Their destination was an “Island X.” That’s all they knew. For the Marines fighting America’s War in the Pacific it was a familiar stereotyped pattern. Months of training, the invasion of an island no one had ever heard of, followed by more training and another invasion.
In Europe troops liberated cities and were cheered as conquering heroes. But the Pacific was a different story. After slogging through fetid jungles and fighting across coral outcroppings, the survivors of battle had only memories of their fallen buddies as they gazed out at the sea from the transports returning them to their base for more training.
But the boys on their way to “Island X” were in for an unusual treat. Along with almost five hundred ships, theirs stopped at Pearl Harbor for a final liberty before battle.
Honolulu!
Mike mingled with old Raider buddies in bars packed wall to wall with leathernecks acting as if they would never see another beer. For many of them, this would be true. Ira and Joe Rodriguez walked down jammed Bishop and King Streets through Honolulu’s “Chinatown” where men outnumbered women a hundred to one. Doc and Rene waited in long lines at the USO near the Royal Palace Grounds, where there were writing facilities, game rooms, food and soft-drink bars. Franklin took the opportunity to permanently proclaim his love of the Corps: On Hotel Street he had the Marine emblem tattooed on his right arm.
When a shore barge sidled up to Harlon’s ship to take him ashore, he caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd of Marines. He silently climbed down the ladder, jumped into the barge, and surprised his old buddy Glen Cleckler with a slap on the back. Glen Cleckler, the Panther fullback who had churned through the big holes opened up by Harlon’s blocking.
The two boys went larking in the city; there they ran into a couple of other Weslaco boys. So many boys from Weslaco! It seemed like the whole Marine Corps was there! “This must be the Big One,” the young boys shouted, referring to the invasion of Japan.
But as the group’s hilarity wore on into the night, Harlon’s mood turned serious. It was while the friends were milling out of a movie theater that he turned quietly to Glen. He slipped his ring off his finger and some photographs out of his pocket and pressed them into Cleckler’s hand. “Give this to my mother,” he told his buddy. “My luck has run out. I don’t think I’m coming back.”
Like the others who had heard this, Glen at first laughed it off. He tried to hand the items back, but Harlon looked hurt, so Glen shrugged and kept them. “I didn’t know what to make of this,” Cleckler told me, “but Harlon was dead serious.”
A few days later, just before he left Hawaii, Harlon had one more encounter with a Weslaco Panther teammate, Leo Ryan. Harlon searched for Leo until he found him in a naval hospital tent in “Camp Catlin” on Red Hill outside Honolulu. Leo was in horrible shape: heavily bandaged and temporarily blinded from the effects of a Japanese shell in the battle of Tarawa.
Leo was lucky to be alive. In fact, he had been left for dead, in a pile of bodies stacked like cordwood that had been his Marine comrades until the 155-millimeter shell had exploded in their midst on Tarawa. The concussion had torn his nose to shreds, changed the wrapping of his face, unhinged one side of his jaw, and blown both eyeballs out of their sockets—they were hanging down his cheeks, held only by their stems, when the corpsman found him.
Unconscious and motionless, he was placed on a pile of corpses. He was in this state when a medic had spotted him and ordered the erroneous telegram notifying Jean Ryan that her husband was dead. Only later, when another medic walked by and noticed movement, was Leo pulled out of the pile, given treatment, and evacuated to Oahu. Against all odds, he not only recovered but also eventually regained his eyesight.
Now, in this hospital tent in a virtual city of hospital tents—they were sectioned off into streets, there were so many—the two boys spoke quietly as a heavy rain fell. Harlon spoke as the blinded Leo, his face wrapped in gauze, listened. The glory of their undefeated football season seemed a long way in the past.
Harlon confessed the same fatalistic thoughts to Leo as he had to the others. He was as calm in delivering them as he had been with his brother Ed and sister Maurine. He had mulled it over: He would do his duty. He would fight. He would die. “I have beat the odds because I haven’t been hit yet,” he told Leo. “But I won’t be so lucky again. My odds have run out.”
But there was more. He spoke of his liberty in Weslaco months before as “a gift from God, an act of fate that gave him his last opportunity to tell people that he would not return.” Corporal Block then spoke of his reemerging religious beliefs. He realized he had to go out and kill the enemy, but he was not comfortable doing so. Harlon spoke of the validity of the Fifth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and how it was the government that now demanded he kill. “Eleanor Roosevelt had complained that the Marines were a bunch of savages after a few had broken up some West Coast bars,” Leo remembered. “Harlon was hurt by this, sensitive to being taught to kill against his religion and then being branded a killer.”
In late January the huge fleet moved slowly out of Pearl Harbor, forming a convoy seventy miles long. Amidst the machinery and manpower on one transport ship, the USS Missoula, are six particular boys: six boys with the wind in their hair, unsuspecting of their own impending place in mythic history.
The boys are pushing toward their destiny now. Doc, Ira, Mike, Franklin, Harlon, and Rene are rushing to their appointment with an entrenched, dedicated defender of a sacred homeland. Peaceable American boys, citizen-soldiers about to engage with a myth-obsessed samurai foe. This will not be a mere battle. It will be a colossal cultural collision, a grinding together of the tectonic plates that are East and West. The Western “plate” will be the cream of American democracy and mass-production: in voluntary manpower; in technology, training, and industrial support. The Eastern “plate” will be the elite minions of a thoroughly militarized society whose high priests have taught that there is no higher virtue than death in battle.
The results of this collision will alter the fates of both East and West for the next century to come.
This giant fleet of American warships—a modern armada—churns across the ocean day and night for a journey of four thousand miles. It moves with the inevitability of a railroad schedule. It stops for nothing, it deviates for nothing. The United States, having been surprised at Pearl Harbor and then raked in battle after battle by the onrushing forces of imperial Japan, has finally stabilized and gathered its strength. Now the American giant is fully awake and cold-eyed. It is stalking an ocean, rounding the curve of the earth, to crush its tormentor.
Accommodations on the Missoula are less than comfortable. There are only small spaces on the boat to mingle, so most of the men have to remain in their bunks, along with their pack, rifle, and helmet. The boys’ sleeping compartment is a cargo hold belowdecks where floor-to-ceiling bunks have been installed. Woe to all below when the man on the uppermost bunk gets seasick.
The days are long. Pinochle games dot the fantails and the upper-deck gun platforms. Some of the men squint at paperback books—Perry Mason mysteries, Zane Grey westerns. Others thoughtfully clean and reclean their weapons. Briefings are common; captains and sergeants going over the plan of action on the beach with their huddled squads and platoons, again and again. The troops know their drill. They’ve practiced it for a year. They go over it again, one more time.
One kid prowls the decks offering to sharpen knives. He’ll sharpen anybody’s knife. It doesn’t matter if he’s sharpened it before. It’s something to do. Something to pass the hours.
The Missoula carries all of Easy Company amidst its 1,500 troops. By the time this fleet converges with a second one, hurrying northward from down near Australia, the total number of ships will exceed eight hundred. They are carrying three reinforced Marine Divisions. All of these ships, all these men, converging on an eight-mile-square island six hundred miles south of Tokyo.
The movement of over 100,000 men
—Marines, Navy support personnel, Coast Guard units—across four thousand miles of ocean for three weeks is a triumph of American industry galvanizing itself in a time of great national peril. At the outset of the war, Japan’s naval strength was more than double that of America’s. But across the American continent, the idling factories steamed and sparked to life. Most of the vessels came splashing off the industrial assembly lines in the six months before this assault. And they have been augmented by reinforcements from around the globe. The call has gone out to every theater of the World War, and every theater has sent what it could spare. Support has come from MacArthur in the Philippines, from the China and India commands. Eisenhower in Europe looked up from his maps and wondered, “What are they doing out there?” and consigned transports that had borne troops from England to the beaches at Normandy.
And it has not been just a matter of hardware. The civilians of America have mobilized behind these fighting boys. Behind each man on board the ships are hundreds of workers: in the factories, in the cities and towns, on the heartland farms. Rosie the Riveter. Boy Scouts collecting paper and metal. The young girl who will become Marilyn Monroe, sweating away in a defense plant.
Here is some of what those mobilized civilians have generated for this tremendous force:
For each of the 70,000 assault-troop Marines, 1,322 pounds of supplies and equipment. Some of it sounds weirdly domestic: dog food, garbage cans, lightbulbs, house paint. Some of it suggests an island business office: duplicating machines, carbon paper, movie projectors. Some sounds like kids’ camping gear: toilet paper, socks, shoelaces, paper and pencils, flashlights, blankets. Some begins to suggest a sterner mission: flares, plasma, bandages, crucifixes, holy water, canisters of disinfectant to spray on corpses. And some of it gets exactly to the point: artillery, machine guns, automatic rifles, grenades, and ammunition. The transport ships carry six thousand five-gallon cans of water, enough food to feed the population of Atlanta for a month, or the assaulting Marines for two months. The Marines brought along 100,000,000 cigarettes.
Two days out of Honolulu the identity of “Island X” is revealed.
Some troops in World War II will have the honor of liberating Paris, others Manila. Easy Company has been assigned an ugly little hunk of slag in the ocean, nearly barren of trees or grasses or flowers. It is a dry wasteland of black volcanic ash that stinks of sulfur (“Iwo Jima” means “sulfur island”). Bulging at its northeast plateau, tapering down to Mount Suribachi at its southwestern tip, it resembles an upside-down pear with Suribachi at its stem. Pilots who had photographed the island from above thought it resembled a charred pork chop.
Mount Suribachi in the south is an extinct volcano, and the lava flow from Suribachi’s volcanic eruptions formed the rest of the island, oozing along the slender neck and pooling out over five and a half miles to a width of two and a half miles at its widest part. The only practical landing beach begins at Suribachi’s base and extends two miles along the eastern shore. The land rises, then, as the island’s width expands, toward a 350-foot mountain, Motoyama, that commands the northwesterly corner. Plumes of steam-driven, rank sulfur still jet from Motoyama, evidence of volcanic substrata.
Iwo Jima is an ugly, smelly place. Giant boulders, shifting sands, and stinking sulfur beds allow for little vegetation. Hardly a Pacific dream isle, it is covered by some twisted brush and has no fresh water. It is, as one Japanese soldier wrote, “A place where no sparrow sings.”
Maps are being unfurled on ships throughout the armada: large, rolled-up, heavily detailed maps, maps designed from aerial photographs of the island, table models made out of rubber, maps designed to be suspended from walls and spread across vast tables.
The maps show the military challenge. They give the combatants their first look at Iwo Jima: a small chunk of land in a triangular shape. Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene, and Doc no doubt pay close attention to the strange little fortified volcanic mountain down near the beach where they’ll rush ashore.
The boys, new to combat but seasoned by their year’s training, look on alertly, with professional savvy. Some of the veterans and older field officers, who can relate map symbols to direct personal experience, draw back in disbelief. One of them mutters, “It’s gonna be rough as a corncob.”
I can only imagine what the flagraisers thought as they bent over the Iwo Jima map on the Missoula. Stamped “SECRET” and dated November 12, 1944, it was based on “PHOTOGRAPHY FROM NAVY SORTIES19. AUG. AND 1 SEPT. 1944.” They must surely have focused on their landing beach, stamped “GREEN BEACH,” adjacent to Mount Suribachi. And they would have seen the designation the mapmakers had given Suribachi: “HOT ROCKS.”
Harry the Horse’s 28th Regiment, with Easy Company among it, would land closest to Hot Rocks, right under its threatening mass. They were part of the group that would string out in a ribbon of men across the narrow neck of the island, “cutting” Mount Suribachi off from the rest of the island. Then they’d pivot left to take the volcano.
The surface of Iwo was rendered white on the map. But the white was almost totally obscured by little black dots. These black dots represented the armaments that would fire at them as they struggled up Green Beach and raced inland in the shadow of Hot Rocks.
Just about every type of defense available in 1945 was represented by those black dots. All were identified by the key in the lower right-hand corner: Coastal Defense Guns, Dual-Mount Dual-Purpose Guns, Covered Artillery Emplacements, Rifle Pits, Foxholes, Antitank Guns, Machine Guns, Blockhouses, Pillboxes, and Earth-Covered Structures.
Hundreds of black dots, but no buildings. No structures to house the estimated 12,000 Japanese defenders.
Captain Dave Severance had first seen the maps a month before in the conference room at Camp Tarawa. He was astounded by its many overlapping swirls and heavy rectangles and triangles, each figure denoting a weapon emplacement or a fortified blockhouse. Severance’s thoughts reeled back through military history. “It scared the hell out of me,” he will always recall. “It conjured up images of Civil War battles, row after row of men going up and replacing those who had fallen. I knew we’d get to the top of that mountain, eventually—but how many men was it going to chew up?”
Each boy in the armada reacted differently to knowing the target. Some hoped it would be over quickly, others dreaded a long campaign. Others sharpened their bayonets for the umpteenth time, while a few checked their lucky charms once again.
For good luck Rene tucked a photograph of nineteen-year-old Pauline Harnois, his girlfriend from back in the mills, into the webbing of his helmet. The photo showed Pauline in an evening gown. Pauline, whom he had met working in the Chicopee spinning room. His mother disapproved of Pauline, thinking she was too aggressive, pushing her little boy. But it was Pauline’s picture that Rene depended on to protect him in the coming battle.
Mike Strank’s protection was his sense of humor. He put on a don’t-give-a-damn veneer, coated by his trademark grin and playful sense of humor. He wore his helmet cocked to one side of his head and told jokes in an Old Country dialect that broke up the farmboys and the office clerks.
Joe Rodriguez remembered the day that Mike overheard him sounding off about how poor his parents were during the Depression; how his mother had to make pillowcases out of used flour sacks.
“You guys must have been rich as hell,” Strank broke in. “I’ll tell you what my mother used to do. When I was a kid my mother made our shorts from flour sacks. You know, it took me almost six weeks after joining the Marines to figure out what that fly was for!”
Early in February the fleet crossed the 180th meridian, the International Dateline, and veterans like Mike initiated the men making their first crossing. They were now in the domain of the meridian’s ruler, the Golden Dragon. Mike threw himself into this comic ritual, where Marines were yanked out of their bunks, shaved bald, decked out in ridiculous garb, forced to ingest some unnamed “stinking” matter, and then doused with water hoses as
they scampered up and down the decks. The victims were forced to kneel and kiss the bare feet of Neptune, the god of the sea.
Mike was at the center of it, laughing. “He dragged me out of bed while I was seasick,” John Fredatovich recalled, “but he let me go when he saw how sick I was. But I still had fun. Everybody was laughing. And Mike was the ringleader.”
The younger guys loved this, Rodriguez recalled. Those kids in uniform wanted to be just like him; kids who weren’t so sure of themselves couldn’t get enough of Sergeant Mike’s style.
It is a calculated performance. These admiring boys, many of them still innocent and unsuspecting, are his new younger brothers. They are transparent to him. The grueling training, the close quarters, the liberties, the poker games, the bull sessions about battle—all of that is over now. The cards are on the table. The cores of these kids’ beings are visible to Mike. They are ready to give their lives—especially for one another. But most of them don’t really know, yet, what that is going to mean. Mike is their shepherd. He has won their confidence. Now he is going to do his damnedest to get them home.
Mike, the immigrant American, is representative of the best of the young leaders in the Pacific. A sergeant, he does not lord his rank over anyone. He embodies the Raider egalitarian ideal of no divisions between the men, no hierarchy.
He eats with his men instead of going to the sergeants’ mess. And a few weeks before leaving for Iwo Jima, Captain Dave Severance tries to recommend Mike for the rank of Platoon Sergeant. Mike turns the offer down on the spot, saying, “I promised my boys I’d be there for them.”
Despite the hilarity, one frightening aspect of the coming battle stuck in the back of the boys’ minds. There was reason to believe the battle for Iwo Jima would be even more ferocious than the others, reason to expect the Japanese defender would fight even more tenaciously.
Flags of Our Fathers Page 15
