Battle Field Angels (21 page)

Corpsman Jack Williams was shot three times in the belly and groin while treating a wounded soldier on Iwo Jima. He treated his own wounds before crawling under enemy fire to another wounded soldier. Williams tended to that soldier’s wounds as well, before an enemy sniper killed Williams.
(U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Archives)

John Willis was one of four corpsmen who earned the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. Fourteen Medals of Honor were awarded for valor during the thirty-six-day battle, the most for any single engagement in World War II.
(U.S. Navy, Bureau of Medicine & Surgery Archives)

By afternoon of the first day, the Americans had advanced a few hundred yards inland. Some regiments suffered a 33 percent casualty rate that day, far more than the invasion planners had predicted for the entire campaign.

Corpsmen raced from one wounded soldier to the next, first checking for life and then assessing medical condition. The top priority was the sucking chest wound. Without immediate medical care on the battlefield, a man could drown in his own blood if a bullet or red-hot piece of shrapnel had punctured his lungs. A corpsman had to jam a battle dressing into the wound to seal it from the outside and give the soldier a shot of morphine. Then he wrote a large “M” on the soldier’s forehead with an iodine pencil so medical personnel at the battalion aid station would know the wounded man had been given morphine. Next the corpsman filled out a tag with as much information as he could read from the soldier’s dog tags and tied it to the soldier’s uniform. Then he called for a stretcher team and moved on to the next injured man. A wounded soldier’s fate sometimes was determined by a corpsman who spent perhaps two minutes with him.

Stretcher teams didn’t always arrive immediately to take a patient to the rear. Usually, the least experienced privates were assigned as stretcher bearers. Sometimes they drew straws to determine who had to head up to the front line, knowing they would be easy targets for Japanese snipers. Hearing “
pffftt, pffftt
” as they ran was a good sign: snipers’ bullets were missing them.

The following morning, the sun rose over the carnage. The beach had become a junkyard of twisted cranes, abandoned equipment, and overturned tanks. Scattered among the wreckage were bodies that had been half-buried in the black sand by the incoming tide.

That day and for many thereafter, the Marines measured their progress in feet. Some of the thousands of caves and dugouts concealed fifty-five-gallon drums (called “spider holes”) with Japanese snipers hiding in them, bent on suicidal sneak attacks from behind as the Americans pushed forward.

After a week of intense warfare, the 5th Division had crossed Iwo Jima to the western shore and had turned northward toward three hills with the same elevation, designated 362A, 362B, and 362C. They had made tedious headway along paths through minefields that engineers marked with tape and white streamers.

On February 26, George Wahlen accompanied his platoon as it moved out across a small, open plateau. Once the platoon became fully exposed, the skies rained mortar fire. The ground trembled under the Marines’ feet. In seconds, Wahlen heard cries from men up ahead. The corpsman crawled to a writhing Marine whose thigh pumped blood down his shin. After treating him, he tended another soldier whose leg had disappeared in an explosion. Wahlen applied a tourniquet to keep him from bleeding to death. Then he crawled to the next Marine a few feet away as enemy fire continued to hail down on them. Shrapnel had torn into the rifleman’s body. Wahlen cleared sand from the raw flesh, applied a battle dressing, and moved on. Then Wahlen found Eddie Monjaras, a corpsman whose chest and stomach had been ripped open. Wahlen stopped the bleeding, gave him a shot of morphine, and left him for the stretcher bearers.

Only a half hour had passed since the barrage had started. During that time, Wahlen treated at least fourteen badly wounded Marines under relentless enemy bombardment. Exhausted, he finally inched his way out of the death zone. Moments later, the shattered platoon moved off the plateau toward its objective: Hill 362A. As shell-shocked Marines crept toward the hill, a grenade landed in the sand a few yards from Wahlen. Before he had time to react, shrapnel ripped into his face, blinding his right eye. Lying on the ground, Wahlen bandaged his own oozing facial wound. Then he crawled more than twenty yards under enemy fire to another injured Marine. Three more grenades exploded in rapid succession. They seemed to follow Wahlen as he treated one soldier after another. Shrapnel burrowed into his buttocks and legs. Soaked in sand-caked blood, Wahlen attended to Marines for an hour until he depleted his two pouches of medical supplies.

When another corpsman refused to make the dangerous run back to the command post for supplies, Wahlen volunteered. He refused treatment. He hauled the provisions back up to the remaining Marines in his platoon on the front line. By the time the sun set on the eighth day of the assault, George Wahlen had treated nearly half his platoon’s casualties, had been wounded repeatedly, and yet stood his watch that night. His Marine division had gained only three hundred yards. The Japanese still held Hill 362A.

Two days later, the enemy remained on high ground. Rocky outcrops blocked every approach to Hill 362A. As dawn broke on February 28, American artillery, rockets, and carrier-based aircraft pounded the Japanese positions on the hill. At 0815, the Marines launched another assault.

Corpsman John Willis quickly had his hands full. Marines fell as they advanced across a two-hundred-yard stretch of sand at the base of the enemy stronghold. They were met with a fusillade of small-arms fire and incoming grenades. Willis ran from one crater to the next, patching wounded soldiers. Shrapnel hit him, so the corpsman retreated to an aid station. After receiving treatment, he ran back to his platoon, which was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with nearly one hundred Japanese who had launched a late-afternoon counterattack.

As he administered plasma to a wounded Marine, a grenade dropped onto the sand next to Willis. He lobbed it back toward the enemy. Then a second grenade landed, followed by a third, a fourth, and a fifth. Corpsman Willis picked up eight Japanese grenades and threw each out of the crater, protecting the two men he was treating. The ninth grenade detonated in his hand. The youngster from Tennessee and the two Marines he had fought to save died instantly.

It seemed nearly every Marine in the battle knew what Willis had done. They spread the word as they fought both exhaustion and the enemy. When night fell, the Americans remained at the base of Hill 362A. The brutal battle had produced a gain of only three hundred yards.

On March 2, after twelve days of fighting, the Marines finally took Hill 362A and controlled two thirds of Iwo Jima. That night, more than fifty Japanese sneaked behind American lines to take back the high ground. They nearly succeeded—as the combatants fought face-to-face with sabers, knives, pistols, grenades, and explosive satchels, some filled with picric acid.

In less than two weeks of battle, more than three thousand men died on Iwo Jima. More than twelve thousand were wounded. Casualties were five times more than those suffered by the Marines on Tarawa. But the battle was not over.

The exhausted Marines received new orders to assault Hill 362B about a mile away—elevated land gutted with enemy tunnels, dugouts, and foxholes—but first they had to cross a minefield. Jack Williams’s regiment would strike from the western beaches but had to traverse rippled ridges and winding gorges filled with the enemy and booby traps.

On March 3, at 0745, Marines climbed out of their foxholes and advanced. By now they knew what to expect. The sudden downpour of artillery, rockets, and grenades no longer surprised them. As Williams treated one wounded soldier, he heard the cry of another lying in enemy territory and ran to him. He grabbed the Marine under his shoulders and pulled him into a pan depression in the sand. With his body, Williams shielded the injured man from enemy snipers. A millisecond later, three enemy rounds ripped into the corpsman’s groin and belly. As blackish-red abdominal blood spread through his uniform, Williams finished treating his patient while the gunfire continued.

Waves of pain rolled through him as he patched his own belly and staunched the river of blood flowing from his groin. Once his bleeding had slowed, Williams crawled toward another hurt Marine. After dressing his second patient’s wounds and giving him a shot of morphine, Williams crawled toward the rear for help. But a sniper’s aim found Jack Williams. The youngster who had once dreamed of owning a farm died a short time later.

George Wahlen’s shoulder ached. Part of it had been blasted away the day before. Wahlen had refused first aid despite some momentary paralysis. Instead, he had instructed a Marine how to clean the ash-filled sand out of his raw flesh and then apply a battle dressing.

Furious fighting marked their agonizing advance toward the hill. Nearly invisible caves erupted with sniper fire at exposed Marines. Wahlen’s company had advanced another three hundred yards after five hours and consolidated with other units for the major assault up the hill late in the afternoon.

As they pushed forward, Wahlen heard screams for help. Three wounded Marines huddled together in the bottom of a crater. At first, Wahlen couldn’t see them through clouds of exploding sand and the smoke of detonating ordnance. As the Marines yelled directions to Wahlen, an explosion cut them off mid-word. An enemy artillery shell had found them.

Wahlen peered over the lip of the crater. One Marine had dissolved into a splattered mass of tissue, organs, and bone fragments. The other two had lost arms and legs. When Wahlen stood to scramble down into the crater, his legs buckled, pitching him into the hole. Part of his right foot had been torn away by a sniper’s bullet. Ignoring his wound, he cinched a tourniquet at the base of one of the Marine’s stumps. It was only when other corpsmen arrived and took the surviving Marines to an aid station that Wahlen treated his own wound. Once alone again, he heard the cry of another wounded man. Even though Wahlen had given himself a shot of morphine, he climbed out of the crater and crawled nearly fifty yards under enemy fire toward the injured soldier. Both of the Marine’s legs were broken. Wahlen pulled him into a crater and stayed with him until others arrived to evacuate them both.

The most seriously wounded on Iwo Jima would require treatment hundreds of miles away at permanent military hospitals. On the same day that Wahlen and others were wounded, a new type of military medicine specialist arrived in the Far East: nurses and corpsmen trained specifically for aeromedical evacuation.

On March 3, Jane Kendeigh became the first flight nurse to land on a battlefield when her plane touched down on a captured Iwo Jima airstrip. In early 1945, the Navy graduated its first class of flight nurses after training them to treat patients at high altitude. These nurses could swim a mile, tow or push a victim two hundred yards in the water, and swim four hundred forty yards in less than ten minutes. Kendeigh landed under enemy mortar fire aboard a Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft, filled its twenty-four litters with gravely wounded men, and took off on a fifteen-hour flight to a medical facility in Guam.

Two years earlier, the Army also had begun using flight nurses to evacuate badly wounded soldiers during the Tunisian campaign in Africa. The nurses had been trained in ocean, jungle, and desert survival. They cared for the seriously injured aboard C-46 aircraft, nicknamed “flying coffins” for the tragic tendency of faulty heaters to explode.

Medical evacuation by air shortened the time it took to deliver a gravely wounded soldier to sophisticated medical care. Trained inflight medical specialists augmented a military medical corps that was stretched dangerously thin on the ground in Europe and the Far East.

Some Marines became psychiatric casualties after weeks of continuous fighting on Iwo Jima. Corpsmen started seeing dramatic cases of what they called “combat fatigue.” Some men fell into a semiconscious, catatonic state, while others became manic and irrational. Still others lost control of their bowels. The best that corpsmen could do at the bottom of a foxhole was to tag the soldier and call for a stretcher team to take the casualty to the rear.