back to the beach when I saw a young Marine. He was just wandering around aimlessly. Shells were landing in his area.
“Get down!” I hollered at him. The shells were flying all around.
“I can’t see!” he hollered back.
“Just stay right where you are then,” I yelled over the noise. “I’ll be right there.” I crawled over to him and said, “I can’t walk. But if you can help me up, then I’ll direct us both back to the beach.”
So that’s how we got back to the beach, him and me. When we got back to the beach, the Navy guys were there. They took the blinded man right out to the hospital ship. He had to have some fast treatment. A while later they took me out to a barge in the water, because I wasn’t considered critical. To this day, I don’t know who that man was or what happened to him afterward. I often wonder if he ended up permanently blinded.
CHUCK TATUM
We had what I call “the big Iwo Jima Turkey Shoot.” It consisted of us guys that Basilone took up there, maybe eighteen or nineteen guys. We’ve only got one machine gun between us and half a box of ammo left. With Basilone down, we dug into our holes and stayed put. It would have been safer to get out of there, but Basilone had ordered us to stay and hold our position. Even with him dead, we obeyed his order.
After a while, someone hollered, “Hey, there they go!” We looked down the airstrip, and there was six or seven Japanese running from the beach side to the other side. Well, Steve grabbed the machine gun and mowed them down. Fine with me, but I knew we’d need to conserve ammo. There were no officers or sergeants around. I kinda took charge. I told the guys that the next time we see any Japs, the BAR guys would need to get them. They did. They spent all afternoon shooting Japanese.
The day wore by. I started to get concerned about our longevity, to be honest. About one in the afternoon I ate a K ration. I hadn’t eaten since four o’clock in the morning. We were there all day long, fighting, waiting, fighting, waiting. Around four-thirty I looked around at the end of the airstrip. There was Sergeant Windle coming over the end of the airstrip, with the rest of B Company. They came right to where we were. They had an ammo carrier, so we resupplied then.
CLARENCE REA
We fought our way to the airfield. By the time we secured the airfield, it was dark. We holed up for the night. I got my guys all situated on the line where we were very secure.
That first evening, I was sitting with a couple of my squad leaders under a red Japanese meatball painted on the wing of a wrecked airplane on the airstrip. We’d found an old phonograph that had these old Japanese records, you know, and were sitting there playing that thing. All of a sudden, this screaming and hollering came at us. A Japanese soldier was charging our way. The word quickly went out to the guys on the line, and they shot him almost instantly.
CHUCK TATUM
I was promoted that first day. We were getting the lines set up that evening, and my sergeant, Windle, called me over and said, “Tatum, you take the squad.” I said, “Why me? I don’t want to be a squad leader on Iwo Jima.” He said, “Well it just so happens that you’re now the ranking PFC in the company.” Our company had suffered severe losses during the beach assault. By the end of the day, we had seventeen men killed and fifty-one wounded.
CLINTON WATTERS
That night they took me to the hospital ship, where they operated on me. They operated on my eye and leg the same night. They operated on my eye first and took out all the sand. I could still see out of it all right. They were quite concerned I was going to lose my eye from infection, but I didn’t. My eye has never bothered me since, even though I still have one little speck of sand that’s visible even today. Then they operated on my leg. The shrapnel had gone into my thigh and lodged there without exiting. They cut a place on the inside of my thigh and pulled the piece of shrapnel the rest of the way through. Then they stuffed a piece of gauze all the way through the inside of my leg. They propped me up on my side and poured penicillin on that gauze. It acted just like a wick. They also gave me penicillin shots in my rear end, every four hours, night and day, for two weeks. I was so sore I had to sleep on my side and stomach. I tell you, my rear end hurt more than my wound.
CHUCK TATUM
That first night on Iwo Jima was terrifying. It’s worse fighting at night than any other time. Remember, the Japs knew the island perfectly. We didn’t even know where we were. Neither did we know which way they were going to attack us from. To put it bluntly: We didn’t know anything.
We surmised there’d be a huge banzai attack, so we set up six machine guns to put up a line of fire. But the first night they didn’t come.
I was so tickled to be alive the next morning.
Having landed and secured one of Iwo Jima’s three airfields, the Marines began their conquest of the island, by attacking west to east, yard by yard.
CHUCK TATUM
The morning after the invasion it was raining. Cold, too. It made everything muddy and miserable. Word came down the line who had been killed and who’d been severely wounded, out of the action. Lieutenant Dreger, Gunnery Sergeant Kavato, Sergeant Lutchkus, Brookshire, Whaley, Pospical. Those were just in the machine gun platoon. All capable leaders. There were many more.
CLARENCE REA
The next morning we started out again, this time on the left side of the island going north. Shelling was heavy during the night, every night. You were lucky to get fifteen minutes of sleep. I never slept for more than thirty minutes each day, my whole time on Iwo Jima.
From about the third day onward, the Japanese artillery fire got very heavy. Under heavy fire, I’m sure everybody feels different. I had thirty men I was worrying about. You’re trying to pick out targets, you’re just so busy you don’t really think about anything other than what you’ve got to do. I’m sure you’ve had dangerous experiences where you don’t realize how in danger you are, so that you don’t even think about it. At the time, you’re just too damn close.
CHUCK TATUM
A lot of fire came to us that day from Suribachi, a mountain that loomed over us on the island’s western coast. But the Japs didn’t hit us then. The rounds were too short. They tried, all over the island, they tried. We found an empty Jap pillbox and took cover there. We figured they would never direct their fire at their own pillbox. There was just a lot of shooting that day. A lot of action. A lot of noise.
A night or two later we experienced our first banzai charge. Maybe 9 or 10 P.M., shadowy shapes appeared on the horizon. You wonder what it’s all about. Then all these enemy soldiers with their bayonets fixed started running right at us. They ran low to the ground and were screaming, “Marine, you die!” and a whole lot of other stuff that was just undecipherable. High-pitched shrieks. Really eerie stuff.
By reflex I opened up my machine gun and just kept it going within my field of fire, traversing it back and forth and back and forth. I kept my finger glued to the trigger and was so tense I forgot to fire in short bursts like you were supposed to. Soon the barrel of my machine gun turned red from heat. In no time flat I’d spent a whole belt of ammo. Steve quickly snapped a new belt in place, and we were back in business. With the second belt, I was calmer and fired like I was supposed to. The whole attack lasted about an hour. No one slept after that.
Meanwhile in the hospital on Guam…
CLINTON WATTERS
All that penicillin must have worked, because I kept my leg and it healed up well. I was in the hospital in Guam when I was told that Basilone had been killed. That was a shock. It was hard to believe. He seemed invincible. I don’t know when Johnston and Wheeler were killed, but they were in his wedding party, too. And Martini, the other sergeant in the party, he lost his arm and got the Silver Star for it.
You would hear things in the hospital, just rumors from Iwo. I wondered how the platoon was making out. Some of those people still out there were pretty young.
Meanwhile on Iwo Jima…
CLARENCE REA
After that first couple of days it was pretty scary. We didn’t think we gained anything but a couple of yards on the beach. You didn’t know for sure what was going to happen. There was a lot of doubt.
I was standing there when they raised the first flag on Suribachi. I wasn’t up on there, I was down below. All of a sudden you heard the ships blasting their horns. Somebody noticed the movement on that mountain, and everybody started looking up there; then you could see them putting up the stars and stripes. It was only a couple hundred yards away. It was absolutely amazing. Guys started yelling and cheering. Most of us had tears in our eyes.
I thought, At least we’ve got the mountain; now we’ve got the rest of the job to do. Hell, we still had three-quarters of the island to take. There is something about seeing that flag that builds up a courage or something in you, that makes you want to get the hell going, get the job done, and get out of here. It inspired us to go forward as it did for every kid on that island.
I saw the second flag go up later. That’s the one you see in the famous pictures and the statue. The first one was the one that got the reception.
CHUCK TATUM
To give you an idea of the big picture: Iwo Jima was a series of daily battles. The fighting was continuous. We advanced one yard at a time. There was no no-man’s-land. The enemy could be fifty to sixty feet in front of us. Often we fought all through the night and into the next day with no rest.
CLARENCE REA
The Japanese had what they called these “spider traps.” These were fifty-gallon oil drums buried in the sand. The lids on them, they were hinged. There’d be a Japanese soldier squatted down in it with the lid down. They had grass and stuff on top of it, so we’d walk right on over it and wouldn’t know it. Then, when we were in front of them, they’d raise the lid, get their rifle out, and fire at us, then quickly close the lid again. Many times, you didn’t know they were behind us like this. Sometimes we were able to find the man, if we could find him. But other times not. You turn around and look back, and all you see is level ground and weeds. These traps were everywhere. Eventually we got them all.
CHUCK TATUM
George Van Conkelberg had been the gunner in our squad, but he had a tooth that got infected on the way to Iwo Jima. He came ashore on D plus five or six. Technically, Van should have been made squad leader, because he had two years longer in the Marines than me. But I guess I had more battle experience than he did, after those few days of fighting. He was really pissed because I was the corporal now. He was a couple years older than me and kinda treated me like his little brother.
Once, Van noticed me chain-smoking after a heavy bombardment. I lit one cigarette after another. He said, “Tatum, I need to talk to you about that smoking. You’re smoking too much, that’s dangerous for your health.” I said, “F-you, man. Being on this island is dangerous for my health.”
CLARENCE REA
One night we were taking heavy shelling, and we got into this big shell hole for safety, me and a couple guys. These shells were hitting all around us. One shell hit really close to our hole and blasted sand all over us. A second shell hit. We had one young guy in our outfit, a really young kid, maybe eighteen, we called him Chicken, he just lost it mentally and took off running. Well, the Japanese shot him before he got fifteen yards. That’s the kind of stuff you remember, and it really hurts.
The fighting took a mental toll on you. The island was only eight miles long by four wide. But the fighting went on, day and night, for thirty-three days. You knew the only way to end this madness would be to kill every human being—every Japanese soldier—on the island.
On the tenth day of fighting, in the northern portion of the island, the Marines encountered a rock wall named “362A” on the map. The Japanese had turned this work of nature into a fortress.
CHUCK TATUM
Maybe a week in we experienced our darkest of days fighting on Hill 362A. It was a horrible place. No place to dig in. No way. The name “362” referred to the height—362 feet high. It was probably the second largest part of the island.
When we first approached it, it was nothing to look at. We were in a flat area at first, and nobody knew anything about the hill. All we could see was this big lump of land ahead. Later, we learned it was the Japs’ number one defense line going across the island. So they were going to hold it at all costs. We kinda stumbled into it, honestly. We had no idea how many pillboxes were hidden in the side of that hill. More than three hundred, we discovered.
Captain Jimmy Mayenschein was leading our group then, the XO in our company. Jimmy was very popular. Shorter, maybe five-seven. Maybe not even that tall. But he was all man. He’d been a Paratrooper and had already seen combat at Bougainville. The Japs got us trapped in this area during a bombardment. Finding pathways out was difficult. Captain Mayenschein got us out of harm’s way then followed us toward safety. He never made it. The last man out, the Japs used him for target practice, shooting him to pieces.
I was fighting alongside Lloyd Hurd, Steve, and Van. I was the acting corporal of our squad. You couldn’t see anything on the hill, but Windle spotted a cave and directed me to put the machine gun on that. So I signaled to Van, the gunner, to make that his target. He ran up and threw the tripod down. Steve came behind him with the machine gun. Before they could get all the way set, a sniper shot Van in the back, shoulder area, while he was still leaning over. They shot Steve in the stomach while he was still running up to help. A gut shot like that is real bad. Steve was bleeding hard.
I got pissed. Both of my friends were down. I ran over to where they were, grabbed the machine gun, and opened fire on the cave from the hip. I fired the whole belt of bullets into that cave. The belt ran out. I have no idea how many I killed, but in my citation it says that I killed several of the enemy. I was afraid that if Van or Steve moved, the Japs would shoot them again.
Then I ran and got a medic, and Hurd and I and the medic carried Steve and Van down out of sight. A corpsman gave the guys morphine.
Steve gave me a thumbs-up signal, very weak, letting me know he was still alive, and maybe I had tears in my eyes. I can’t remember ever crying about it. I should have, probably. Mostly I was angry. I’d never been so mad in all my life. Somebody had shot my friends. Hell, they might be killing me next. I hated this island. I absolutely hated it. I hated the Japanese. I hated the war. I hated everything I could think of.
The rest of that day was foggy to me. The stretcher bearers took Steve and Van out. I told Windle I wanted to go with them, but he wouldn’t let me go. “We’ve lost too many men already,” Windle said. They took them away, and I never saw them again on the battlefield.
I found out later that Van made it but Steve died during the night. When you’re gut shot, you’re going to die. Sadly, he did.
The caves in the northeast corner of the island marked the fever pitch of the battle for Iwo Jima and, in many ways, a repeat of Peleliu.
CLARENCE REA
About three-quarters of the way up the island, near some cliffs, we came to a section where all the Japanese were in caves. That was where it got really bloody.
One day I was in a foxhole and my guys were dug in. We were trying to figure out how to move on. The Japanese had us pinned down. We didn’t have tanks up there at that time. I was calling for the Corsairs to come in and drop some napalm bombs at the face of the cliffs, which the other companies were doing as well.
I saw a Japanese machine gunner up there in a niche in the rocks. My BAR man was in a hole over to my left. He was a little Italian kid who I had brought through parachute school. I called over to him and pointed the Japanese soldier out to him, to put the fire on him. As I was peeking over the edge of my hole, I heard the sound of metal on metal. I looked over to him. His head was slumped. “Benny, Benny, are you okay?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. I lifted up his helmet and the back of his head was gone, blown away. His brains were running out the back of his helmet. He’d been shot directly in the forehead and killed instantly. It was like losing one of my own kids.
CHUCK TATUM
I don’t remember a lot of the specifics of Iwo anymore. Days blurred into one another. The whole experience on Iwo was a lot more of the same thing, over and over. Just continuous fighting, the whole time I was there. No letup.
We were on a ridge somewhere, and I was walking behind the company a ways. We walked by this Jap body. He looked dead anyway. But just as we were past him, I saw him move. Just a bit. Maybe he was wounded, because he threw a grenade at us, and it was a pretty weak toss. I jumped back and rolled down the hill. The grenade exploded above me. I felt its blast smash against my back.
Everything was completely black for a few seconds. Maybe it was longer. I don’t know. When I came to, I noticed that my carbine was still in my hands. I hadn’t let go of it. For some reason, that felt good to think I hadn’t dropped my rifle.
The Marine I’d been following was a few feet away. He was okay. Just covered in dirt. But he was yelling at me and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. My ears were all crazy. Inside my head it was like a drum beating—I don’t know how else to describe it. There was a cut on my leg, maybe eight inches long, and it was bleeding, but it didn’t look terribly deep. We just got up and kept going. I felt dizzy and achy and wanted to lie down. I thought my head was going to explode.
CLARENCE REA
One of my squad leaders was a kid from Fresno named Dawson. One day I called him to bring his squad up on line. As he was running to where we were, a machine gun opened up on him. He was running and dodging. And we were saying, “C’mon, Dawson! You can make it!” He was almost to us, but then the machine gun hit him about ten feet from the hole. We crawled out and pulled him into the hole. Dawson was shot all to hell. We all thought he was dead.* So pretty soon the corpsman came, and we had to move on. We couldn’t just sit there.
CHUCK TATUM
We were marching somewhere and they called a halt. Anytime you’re hungry, you use whatever time you have. I broke out a K ration. Nearby on the path was a dead and bloated Jap body. There’s nothing worse than the smell of a dead body. But I kept eating anyway. Pretty soon a tank came along and ran over him. Completely squashed the corpse. Some of the body fluids splashed up and onto my pants. I couldn’t get the smell out, so I took my Ka-Bar and cut that part of my dungarees off and threw it away.
Another time, a young guy came up as a replacement, Buckland. He told whoever the sergeant was, “I’m sure glad to get up here on the front lines.”
“What, are you f-ing crazy?” the sergeant said.
“I was out on the beach burying people,” Buckland said. “I’m glad to join the fight and be up here.” He hated burial detail that much.
Once the Japs buried themselves for us. We were on a ridge above a closed off cave. We could hear the Japs down below. Somebody mentioned that they might blow themselves up, but we didn’t think anything about it. We stayed there that night.
We heard a tremendous blast underneath us. The Japs blew themselves up, and us with them, too. The ground just exploded. There was no time to think about it. Rocks, dirt, went everywhere. All the rocks rained down. We were lucky to be alive.
CLARENCE REA
I had thirty-two men in the platoon when we started. A few days later, I’d lost ten. A few days later the number I’d lost was up to sixteen. You can’t ever describe what it’s like to lose half your men. You’re hurt. Really hurt. You’ve learned to love these kids, you’ve brought them through training. But it doesn’t really hit you until years later. At the time you’re so damn busy, you’re thinking of things so fast. All you do is call back and ask them to send you some replacements.
CHUCK TATUM
Corporal Angelos Tremulis—now there was a bright spot in the war. What a guy! Before he came to us, he’d been a seagoing Marine and was on the Yorktown when it was sunk. He spent eight hours learning how to deep water swim in the Pacific Ocean before he was rescued. He got out of that, and didn’t want to be seagoing anymore, so he became a paratrooper to avoid the dangers of being aboard a ship (laughs). When they disbanded the Paratroopers, Tremulis became a regular Marine. He was a corporal when he came into B Company. He was skinny as a rail, Greek ancestry. His folks ran flower stores back in the States, and that’s what he wanted to do, too. I thought it was funny that this tough Marine wanted to open a flower shop. But Tremulis figured that after the war a lot of the guys would be getting married, so there’d be big money to be had.
Tremulis was a leader of a machine gun squad. Just like Windle. Tremulis got dysentery very bad. It went on and on. Dysentery is one of the worst things that can happen on the front lines, because you’re not keeping any food inside of you. Day after day, Tremulis never got any better. They have a medicine for it, but they ran out of it. It got so bad he couldn’t walk anymore, his ass was so raw. But here’s what he did. He got a bandage from the corpsman and smeared it all over with a half inch of petroleum jelly, and stuck the bandage between his ass cheeks. He just pulled his pants up and kept going. He couldn’t walk otherwise.
CLARENCE REA
I was hit on the thirteenth day, hit in the left arm with shrapnel. I didn’t see or hear it coming. There was so much firing going on. I was on the radio, calling for air support, when the shell hit. The sensation I remember was that somebody hit me on top of the head with a sledgehammer. It knocked me out. When I came to, my arm was just hanging useless because shrapnel had severed the radial nerve. I wrapped it with a tourniquet and took off. I wanted to get down, get it fixed, and come back.
I started making my way down a trench, heading toward the aid station. As I went around a corner, here comes this Japanese soldier with a rifle in his hands. I had a .45 pistol in my hand. He had to pick up his rifle to shoot—I had my .45 ready. I shot him before he could get off a shot.
I made my way back to the aid station. It was set up in a shell hole. It was primitive care—you gotta realize there’s nothing on the island yet.
I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay, but they couldn’t treat me at the aid station there. I lost complete use of my left arm, so they just carried me down the beach and put me on an LST, took me out to a hospital ship, and hauled me down to Guam.
It was tough to leave the guys. You trained all those kids. You got so you knew them so well. They told you all about their families, everything. I had lost a lot of them, almost half of my platoon, and now I had to leave the other half behind. It hurts. It was a brotherhood. Even if the government decides someday there won’t be a Marine Corps, it’s still going to live.
CHUCK TATUM
The days wore on. It kept raining. We were cold, hungry, tired. Everywhere you looked was a dead body. We were in battle all the time. It all got blurry. My head ached from that grenade blast. The ringing in my ears wouldn’t go away. I felt sick to my stomach all day long, every day. I had the craps, just like Tremulis and every other man on the island did, but not quite as bad. My mind was hazy. I felt numb. Guys would say things to me and I wouldn’t answer them. I went to a medic and he kept giving me aspirins for my headaches, but that didn’t do anything. What else was he supposed to do?
We were given the day off to reequip and resupply. Half an hour into it, B Company got called into another battle. It was D plus fourteen, and we began to take heavy mortar fire. We’re deep into it and it’s as bad as it ever was. A round hit close to me and I thought to get to some nearby rocks. Halfway there, another round hit and I got knocked down. Fortunately, the barrage stopped as quickly as it started.
All of a sudden I realized I’m sitting on a rock by myself, and I don’t know where anyone else has gone. Nobody. I have no idea how I got there or what I’m doing there. That’s what was happening in my mind. And then I said to myself, “Tatum, if you sit on this rock, you’ll be a good target.” We had already had two guys from my squad killed that morning. From my section—that morning!
All of a sudden, here comes Windle out of the rocks. He came up to me. “You’re going to be all right, Tatum. Come on, we’re going back to the platoon.” So he led me back to the platoon.
I didn’t know about combat fatigue, but that’s what I had, apparently. I kept having these headaches, sure. Sometimes when a mortar goes off near you, you get these concussions from the shock. There’s no aspirin for it. There’s no cure. I think my mind slipped into a protective mode. You’re hoping for the best, but you’ve already seen so much, you don’t believe in the best.
Later that afternoon Windle said, “Tatum, I’m sending you back.” Just like that. I was very surprised. I didn’t argue with him. What they were afraid of is that I might do something and get them all killed. So that’s the reason he got rid of me. I don’t know what they were observing in me. I wasn’t goofy. I was just sitting alone with a blank stare, I guess, dizzy, with a ringing in my ears. Alone with my thoughts.
Tremulis could hardly walk by then. So Windle sent Tremulis out, too. “You’re both finished,” Windle said. “Get the hell back, both of you.”
Tremulis and I started walking toward the beach. We hoped no Jap snipers would get us. The farther we walked away from the front, the more we began to improve. A guy in a DUKW came along and drove us several miles to the rear. I remember we passed this distillation plant and we filled our canteens with some real water. Everything else we’d been drinking since landing tasted like oil. Both Tremulis and I drank as much as we could hold.
Tremulis and I got aboard the first ship we could. Just like that, our war was over.
We’d been fighting on Iwo for fifteen days.
The battle for Iwo would last a further twenty-one days and culminated in a Japanese banzai charge against American airmen in their tents on airfield number 2. The attack would be repulsed and the battle won. By then, Tatum, Rea, and Watters were under medical care.
CLINTON WATTERS
From the hospital in Guam, they shipped me to another hospital in San Francisco, and then to the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. I would be in the hospital for the next six months.
CLARENCE REA
The hospital in Guam was just a little Quonset hut right up against the jungle. Still pretty primitive. So many guys were coming in there so fast, hundreds of them, thousands, from Iwo. The hospital ship had been full, and they were trying to unload all these guys so fast so they could rush back and get another load. The hospital staff didn’t have time to do a lot of special work. They just had to patch you up and get you out so they could get other guys in. I’d heard that Clint Watters had been hit. We were friends and more—we were both born on the same day—March 12—but I was born in 1921 and him in 1922. So when I got to the hospital, I tried to look for him. The information they gave me was that he’d died. He hadn’t made it.
One of the riflemen in my squad, they took both his legs off right there in Guam. They were going to amputate my arm. I told them I wouldn’t accept that. I guess I convinced them, because they decided to send me back to the hospital in Pearl Harbor. I went back there for a week or so then they shipped me to the naval hospital in Oakland, California.
In Oakland, a new young Navy doctor, Lieutenant Cummings, had just started doing experimental work, nerve surgery. I signed permission so they could experiment on me. They cut my arm open, almost the length of it, got the two ends of the nerve, and put it together. Through a lot of therapy, gradually the hand healed. It didn’t come back completely, but we hoped that someday it would.
The stuff I saw in that hospital never left me. I can see it now. It was sickening. Pitiful. Kids with no arms or legs. Some with no appendages whatsoever. Some burned so badly they didn’t look human. Some of my kids. One had his jaw shot off. The doctors took skin from his side to rebuild his face, but what they would do, they would take a long strip of skin, attach half of it to his face, while leaving the other half dangling. If the graft took, they’d cut off the excess skin. So many kids were walking around the hospital like that, with gobs of skin grafts hanging from them.
CHUCK TATUM
Tremulis and I spent the first evening aboard this old three-stack destroyer. I sold my carbine to the sailors for $20. Tremulis got $25 for his. He was a better salesman than me. I took my first shower in sixteen days. They didn’t have any Marine clothing aboard, so they issued us Navy clothes. We ate Navy food. We went to sleep. That first night I slept for fourteen hours straight.
We were transferred to another ship, a troop carrier, and spent several days sailing from Iwo to Saipan, where they put us in an Army hospital. Everyone else there had everything wrong with them, but I felt kinda funny, because I didn’t have any wounds that bled. I was labeled SSCF, shell-shocked, combat fatigued. They don’t have any cure for it, you know.
Combat fatigue is kinda like if you’re on a sidewalk, and you’re trying to cross a busy street. As soon as you start across, a big semi truck rushes at you. Okay. And that keeps happening and happening. You keep trying to cross, but more and more trucks come, so you get more and more jumpy, more and more scared. If you get away from that busy street, then you start to relax more. If a man has combat fatigue, it doesn’t mean he’s a coward. It’s just that a mind can only stand so much. I was just eighteen years old when we landed on Iwo. I wanted to fight, and I could have gone on, I always felt I could have. But perhaps it was just the graciousness of Windle. He saved me, really. Later in life I thought it through, and if Windle hadn’t sent me back, I never would have made it off Iwo alive. I would have been killed—I’m sure of it. I had had so many near misses already.
They sent Tremulis and me on another ship to Hawaii, the island of Oahu, where we went to a naval hospital. That’s where we ran into Van and learned that he was still alive. That was good. He was one of my best friends in the service.
In the hospital, there was a lot of evaluations. Doctors asked everything about you. I told one of the psychiatrists that I was okay mentally and I wanted to rejoin my outfit. That’s when he decided I was off my rocker. Seriously, it didn’t help my case at all.
Eventually, they sent me stateside, to San Francisco. We were aboard a civilian ship that had been converted to transport troops. This was about April 1945, and news came aboard the ship that Roosevelt had died. That was a sad moment for everybody. Truman became the next president.
In San Fran, they took us to another Army hospital. As a matter of policy, we were quarantined for five days. That’s when Tremulis and I decided to go on liberty. They wouldn’t let us out, but we thought, The hell with them.
Tremulis found a place down by the tennis court where a corner of the fence was dug away and you could crawl under and get to the highway. So one night we snuck out through the fence and caught a ride to downtown San Francisco. We had about $4 between us, went to a bar on Market Street, and bought drinks with the money we had. I ordered a 7 and 7, whiskey and 7-Up, because that was the only drink I knew. When I paid for it, Tremulis said in a voice that could be heard by the guy next to us, “We just got back from Iwo Jima.” Golly, that brought the whole place alive. We spent the night carousing in San Francisco, getting drunk, with everybody buying us drinks and dinner.
Finally, the Shore Patrol caught us. “Why are you out of uniform?” they asked us. We were in our dungarees and without hats. Tremulis told them a story about how we were here with Hollywood, making a movie with the Marines. He talked them into it, and they let us go. But next we faced a real dilemma. It’s easier to sneak out of a Navy hospital than it is to sneak back in. We came back on a different street, and we couldn’t find the corner of the tennis courts. So Tremulis decided that he’d hoist me over the fence, and I’d find a place to get him in. As I’m crawling over that, I hear the click of a machine gun. I looked around, and here’s this nervous little sailor, with his hands on a submachine gun. So I jumped down and got on the ground. Here stands the Shore Patrol around us. Four of them. Tremulis told them this story about how we just got back. Finally the guys turn to each other and say, “I didn’t see anything, did you?” They all agree they didn’t, so they open the gate and let us back in.
I was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. It was psychiatry-related—I could tell from all the talking and interviews I was doing. The whole thing was a psycho ward. I didn’t feel like I should be there. The ward is a bunch of wacky people, including me, I guess. A bunch of Marines and sailors. Nobody believed me that I wanted to stay in the service. But it was true—I had hoped to become a Marine officer eventually. I figured that would have been the greatest thing a guy could do for a career.
Then I heard word I was going to be discharged. And they did. Finally it came through, June 14, 1945, and I was able to go home. It was an honorable discharge, but a medical discharge under honorable conditions, which meant I couldn’t go back into the service ever. My days as a Marine were over.
* The “Basilone bail” was a specially designed device used to carry a machine gun. It comprised of a wooden handle fastened by wire to the barrel of the weapon, and was inspired by Basilone’s Medal of Honor engagement on Guadalcanal after he burned his arm while carrying a hot machine gun. Without the bail, it would have been nearly impossible to control the blistering machine gun when removed from its tripod.
* Clarence Rea would remember, “Later on, I was walking down the street near the hospital in Oakland, and I’d be damned if I didn’t walk into Dawson, face-to-face. The corpsman had drug him back to the aid station, and they’d pulled him through. He’d made it. Of course we hugged each other. It was great to see him alive.”