But now the majority of these seemed to consider the story over. Having badly distorted the facts of the ascent up Suribachi, and having fatally garbled the true story of the flagraisings from the safety of their distant ships, the gentlemen of the press—or most of them—withdrew. There were other war zones to inspect, other exotic locales for their datelines.
Now the agony would have its veil of privacy. Now the valor would go uncelebrated.
Easy Company, reunited with its patrol that descended Suribachi the night before, was ready to join the great offensive on the northern plateau. Now the dying would begin in earnest.
Easy plunged into action with the rest of the 28th Marines along the island’s embattled west coast, in the 5th Division’s zone of operations. It was nasty business. The terrain—rocky plateaus abutting on steep cliffs, shallow ravines; “like hell with the fire out” in the words of one correspondent—offered the usual absence of cover. The 28th threw all three of its battalions onto the line, and the hidden Japanese gunners resumed their harvest. Easy had to cross rough, exposed ground against a heavily fortified ridge.
The Japanese ordnance showed no respect for heroes.
Among the first to get hit was Chuck Lindberg, shot through the arm. Doc Bradley was instantly at his side. (“The only time I saw your dad on Iwo, he was running,” Pee Wee Griffiths told me. “Somebody was screaming and he was running.”) The heroic flamethrower’s war was over. He was evacuated from the island.
A few minutes later Mike Strank’s dark prophecy came true.
Mike was leading Ira, Harlon, Franklin, and some other Marines across a dangerous strip of ground when a cluster of Japanese snipers opened up on them. Jesse Boatwright took a bullet in the stomach, a nonlethal wound but enough to slam him into a shell hole. His buddies scrambled for cover. Mike and some others dove behind an outcropping that seemed to give them solid protection from three sides. Its only exposure was toward the sea, where the American destroyers lay at anchor. As sniper fire continued to rake the area, Mike sized up the situation with a veteran’s detachment. Pee Wee Griffiths, L. B. Holly, and Franklin bent toward their leader, awaiting orders.
Mike talked to them about possible escape routes. Then he seemed to drift into a private place. He broke his own silence after a moment with a cryptic remark to L.B.: “You know, Holly, that’s going to be one hell of an experience.” L.B. waited for him to continue, then finally asked: “What are you talking about?” Mike did not reply; he only pointed to a dead Marine who sprawled a few feet from the group.
“He was telling me he would die,” Holly reflected many years later. “And sure enough, two minutes later, Mike was dead.”
Joe Rodriguez watched it happen at close range; he was nearly killed himself. “Mike hollered at me to come over,” he recalled. “He was on one knee with Franklin and the other guys around, getting ready to draw a plan in the sand to get us out of there. But before he could get a word out, a shell exploded.”
Franklin and Holly were bowled over by the blast, but were uninjured. Pee Wee was hit in the face and shoulder and temporarily blinded. Rodriguez woke up a few seconds later with “a warm feeling in my chest, unable to move my legs.”
Mike Strank did not wake up.
The shell got Mike where he gave it. The impact tore a hole in his chest and ripped out his heart.
No Japanese could claim credit for this kill. Almost certainly, the round had come from a U.S. destroyer offshore; it sliced through the only unprotected side of the outcropping. The Czech immigrant to America, born on the Marine Corps birthday, serving his third tour of duty for his adopted country, the sergeant who was a friend to his boys, was cut down by friendly fire.
Melvin Duncan, just nineteen, reached down and cradled Mike in his arms. Now, at seventy-two, Melvin’s emotional comment recalls the esteem he and the others felt for Sergeant Mike: “If there had been some way I could have died in his place, I would have done it.”
L. B. Holly gently replaced Mike’s helmet on his head and whispered to the lifeless form: “Mike, you’re the best damn Marine I ever knew.” Then Holly took Mike’s watch off and gave it to Harlon, who had idolized Mike. Now Harlon was “Mike,” the squad leader.
And then the war went on.
Progress was slow and lethal across the rocky, windswept plain. The 28th had moved out at nine A.M. By nine-thirty it was taking harassing fire from the rear. Seven hundred yards inland, on a front that ranged from two hundred to five hundred yards wide, the regiment was caught in a harsh landscape of outcroppings and ravines. Below the surface was the labyrinth of caves and tunnels. As one combatant later wrote: “If a heavy aerial bomb happened to hit an entrance, smoke would puff out of the other entrances, sometimes an astonishing distance away.”
The 28th was pinned down for four hours, its crouching boys getting picked off with sickening regularity, before it could start moving again.
And movement without cover offered only more danger. Easy, strung out in a long line, scampered across the hard rock toward the island’s northern tip. The gunfire directed at them was intermittent but deadly. My father was following Hank Hansen across a crust of exposed ground when he saw Hank crumple up. No one had heard a shot, and at first Doc thought the sergeant had tripped and fallen. But Hansen did not get back up, and as the other Marines scattered, Doc ran to him and pulled him into a nearby shell crater.
The bullet had entered Hansen’s back and exited through his abdomen. “It was a bad wound,” my father told a magazine interviewer a few months later, “but one thing you learn out there is not to give up. I yelled for somebody to hold the plasma bottle while I put a battle dressing on. For me, it was the luckiest thing I ever did.”
Hansen was dying, but Doc’s cry for assistance saved his own life. Tex Hipps came sliding into the crater to assist the corpsman. Then he glanced over Doc’s shoulder and shouted, “Watch out, Bradley!” Four Japanese, one brandishing a sword, were charging him, screaming, “Banzai!” Hipps dropped the sword-wielding officer and one soldier with his M1; the other two retreated. Now two Marines came tearing onto the scene, hurling grenades at the Japanese, who were disappearing into a hole. After it was cleaned out, ten enemy bodies were discovered.
But Hank Hansen was dead. Like too many young boys, he died in Doc Bradley’s arms. My father slipped Hank’s wristwatch off, vowing to pass it on to his friend’s mother.
Harlon Block’s tenure as the heir to Mike Strank lasted until dusk.
As twilight settled in, the rawboned Texan moved among the boys of what was now his squad, giving orders for everyone to dig in and align themselves with a good field of fire.
Tex Stanton had secured himself in his foxhole when Harlon—his helmet characteristically tilted to one side—walked up to the rim and asked, “Where’s Hauskins?”
“Over there,” Stanton replied, and then: “You’d better get down, Harlon.”
“Then Harlon just exploded,” Melvin Duncan remembered. “He was blown into the air; there was dust and debris all around him.”
Stanton could see that Harlon had been sliced from his groin to his neck. The All-State pass-catcher, the boy who’d ridden along the banks of the Rio Grande on his white horse, stood there a moment, his hands filled with a heavy redness. He gave a strangulated scream: “They killed me!” He struggled with his intestines for a moment longer, then rolled to the ground and died facedown.
His back—which formed one of the most galvanic contours in the flagraising photograph—now lay limp and exposed to the setting sun. His letter to Belle—saying that he had come through without a scratch—had not yet left the island. Its postal cancellation would not be stamped until March 14.
On the day Mike and Harlon died, Congressman Joseph Hendricks of Florida stood up on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a bill authorizing the erection of a monument. It would be a tribute “to the heroic action of the Marine Corps as typified by the Marines in this photograph. I have pro
vided in the bill that this picture be a model for the monument because I do not believe any product of the mind of the artist could equal this photograph in action. Never have I seen a more striking photograph.”
At the same time, Maurine Block was imploring her mother, Belle, not to keep telling everyone that it was Harlon in the photograph at the base of the flagpole. It was just the back of a Marine. No one could be sure which one.
But Belle was sure. Her reply to Maurine was a mother’s: “I changed so many diapers on that boy’s butt. I know it’s my boy.”
The mission of Easy Company on March 2 and 3 was to advance. Their objectives were a series of low, stony ridges cut through with shallow ravines, filled with piles of rubble. Japanese shooters populated these ridges, using natural cover as well as their maze of caves and tunnels.
The weather turned raw and stayed that way: rain, gusts of chilling wind. The boys clutched their ponchos and shivered. At night the island was bathed in the lurid light of flares. “Things were going off all the time,” Glen Cleckler remembered. “You’d always wonder if the next one was going to fall on you.”
By March 3, some 16,000 of the original 22,000 Japanese defenders were still alive. The Americans had taken 16,000 casualties, with 3,000 dead. On this day, the 2nd Battalion’s feisty colonel, Chandler Johnson—who had saved the original flag on Suribachi for his men—was blown to bits, a collarbone here, another fragment there. He was one of four of the 28th’s seven officers who were killed that day.
Other heroes continued to die. Sergeant Boots Thomas, who had led the thrust to the mountain’s base and was interviewed on CBS radio, took a field telephone handed to him by Phil Ward. As he answered the call, a sniper shot his rifle out of his right hand. Thomas did not flinch. The next shot ripped through his mouth, killing him instantly.
The fighting was cramped and vicious. Five men of the 5th Division were awarded the Medal of Honor on this day, a record unmatched in modern warfare.
Corpsman George Wahlen, twenty, of Ogden, Utah, was one of those. He was finally pulled off the field after refusing to leave his comrades even though he had suffered the third of three serious wounds. The first, a grenade blast on February 26, had temporarily blinded him in one eye; he ignored it, as well as the other grenades that sent fragments through his butt and legs. On March 2 a mortar shell tore a hunk of flesh from his right shoulder; he kept on ministering to wounded men around him. Finally, on March 3, a mortar splintered his right leg. “I heard other guys crying for help,” Wahlen told me years later. “I tried to walk over to them but couldn’t. I bandaged myself up and gave myself a shot of morphine.” With his foot barely attached to his leg, he crawled fifty yards to give first aid to another fallen boy before he was pulled from the battle.
“Why?” I asked Medal of Honor recipient George Wahlen. “Because I cared for my buddies,” he answered.
It was on March 4 that the lacerated, exhausted Marines saw the first demonstration of why they were fighting and dying on the ugly little island. A crippled B-29 returning from an attack on Tokyo, the Dinah Might, became the first American plane to make an emergency landing on Iwo Jima. Nearby Marines watched with astonishment as the crew leaped from the aircraft and kissed the ground. The ground was shaking with artillery fire. As far as the leathernecks were concerned, the crew had just landed in hell. They got a different perspective when one of the crewmen, thankful he had been spared a crashlanding in the Pacific, shouted: “Thank God for you Marines!”
Rain and chilly winds buffeted the troops that day. Bill Genaust, who had recorded the replacement flagraising with color film and who had asked Rosenthal, “I’m not in your way, am I, Joe?” walked into a “secured” cave to dry off. The last thing he did was turn on his flashlight. He was thirty-eight and left behind a wife of seventeen years. His body was never recovered.
Joe Rosenthal landed on Guam on that day, and inadvertently created the myth that his now-famous photograph was “staged.”
As he later recounted:
“When I walked into press headquarters, a correspondent walked up to me. ‘Congratulations, Joe,’ he said, ‘on that flagraising shot on Iwo.’
“‘Thanks,’ I said.
“‘It’s a great picture,’ he said. ‘Did you pose it?’
“‘Sure,’ I said.
“I thought he meant the group shot I had arranged with the Marines waving and cheering, but then someone else came up with the flagraising picture and I saw it for the first time.
“‘Gee,’ I said. ‘That’s good, all right, but I didn’t pose it. I wish I could take credit for posing it, but I can’t.’
“Had I posed the shot, I would, of course, have ruined it. I would have picked fewer men, for the six are so crowded in the picture that one of them—Sergeant Michael Strank—only the hands are visible.”
This conversation would haunt Rosenthal for the rest of his life. Some of the correspondents listening to him assumed that he was talking not about the “gung-ho” photograph, but about the previous frame, the one that was now famous. Soon a false and damaging slur was making the rounds: that the replacement-flag photograph, now universally understood as the only flagraising photograph, was bogus, staged. (Lou Lowery’s shot of the original raising, delayed in its transmission to the United States, never made an impact on the public consciousness.)
The slur accelerated on the jealousy of some rival photographers, who were only too happy to see questions raised about the photo that had eclipsed all their work, and on the indifference of the news media about checking its facts. Time magazine, on its radio program, Time Views the News, broadcast the “staged” interpretation of the photograph without bothering to verify the rumor. As soon as he arrived back in the States, Joe Rosenthal did his best to set the record straight, and his wire service, the Associated Press, demanded and received a public apology from Time about the error. It would be the first of many false claims, followed by press apologies. Joe Rosenthal’s 1/400th-second exposure would bring him nearly as much frustration in life as it brought satisfaction.
Back on the island, Don Howell had his moment of crisis and valor. Finding himself and some comrades surrounded by Japanese in an enclosed area, Howell turned himself into an acrobatic killing machine. As he ran backward over the treacherous ground, dodging bullets, he coolly slipped a belt of ammunition from his shoulder and delicately fed it into his machine gun, sprayed withering fire into the attackers as his buddies dashed to safety. This action earned Howell a Navy Cross.
The Marines were taking terrible casualties, but at least one Japanese saw clearly how it would all end. General Kuribayashi sent a radio message to Tokyo: Iwo Jima would soon fall, the steely martinet reported, resulting in “scenes of disaster in our empire. However, I comfort myself in seeing my officers and men die without regret after struggling in this inch-by-inch battle…”
My father’s luck continued to hold. Sometime on March 4 he narrowly escaped death once again.
He was treating a wounded Marine in a shell hole, my father told my brother Tom, when he glanced up to see a Japanese soldier charging him with a bayonet.
“I shot him with my pistol,” John Bradley recalled later.
“What did you do then?” Tom asked him.
“I finished my job and ran to the next one.”
“You didn’t check to see if he was dead?”
“That wasn’t my job.”
But some of those closest to Doc were not so lucky. After this incident Doc returned to his platoon, but he could not find his special pal Iggy.
Ralph Ignatowski had been walking with Doc just before he went to help the Marine in the shell hole. Now he was gone. Doc asked a few Marines in the area about Iggy’s whereabouts. No one knew.
The next day, the 2nd Battalion was relieved. Captain Severance took Easy Company back south, toward Suribachi. He was taking them swimming. The gesture was pure Severance: one minute the stern, unflappable field leader, dispensing intelligent, low-ke
y orders under heavy fire; the next, a sensitive and thoughtful shepherd of his boys, in the same mold as Mike Strank. Dave Severance would be awarded a Silver Star for his masterful guidance of Easy Company throughout the Iwo Jima invasion.
Now, on the western beaches, across the island from the landing side, Dave’s battle-scarred kids stacked their rifles and plunged in. It must have seemed surreal to them; it does to me, as I try to imagine it: a cadre of grimy, battle-hardened Marines facing mutilation and death in their dirty fox-holes transformed in a moment to a gaggle of naked boys swimming and splashing in the ocean. While they frolicked, the March 5 edition of Time magazine headed for the newsstands. It carried The Photograph, with the caption:
OLD GLORY ON MT. SURIBACHI
TO RANK WITH VALLEY FORGE, GETTYSBURG AND
TARAWA The boys in the ocean might have felt that they had somehow slipped off the edge of the earth, into a realm far beyond the reach or knowledge of their loved ones. They would have been amazed to know the true story: that the eyes of America were upon them as they struggled. The accompanying article in Time made this clear: “No battle of World War II,” it declared, “not even Normandy, was watched with more intensity by the U.S. people.”
During Easy’s interlude in the Pacific surf, my father continued to wonder about Iggy. He asked around; none of the other boys had seen him lately. The mystery gnawed at him. Teamwork was encoded into the Marines’ behavior. Iggy would not have simply left the company without saying something to someone, without having a reason.
A less mysterious departure was that of Admiral Spruance. The naval chieftain sailed from the island on March 5. Twenty-one days of battle remained.
Flags of Our Fathers Page 26
