Flags of Our Fathers (34 page)

Chick Robeson got hit toward dusk on March 8—in the act of saving my father’s life. Doc had run into the open once again to treat a wounded Marine. When he was finished he called for covering fire. Chick and several others stood up, exposing themselves to view, and raked the ridge as Doc scurried toward them. A Japanese bullet blew Chick’s BAR out of his hand and shredded his little finger. Doc was on him, patching him up, almost as soon as he reached safety. Robeson later recalled that as a surgeon operated on him that night, he asked, “Son, how would you like to get off this island?” It sounded good to Chick.

The 28th spent the next day clawing its way northward for about 150 yards, at alternating intervals of monotony and danger. The rough terrain stripped them of tank cover. Seven men died in the 2nd Battalion.

The day after that was a virtual repetition.

To Representative Homer Angell of Oregon, orating elegantly on the House floor, the flagraising photograph represented “the dauntless permanency of the American spirit.” Half a world away, the boys did not look so dauntless. By this point in the campaign—a point far beyond anything most troops in history had endured—the Marines’ combat efficiency was showing signs of deterioration, and the boys themselves had begun to resemble ghostly remnants of a fighting force.

Scruffy beards matted their faces. Their fatigues were ripped and thick with accumulated sweat. One of their number would later write that their lips were puffed and black and their mouths hung open, as if they were having trouble breathing.

Their daily routine—impossibly dull and impossibly terrifying—was turning them into human robots. Each day was the same: a morning artillery bombardment, then a crawling, slow advance over exposed terrain, then an afternoon bombardment, then another advance. At dusk the boys scuttled into shell holes or ravines for shelter. The next morning, it all started over again.

They had gone deeper into the dark universe of combat than anyone before them. As Richard Wheeler would later write: “The Marines were now being required to perform in a way almost beyond human endurance, both physically and psychologically. History is filled with examples of high casualties in battle, but few armies with front-line losses of over fifty percent have been ordered to keep attacking, especially in the face of heavy fortifications. No troops with less esprit de corps than these Marines could have kept going.”

One of the Marines who hardly ever betrayed a hint of the pain or exhaustion he felt was Ira Hayes. Jack First recalled Ira as stoic and focused throughout the ordeal. “I spent a few nights with him in a foxhole,” First said. “He was quiet; he never said much.” Lloyd Thompson agreed. “I would shout, ‘How you doing, Chief?’ when I’d see him,” he said. “Everybody respected him as a Marine.” And Phil Ward, who shared a foxhole with Ira for a week in the north, maintained, “I was glad to have him looking out for me.”

But sometimes even Ira’s veneer cracked. Bill Ranous recalled: “One night a Japanese came close to our foxhole and Ira shot him dead. The next morning I could see sorrow on Ira’s face as he looked at the dead man. He was moved.”

As the boys slogged through their seemingly endless operation on Iwo Jima—as they resigned themselves to the leaden permanency of an eternity spent in hell—the effects of what they had accomplished began rapidly to change the contours of the Pacific War.

On March 9 more than three hundred B-29’s, liberated from harassment out of Iwo’s airstrips, launched the first of the great firebombing raids on Tokyo. They dropped more than sixteen hundred tons of incendiary bombs that destroyed sixteen square miles of buildings, killed nearly 100,000 people, wounded 125,000, and left 1.2 million homeless. The casualty figures from this and other firebombing raids would be higher than those caused by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

The next day on Iwo my father’s actions once again caught the eye of Dave Severance. A man fell injured as Doc’s platoon was repulsed by Japanese fire. Severance, in his report recommending my father’s Navy Cross, wrote what happened next: “As a second attack was launched, Bradley ran forward under the covering fire of the attacking platoon, rushed to the side of the casualty and remained there in the midst of the enemy’s tremendous volume of defensive fire until he had verified that the man had died of his wounds.”

The Marines inched forward on Iwo’s hard shell; killed; died. On March 11 two companies covered twenty-five yards and took thirty-three casualties; on the 12th, they were stalled, with twenty-seven casualties. It had become that kind of war.

A U.S. Senator, Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, expressing a rising sentiment from around the country, arose in the Senate and called for a postage stamp to be issued commemorating The Photograph.

And on this day Doc Bradley’s war came to an end.

Sam Trussell, who was wounded along with Doc, remembered it. The two were crouching at the base of a cliff with some other Marines. They thought they were protected by an overhang, but the mortar shell that got them smashed against flat rock and sent steel splinters flying. “I was blinded,” Trussell recalled, “and Doc pulled me back into the hole. Then he worked on a guy whose legs were torn up. Then he guided me to the aid station. I heard some guys talking about Doc’s bloody legs, but I couldn’t see how bad he was hit.”

My father had taken shrapnel wounds to his right thigh, calf, and foot, and to his left foot. This did not stop him at first. Rolla Perry recalled glimpsing him as he ran past the enclosure: Both his legs were bleeding, but he was busily treating five other wounded Marines.

Dave Severance would later write, in his report on Doc, that “I observed him repeatedly running to any sector of the company zone of action to render first aid,” and that “it would be hard to estimate the number of lives he saved by his prompt and skillful administration of medical aid, carried out with complete disregard for his own safety, nor to fully express how stimulating his devotion to duty was to the morale of those who served with him and were treated by him.”

Doc was rushed to the Battalion Aid station for emergency treatment, then on to the field hospital, where some of the fragments were removed. The next morning he was loaded onto a plane for Guam, and then sent to a hospital in Hawaii.

In the Pacific killing grounds, Doc Bradley was just another casualty, one of thousands. But back in the United States, millions of people were scrutinizing his profile in The Photograph, wondering who he and the other flag-raisers were. The
New York Sun
had superimposed a drawing of the famous “Spirit of ’76” illustration in one corner of the photo. After it hit the newsstands, 48,000 people sent in requests for copies.

The day after my father departed, Rene Gagnon fired his rifle for the first time.

He and a buddy had wandered into a cave, assuming it was empty—a mistake that had cost many Marines their lives. The two boys found themselves facing a lone Japanese soldier with his rifle aimed at them. As he told his son, Rene Jr., many years later, the New Hampshire mill kid had a blinding thought in the split second that followed: “We all have mothers. We’re all human. Why does this have to be?”

Rene had his own rifle, but he hesitated. He hoped, against all reason, that the Japanese would lay down his weapon. Instead, the enemy soldier fired. Rene’s buddy dropped dead. In the next second it would be Rene’s turn. He squeezed the trigger, and the Japanese crumbled.

Rene stood in the cave, trembling. This was what the battle had come down to. To his son, he later recalled thinking: “Why did I have to do this? Looking down a barrel into someone’s eyeballs and having to kill him. There’s no glory in it.”

Glory, though, was on the mind of Senator Raymond Willis of Indiana, who was moved by The Photograph. On March 13 Willis urged his colleagues to move with “utmost haste” in creating legislation to honor “the all but unbelievable valor” of the Marines in the Pacific.

The next day the schoolchildren of Tokyo—those who had survived the firebombing—made a special radio broadcast to the surviving defenders of the island. They sang “The Song of Iwo Jima,” which began:

Where dark tides billow in the ocean,

A wing-shaped isle of mighty fame

Guards the gateway to our empire:

Iwo Jima is its name…

On March 14, Admiral Nimitz proclaimed Iwo Jima conquered and that “all powers of government of the Japanese Empire in these islands are hereby suspended.” Two days later Nimitz declared Iwo officially secured, and that organized Japanese resistance had ended.

“Who does the admiral think he’s kidding?” steamed Marine Private Bob Campbell when he heard of this. “We’re still getting killed!”

That same day, the 5th Division’s cemetery, where Mike and Harlon now lay, was dedicated. Howlin’ Mad Smith’s eyes filled with tears as he said to his aide: “This is the worst yet.”

President Roosevelt heard of the ceremony on his way to address Congress on the Yalta summit. “The Japanese warlords know they are not being overlooked,” he said, in an aside to the legislators. “The Japanese know what it means that ‘the United States Marines have landed.’ And I think I may add, having Iwo Jima in mind, the situation is well in hand.”

James Buchanan recalled those closing days a little differently. “We were trapped!” he said of his unit. “Getting shot at constantly. I was a private, and replacements were reporting to me. There was no one else left.”

On March 16, General Kuribayashi radioed Tokyo: “The battle is approaching its end. Since the enemy’s landing, even the gods would weep at the bravery of the officers and men under my command.”

On that same day, Louis Ruppel, the executive editor of the
Chicago Herald American,
had a brainstorm. He composed it into a telegram that he sent to FDR that same day. Louis Ruppel’s idea was that the flagraisers captured in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph—which had already been designated the symbol for the Seventh Bond Tour—be brought home as stars of the tour.

This situation was unique: The Photograph had created such a stir that the President of the United States was about to anoint the flagraisers government-approved national heroes. Yet no one knew who they were, or what they had done.

On March 17, Japanese Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso went on the radio to announce the defeat of General Kuribayashi’s defenders on Iwo Jima.

But the bullets and shells were still flying. Amidst all his command duties, Captain Dave Severance of Easy Company began to receive some relayed requests that at first only annoyed and distracted him: Could he please provide the names of the Marines in The Photograph?

“I must confess, I shared little interest in the subject at the time,” Severance told me. “We were fighting for survival, covering an area big enough to engage a full company, but manned now by two small platoons commanded by corporals or sergeants. Naming the flagraisers was a subject far from my mind.”

By this time, newspaper clippings of the flagraising photograph had made their way to the island. Keyes Beech, a Marine correspondent, was one of many journalists who saw a story in finding the flagraisers. But the Easy boys who had been atop Suribachi that day were by now either casualties or scattered in the northern fighting. Only the runner, Rene Gagnon, was available to help with the identification.

Rene scrutinized the blurred figures. His best guess was five names: Franklin Sousley, Mike Strank, John Bradley, himself, and Henry Hansen. Rene had determined that Hansen was the figure on the far right, ramming the pole into the ground with his back to the camera. Harlon Block and Ira Hayes were not mentioned.

On March 18 Tex Stanton, who had endured and witnessed so much travail, received his final wounds.

“I was lying in my hole,” he recalled to me, “where I had been for four days. Whenever I raised my head they shot at me.” He did not hear the round that got him. “It was just rocks and dirt everywhere.” Ira and Franklin, sharing a foxhole nearby, fell under the same mortar barrage. They saw what happened to Tex.

Tex’s memory of what happened next was matter-of-fact: “I tried to get up,” he said, “and looked down and saw that both my feet were gone. But I didn’t want to leave. I wanted them [the corpsmen] to leave me with my buddies.”

Rolla Perry, who also saw the impact, confirmed this. “I saw Stanton fly out of the hole,” he said, “and when he landed his one foot was gone and the other was dangling. It was very sad to see him without feet, trying to reach his BAR so he could keep supporting his platoon, even though most of the original men were no longer there. I had always felt safe when he was firing near me, for he was the best. When the stretcher team loaded him up and started for the rear, I heard him say, ‘You can’t take me away. My old buddy Perry needs me.’”

As terrible as Tex’s wounds were, many boys on the island would have gladly traded places with him. He had no feet, but he’d received a “million-dollar wound”—a ticket off the island. Unlike so many who were still fighting, he would survive. The battle had become so brutal, and these teenagers so brutalized, that the sacrifice of an arm or a leg made good sense to them now.

So saturated were their minds with visions of death that when they were splashed with the blood of a stricken buddy—as so many of them were—they perceived it as a kind of hallucinatory dream. Only years after the war ended would these dreams transform themselves for some into nightmares.

By March 21, the invasion force on Iwo Jima had been attacking for thirty-one consecutive days—a sustained effort unique in modern warfare. Their daily mission was unchanged: move on to one more ridge. A battle for yards, feet, and sometimes even inches. Brutal, deadly, and dangerous combat aimed at an underground, heavily fortified, nonretreating enemy. Five days of fighting remained, but no one could know that. Sleep-deprived, undernourished, inured by now to the routine of constant death, the boys shuffled forward. Their alertness, their finely tuned instinct for self-preservation, had inevitably deteriorated into a trancelike state.