Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  Somehow, the Marines kept advancing. Somehow, discipline held. Somehow, valor overcame terror. Somehow, scared young men under sheets of deadly fire kept on doing the basic, gritty tasks necessary to keep the invasion going.

  The calming presence of veterans in their midst was one factor in their resolve. Another was their year of advanced Marine training in the California and Hawaii camps. “Our training taught us how to conquer fear,” was the way Corpsman Langley put it. “We knew there was a good possibility that we would die or get wounded. But we knew we had to keep going to keep from getting killed. You learn there’s an awful lot you can do while having the hell scared out of you.”

  Mike Strank, true to form, was one of the steadying veterans. In the opening moments of Japanese mortar fire, when the boys of Easy Company were still groping their way toward Captain Severance’s main unit, Lloyd Thompson looked up to his right and could not believe what he saw. “There was Mike, sitting upright, emptying the sand out of his boots. Just as if nothing was happening.” Bill Ranous remembers the same sight: “I had my face buried in the sand. I looked up and saw Mike sitting straight up emptying his shoes. What a guy.”

  Having made his point, Mike was soon shepherding his boys across the sands to their rendezvous with Dave Severance’s unit. Joe Rodriguez remembers him dashing back and forth among his squad members, cautioning them to spread out: “Don’t bunch up! Don’t be like a bunch of bananas!”

  It was gestures such as Mike’s—probably hundreds of them, most lost to history—that enabled the Americans to withstand the maelstrom of hidden firepower, and even to begin inflicting damage of their own.

  Damage against what? That was the constant question at Iwo Jima. There were no targets. The gunners were invisible, protected, creatures of the underworld. Sergeant Major Lyndolph Ward summed up the frustration: “The thing that bothered me was you couldn’t get your licks in. There was no visible enemy to shoot at.” Even when they claimed a casualty, the Marines could rarely see it: The Japanese quickly pulled their dead and wounded back inside the caves and blockhouses. Thus there was little evidence of the invasion’s impact, a detriment to morale. In the days that followed, observers of the battle in spotter planes high above the action would remark that it looked as though the Marines were fighting the island itself.

  And yet the Americans did inflict damage that hellish first morning—by the same excruciating means they would continue to inflict it for thirty-six days, until all the 22,000 defenders were wiped out: by exposing themselves to fire, charging the fortified blockhouses and cave entrances, and shooting or incinerating their tormentors at close range.

  One of their strategies was to identify “fire lanes.” By observing where enemy machine-gun bullets were landing and kicking up ash, a Marine could roughly judge the peripheral limits of a shooter’s range: his capacity to swivel the gun left and right from inside his cave or blockhouse. Units of boys, widely spaced, would dash along the outer boundaries of those fire lanes—a great many of them falling dead or wounded under cross fire—until a survivor reached the cave’s mouth or the blockhouse’s unprotected rear. Then a tossed grenade, an orange sheet from a flamethrower, and the nest was silent.

  For a while. An early mistake in the invasion was to assume that a source of enemy fire, once extinguished, was permanently dead. It wasn’t. General Kuribayashi’s vast tunneling system assured that many Marines were shot as they moved past a “neutralized” nest that had been quickly repopulated from below the ground.

  Throughout the bloody morning, fresh troops landed on the beaches. Tangible progress was achieved in the opening hour and a half of combat. By 10:35 A.M., a small group of men from the first assault waves—Company A of the 28th Regiment—had survived a near-suicidal, seven-hundred-yard dash across the island to the western beach. Already Suribachi was cut off from the rest of the island. The reptile’s head was alive and deadly, but it had been severed.

  How they got there was a portrait of American victory in microcosm. They got there with courage best exemplified by Tony Stein’s headlong charge.

  Stein was a twenty-three-year-old corporal from Dayton who became the first Medal of Honor winner on Iwo. For the risky mission he’d armed himself with a stinger gun, a light machine gun he’d taken from an airplane and adapted into a rapid-fire gun. When his comrades were stalled on their dash by concentrated Japanese fire, Stein stood upright, drawing the enemy’s fire and allowing his buddies to get into position. But Stein was just getting warmed up. His next move was to charge the nearby Japanese pillboxes, alone. He did this several times, killing twenty of the enemy in close-range combat. Out of ammunition, he threw off his helmet and shoes and hurried barefoot to the beach to resupply himself. He did this eight times, carrying a wounded man to safety on each trip. Later in the day he covered the withdrawal of his platoon to the company position, though his weapon was shot from his hands twice.

  Meanwhile, other brave boys were doing grunt-work near the shoreline, work that would get the mechanized part of the assault in motion. Oblivious to the storm of lead and steel, some bent down and shoved wire mats under the treads of mired tanks; others calmly climbed into bulldozers to begin roughing out the semblance of a road system.

  These were the instincts of training and courage that took hold as the first shock of battle wore off; courage fueled by a fierce kind of love. “There was an incredible bond among guys on that beach,” Danny Thomas remembered. “We knew each other and we could rely upon each other, trust one another. We had trained together and we were bonded.”

  Death became demystified, an occupational hazard. The Marines quickly saw that even heroes could die. Sergeant John Basilone, the Medal of Honor winner who had helped change the course of the Guadalcanal battle, was leading a rifle unit along the beach toward a Japanese emplacement. “Come on, you guys, we gotta get these guns off the beach,” he called to his men, and then was obliterated by a mortar shell.

  Moments of valor proliferated. Among the heroes were the men sent to give solace. Corpsman Emery yelled “Keep down!” to a fellow medic sitting upright in the sand. Crawling closer, he saw that the man was struggling to tie a tourniquet around the stump of his leg. “Take care of the others, I’ll be OK,” the injured medic called out. When Emery crawled back past the corpsman several minutes later, he was dead.

  “Dead men were lying around,” Ira said later, “and the peculiar smell of gunpowder, smoke, and blood was in the air.”

  Father Paul Bradley went in on the third wave. “I was young,” he recalled later, “and didn’t think about the danger to me. And I was too busy crawling from dying man to dying man. It was always, ‘Father, over here!’ Once I was kneeling in the sand administering to a guy who had been hit. There was a loud thud! His eyes closed. He’d been hit again and was dead. ‘Father, over here!’ someone called. I went on to the next one.”

  One combatant met his fate with supreme elegance. The moment occurred in the air, as the first wave of amtracs headed for shore. The Marine fighter planes were finishing up their low strafing runs, and as the last pilot began to pull his Corsair aloft, Japanese sprang to their guns and riddled the plane with flak. The pilot, Major Ray Dollins, tried to gain altitude as he headed out over the ocean so as to avoid a deadly crash into the Marines headed for the beach, but his plane was too badly damaged. Lieutenant Keith Wells watched it from his amtrac, with Doc Bradley standing by his side. “We could see him in the cockpit,” Wells said, “and he was trying everything. He was heading straight down for a group of approaching ’tracs filled with Marines. At the last second he flipped the plane over on its back and aimed it into the water between two waves of tanks. We watched the water exploding into the air.”

  Military personnel listening to the flight radio network from the ships could not only see Dollins go down; they could hear his last words into his microphone. They were a defiant parody.

  Oh, what a beautiful morning,

  Oh, what a beautiful d
ay,

  I’ve got a terrible feeling

  Everything’s comin’ my way.

  Eight days earlier, en route to Iwo Jima, Major Dollins had received news of the birth of his first child, a daughter. He was the first 5th Division Marine to die in the battle.

  In the midst of all this carnage and confusion was my father. My father, with his corpsman’s pouch, his Unit 3, slung over his shoulder. The ex-paperboy, on his rounds.

  He was busy almost from the moment he touched land—although his fellow medic Cliff Langley was busy even sooner. “Cliff hit the beach about ten seconds before me,” Doc told an interviewer some weeks after the battle, “and when I stepped out, he was already treating a casualty.” The “casualty” was a lieutenant shot through the jaw, a disabling wound by its appearance. “Do you want to be evacuated?” Langley asked the man. “No, I’m OK, thanks,” the Marine bravely mumbled, and ran back into the battle.

  Thurman Fogarty, eighteen then, remembered the “welter of blood” that engulfed the Navy doctors and corpsmen as soon as they landed. Fogarty himself was buffeted by the concussions of the big shells coming in and going out, like gusts of a powerful wind. After just a few minutes he fell to the beach and scraped out as much indentation as he could. Doc Bradley was crouched next to him, attending to a small wound in his own leg.

  “I happened to look to my left and saw that the Marine next to me had his arm almost blown off,” Fogarty said. “It was just dangling from his shoulder. I pointed this out to Doc. He looked up from his own wounds and rolled across my legs to attend the injured Marine. The guy was conscious. Doc calmly put a tourniquet on the stump of the arm and told the guy to hold it. Then he shot him full of morphine and tied the dangling arm to the stump. And then pointed him toward the Aid Station.”

  After that, Fogarty and my father were separated. Crawling up a terrace, Fogarty spotted a boy whose head had been cut open by shrapnel. The sight nauseated him and he slid into a shell crater to vomit. There again he found Doc, taking care of a man whose chest had been caved in. This sight reactivated Fogarty’s heaving. “Doc asked me where I was hit,” he later remembered. “I told him I was just sick. He smiled at me and assured me, ‘You’ll be all right.’”

  John Fredatovich, also eighteen, would become Easy’s first casualty and had need of Doc Bradley nearly as soon as he broke from the water. He recalled it vividly: “I heard the mortar, then I felt a cold chill, the shock to my nervous system as the shrapnel penetrated my arm and leg. I was sliced open from my knee to my buttocks and under my arm. My femur was smashed.

  “Doc came over. He made everyone stay away. He was very forceful and took charge. He gave me blood transfusions as I went in and out of consciousness. Then four Marines carried me away to a place on the beach for evacuation.”

  The place where Fredatovich lay offered no protection from the hell-storm. Every inch of the beach was an active target. Fredatovich lay on his cot until four P.M., and watched death and destruction explode around him. He saw a boatload of Marines lifted out of the water in a giant flash, and implode into nothingness. He saw other wounded boys on their stretchers get blown to pieces. He saw kids in the beach detail get hit as they unloaded explosives, their flesh fused to the fireball.

  The sight that returned to the future teacher most often in memory, however, was a strikingly unlikely one: a glimpse of Harlon Block as Harlon ran past him toward the action.

  “I called up to him; I said, ‘Hi,’” Fredatovich remembered, “but he just ran on by. It was the look in his eyes that startled me. He had a glazed, blank look. It was as if memories were coming back to him from past experiences. This surprised me. I later studied psychology and I realized that those dilated pupils meant he was shocked by something and was transfixed on some image from his past. It was as if the noise of the mortars transported him to a past memory.”

  Fredatovich later decided that Harlon was summoning up visions of death: the deaths he’d seen on Bougainville, perhaps. Or perhaps his own.

  By noon, the heavy casualties continued but the threat of annihilation had vanished. Nine thousand troops were ashore, and counting. The Marines were on Iwo Jima to stay.

  Through the long afternoon, the American boys held their positions and even advanced, despite the continuing nightmare of fighting an invisible enemy. The Japanese cross fire maintained and even increased its prodigious volume. It came from everywhere on the island; even the artillery near Kitano Point, nearly five miles to the north, was delivering shells in sheets. From the right flank of the plateaulike land on the eastern beaches came automatic-weapons fire that swept back and forth. Advancing vehicles were blown up by aircraft bombs embedded in the sand as tank mines. “Spider traps” and caves linked to the tunneling system were everywhere. They gave the defenders countless places from which to pop up, fire, disappear, and surface again somewhere else. The veteran Marine who’d boasted to my father that he was experienced enough to dodge bullets had not dreamed of what he’d face. The difference between living and dying was sheer luck, many survivors said later. You were a target if you moved. And you were a target if you stayed in place.

  Some of General Kuribayashi’s technical stratagems could almost have been lifted from the science-fiction comic books the Marines had read as boys. Many recalled watching in horror as an orifice would reveal itself on the side of Suribachi; a yawning hole in what had appeared to be solid rock. From the hole, the muzzle of a massive gun would appear and discharge a heavy round. Before American artillery could fix on the hole, it would close again: a reinforced metal shield, operated like a giant retractable garage door.

  And yet, as William Wayne recalled, “We did what we were ordered to do. We worked our way across the center of that island with machine guns firing at us. We’d jump into a tank ditch for protection and then our leader would yell, ‘Mine!’ and we’d change direction. We’d blast pillboxes, secure them just like in training. But unlike in training they’d come alive again and fire at us from the rear.

  “But we made it. We completed that day’s mission. We got across the island.”

  Eight battalions were onshore by the afternoon, as were the tank battalions of two divisions and elements of two artillery battalions.

  Getting ashore proved more difficult as the day progressed—and not just because of the gunfire. John Gramling recalled that his amtrac circled for hours in the offshore water, the boys tensed for an incoming shell. “We couldn’t get in because of the congestion,” he said. “When we hit the beach there were stacks of bodies.” Wesley Kuhn’s ’trac encountered bodies well before it hit the shoreline. “They floated facedown because of the air trapped in their backpacks,” he said.

  One of the war correspondents aboard the ships, Robert Sherrod, watched the battle through binoculars. To him, the struggling tanks were like “so many black beetles struggling to move on tar paper.”

  At around five P.M., Sherrod made ready to board a landing craft to take him ashore. He met Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Times, returning from the beach. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Wheeler advised him. “There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the rest of the war put together.”

  In the midst of this hell, Harlon was crawling through a trench in the late afternoon, leading a line of boys on all fours. Bill Ranous was directly behind him, and collided with him when Harlon stopped abruptly.

  “We all looked to see what had stopped Harlon,” Ranous recalled. “He was staring at two legs attached to hips with no upper torso. He was just transfixed, staring silently.”

  To William Wayne, also in the line, the legs were inanimate—something to put out of his mind and move on from. “I was in a survival mode,” he said, “and seeing those legs didn’t bother me at the time. But to Harlon they were part of a person. He turned to me after a little while and said, softly, ‘Why don’t we bury him?’”

  Variations on such encounters produced varieties of tortured etiquette. Roland Chiasson tumbled
into a crater and nearly rolled over a Marine with his right arm blown off. “I felt silly,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone who has just lost his right arm?”

  Mike Strank had performed heroically, shepherding his boys throughout the day. But his grim fatalism had not left him. Aloise Biggs recalled taking a breather in a shell hole with him in the afternoon. In a matter-of-fact voice, Mike said: “This is my third campaign, and I’m not going to make it through this one.”

  “I had been through Bougainville,” Biggs said, “and I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  The corpsmen were catching hell along with everyone else. Cliff Langley, Doc’s comedic, was watching six of them in a circle, conferring with one another. A shell landed in their midst. “That was the last of them,” Langley said.

  By nightfall the beachhead was secured. As the sun set, the shoreline grew even more grotesquely clogged with human bodies: Each Marine returning for supplies from the front brought a dead or wounded man with him. Their groans could be heard up and down the shore as darkness set in. Uncounted numbers of them died there, blasted by shells as they lay on their stretchers, waiting to be evacuated to the hospital ships.

  And still there remained work to be done—for the corpsmen, especially. More injured, hundreds more, lay scattered throughout the field of battle. Doc, as senior corpsman for his unit, received reports and assigned help as best he could.