Flags of Our Fathers (35 page)

Perhaps that explains what happened to Franklin Sousley.

Franklin had grown in battle, his comrades had observed. He’d seemed to get older and bigger. The last time L. B. Holly saw him, the young boy from Kentucky was cradling a wounded Marine between his legs as a corpsman gave first aid. A hell of a good Marine, Holly thought. A very considerate boy.

But then Franklin lost his focus for just a moment.

It happened at about two-thirty in the afternoon. The island had nearly been secured. Some Marines were already reboarding the transport ships offshore. General Keller E. Rockey was busy dedicating the 5th Division cemetery. And Franklin Sousley simply wandered into a road.

It was a known area of Japanese sniper fire. Perhaps Franklin forgot that. Perhaps he figured the Japanese had stopped shooting. Perhaps he was daydreaming about Marion.

The shot got him from behind. As the boys around him dove to the ground, Franklin swatted absently at his back, as though brushing away a blue-tailed fly. Then he fell.

Someone shouted to him: “How ya doin’?” and Franklin answered back, “Not bad. I don’t feel anything.” And then he died.

The glassy-eyed Marines had been inflicting heavy enemy losses for many days; but, as usual, these losses were mostly concealed from the Americans’ view. But now the signs were inescapable: Final victory was near. General Kuribayashi’s abandoned blockhouse was blown up on the day Franklin died. The job required four tons of explosives. Donald Howell, advancing with a unit at the very northern tip of the island, watched as a nearby tank aimed its flamethrower at a bunker, routing the Japanese inside. As they ran for their lives, Howell cut them down with his machine gun. “They were just piling up,” he remembered. “I was shooting them as fast as they came through. I got sick to my stomach; I vomited; I was a mess for an hour and a half. It was just the thought of what you were doing to another human being. They weren’t doing anything to me, and I couldn’t take it. It was different than shooting someone who was threatening you.”

The defenders grew reckless in their desperation. Enemy infiltrators were everywhere at night now, providing easy targets for Marine sharpshooters. A banzai charge on the night of March 22 faltered with fifty of the sixty attackers gunned down. Area after area on the northern plateau was declared “secure”—each area having been won at appalling cost.

“We are still fighting,” Kuribayashi radioed on March 22. “The strength under my command is now about four hundred. Tanks are attacking us. The enemy suggested we surrender through a loudspeaker, but our officers and men just laughed and paid no attention.”

It was Kuribayashi’s last dispatch. His body was never found.

The next day, Frank Crowe looked on as two surviving platoon leaders met anxiously with Dave Severance. “They were murmuring about the losses, and about the inability to finish off the enemy,” Crowe recalled. “They intimated that they and their men were about at the end of their rope. The captain listened to them, then quietly gave orders for the next day’s fighting. His calm manner had a strong effect. The feeling of hopelessness changed to one of quiet resolve.”

The tall, dignified captain was a good deal more ravaged than he appeared. He had received word from home that day that his wife had given birth to a stillborn baby boy. Sometime later, Severance learned the bad news about a corporal in his platoon, one Dave Bowman, whose wife also was expecting. Bowman was giving a final briefing to the platoon leader who was relieving him so that he could head for the offshore transport and passage back home. As he talked, he was shot dead.

This was too much for Severance. “I went off to an area all by myself and cried,” he told Richard Wheeler. “I eventually regained my composure and moved on.”

Three days after that, the war was over for Easy Company.

Easy’s original total force on Iwo Jima was 310 young men, including replacements. On March 26, Captain Severance led his 50 survivors on a tour of the newly dedicated 5th Division cemetery. And then they traveled by a small boat to the transport, the
Winged Arrow,
for the trip back home. They had to climb a cargo net to get aboard. Many were so weak that they had to be pulled over the rail by sailors.

When I asked Severance, many years later, exactly how it finally ended, he thought for a moment and then replied: “We had all the real estate.”

Severance was the only one of six Easy Company officers to walk off the island. Of his 3rd Platoon, the one that first scaled Suribachi, only Harold Keller, Jim Michels, Phil Ward, and Grady Dyce came through the battle untouched. Easy Company had suffered eighty-four percent casualties.

Of the eighteen triumphant boys in Joe Rosenthal’s “gung-ho” flagraising photograph, fourteen were casualties.

The hard statistics show the sacrifice made by Colonel Johnson’s 2nd Battalion: 1,400 boys landed on D-Day; 288 replacements were provided as the battle went on, a total of 1,688. Of these, 1,511 had been killed or wounded. Only 177 walked off the island. And of the final 177, 91 had been wounded at least once and returned to battle.

It had taken twenty-two crowded transports to bring the 5th Division to the island. The survivors fit comfortably onto eight departing ships.

The American boys had killed about 21,000 Japanese, but suffered more than 26,000 casualties doing so. This would be the only battle in the Pacific where the invaders suffered higher casualties than the defenders.

The Marines fought in World War II for forty-three months. Yet in one month on Iwo Jima, one third of their total deaths occurred. They left behind the Pacific’s largest cemeteries: nearly 6,800 graves in all; mounds with their crosses and stars. Thousands of families would not have the solace of a body to bid farewell: just the abstract information that the Marine had “died in the performance of his duty” and was buried in a plot, aligned in a row with numbers on his grave. Mike lay in Plot 3, Row 5, Grave 694; Harlon in Plot 4, Row 6, Grave 912; Franklin in Plot 8, Row 7, Grave 2189.

When I think of Mike, Harlon, and Franklin there, I think of the message someone had chiseled outside the cemetery:

When you go home

Tell them for us and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today

Most of the Japanese dead lay sealed in caves where they would be mummified by sulfur fumes. Decades later, many would be found perfectly preserved, their eyeglasses still on. Some survived and fought on. One who surrendered months after the Marines left later emigrated to Brazil, too shamed to live in Japan. The last two defenders surrendered in 1949.

In the 1,364 days from Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender, with millions of Americans fighting on global battlefronts, only 353 Americans were awarded Medals of Honor, the nation’s highest decoration for valor. Marines accounted for eighty-four of these decorations, with an astonishing twenty-seven awarded for just one month’s action on Iwo Jima, a record unsurpassed by any battle in U.S. history. Iwo Jima stands as America’s most heroic battle.

The American victory unquestionably hastened the end of the war. In the ensuing months, about 2,400 distressed B-29 bombers, carrying 27,000 crewmen, would make emergency, lifesaving landings on the island.

This knowledge provided some comfort to the boys who had fought on Iwo Jima. Some.

“We who survived to the end were lucky,” said Robert McEldowney. “Just lucky.”

“It wasn’t a matter of living or dying or fighting,” said Corpsman Robert DeGeus. “It was a matter of helping your friends.”

“Tell your readers,” Corpsman William Hoopes advised me, “that I was wearing Marine Corps green dungarees. Mine were stiff with dried blood, and they cracked. And it wasn’t my blood.”

To Tex Stanton, it was an island of heroes. “If you got a medal,” he said, “your citation read that you did something ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’ Well, I saw plenty of heroes on that island. And I figure if you spent just twenty-four hours there, you were doing something ‘above and beyond’ just to survive.”

One of the last things Danny Thomas did before leaving the island was find Chick Harris’s grave. Chick and Danny had been the “Buttermilk Boys”—the two friends who were too young to drink liquor on liberty. Danny had run past his severed, dying pal on D-Day.

Now Danny knelt beside the place where Chick lay buried and made a silent promise: a promise that had nothing to do with wars or flags or nations or the Century of the Pacific that the Battle of Iwo Jima had forged.

“I promised I’d drink a toast of buttermilk to him,” Danny said.

Fourteen

ANTIGO

Where seldom is heard

A discouraging word.

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

—“HOME ON THE RANGE”

I KNEW NOTHING OF ALL THIS, growing up in Antigo. I knew almost nothing of it until after my father’s death in 1994.

World War II had been over less than ten years when I was born. Yet from a boy’s perspective in this small, tree-shaded town, it might as well have been fought in the Middle Ages—a vivid, glorious, exciting story, filled with images of great battleships and planes and tanks and men charging forth in rounded helmets, all backgrounded somehow by the Stars and Stripes. Vivid and glorious, but already distant, a kind of myth. I played soldier with my neighborhood friends and sang “From the Halls of Montezuma,” and thrilled to all the war movies on TV. As I grew a little older I devoured history books; I learned all about Eisenhower and MacArthur. But I never linked any of this to my own life, or my father’s life. My brothers and sisters didn’t, either. The Allied Expeditionary Force, Spearhead—these were about as connected to Antigo as Benny Goodman or Betty Grable.

This sense of distance was a little strange, of course, given that we all knew, early on, that our father was a figure in the most famous war photograph ever made.

But that’s all we knew. Our father himself never mentioned the photograph. He didn’t encourage anyone else to mention it. No copies of it existed in the house. The names Mike, Harlon, Ira, Franklin, and Rene were unknown to us. As was the name Iggy.

And so the war, and The Photograph, floated at the edges of my childhood, somewhere between reality and distant dream.

This was real: We lived at 321 Fifth Avenue, in the second-largest house in town. A black-shuttered white frame house that felt as though it had been there for all time and would continue there for all time, with three squat stories and a big front yard crowned by an old maple tree, and the backyard where we played football and catch-one-catch-all.

And this was real: Our dad was the owner of the McCandless, Zobel & Bradley Funeral Home, and one of Antigo’s leading citizens. We never thought to wonder why Dad’s name came last on the funeral home’s name, given that he was the sole owner. It was just part of the way things were. Like our garageful of bikes. Or the old St. John’s Church and St. John’s Catholic School, where Dad had gone as a little boy, two blocks away. Or the Antigo River, two blocks in another direction. Real things; timeless things. Things that just were.

My father had come home from the war and looked up his third-grade sweetheart, Elizabeth Van Gorp of Appleton, and married her in May of 1946, and moved with her to Milwaukee, where he worked at a funeral home while studying mortuary science. They set up housekeeping in a chauffeur’s quarters above a four-stall garage. In 1947 their first child, Kathy, was born, and John heard of an opening at the Muttart McGillan Funeral Home in Antigo. He brought Betty and the baby to his hometown. He probably carried all the money he owned in his pocket.

Seven years later, at the age of thirty-two, he was able to make one of the biggest commercial purchases in the county’s history: the McCandless & Zobel Funeral Home.

He got on the front page of the Antigo
Daily Journal
with that purchase. Before long, people in town were calling it the Bradley Funeral Home. But officially it was McCandless, Zobel & Bradley.

Dad kept those original names in it as long as he owned the business—nearly forty years. McCandless & Zobel meant something to the history of the town, to its memory of itself. That was more important to John Bradley than advancing his own name.

Dad bought the funeral home along about my first birthday, in February 1955. I was the fourth of the eight Bradley kids. Before me there were Kathy, Steve, and Mark. Afterward we were joined by Barbara, Patrick, Joe, and Tom. I still have my birth bill from the hospital on a wall in my study. John Bradley paid it in full the month after I was born. I cost $71.90.

Our house on Fifth Avenue must have been built in the 1910’s. It looked like it could survive a nuclear attack. It featured a big formal living room; a big formal dining room; a den; and a family room. The sunroom had a stone floor with a radiator underneath it.

Ours was a real working household. Everybody pitched in. We all had special tasks. When I was a little boy, my special task in winter was to get up every morning at five
A.M.
and go look outside the window to see if it had snowed. I had a particular window on the second floor, where my bedroom was, that was just right for this. It gave me a view to the telephone lines. There often was three feet of older snow already on the ground at five o’clock in the morning, and sometimes it was hard to tell if fresh snow had fallen. But I always could. If I focused on the telephone lines, even in the dark, I could see whether they supported thin parallel lines of fresh snow.

If there was fresh snow, I’d wake my two older brothers and we’d bundle up and set out on foot down to the funeral home, about a six-block walk, often through unplowed streets. There we’d get to work with our shovels.

The funeral home was a large corner property, and we had a lot of pavement to shovel off: a sidewalk, the large stair-stepped entrances, the huge parking lot. It was all manual labor; there were few little gasoline-powered snowplows back then. We’d arrive before sunup and work our way through what seemed like tons of snow. And after we were finished there, we got to come back to the house and do the walk and the driveway.

Two big snow-shoveling jobs before school. Only then could we dive into breakfast: the French toast, pancakes, and eggs Mom would have ready for us.

But it was fun. We never questioned it, never complained. It was part of Dad and Mom’s “System.”

They never called it that. But it existed. And I think it was brilliant. Brilliant and necessary. My parents had eight children to raise and a business to run. So as each of us got older, we took on a new level of responsibility. Washing the dishes. Keeping the lawn mowed. Helping out with the housecleaning. It was never something we complained about, or tried to negotiate. We just did it, because that was the way the family ran. We helped one another. We were a functioning, interdependent unit. It was our duty.

I think that Dad incorporated this concept of a System into his whole life—though if you put it to him that way, he wouldn’t recognize it. He saw his role in the funeral business as being one of service. People always ask what it was like being a funeral director’s son: Did you see a lot of dead bodies? Did you have to watch them get embalmed? It was never like that. My Dad wasn’t an embalmer; he had assistants who did that. He was a diplomat. He was a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a counselor.

If you lived around Antigo and your father died, you called John. If you had a problem with the Social Security Administration, John would help you with that. You didn’t know how you were going to pay that doctor bill? John Bradley would have a plan.

He focused on the needs of the families. Very often he would work until ten o’clock at night. He’d come home for dinner, take a short nap, and then go back. Nights were when the wakes occurred. He could have had an assistant handle those, but he was nearly always there himself.

He would stand at the top of the stairs inside the entrance to the funeral home greeting the people who came to mourn. He knew an astonishing number of these people by name. People from out of town, people he hadn’t seen in years, would brighten a little when he not only hailed them by name but inquired about personal details they’d forgotten they’d told him—marriages, illnesses, newborn children. This must have required some effort on my father’s part, but I’m sure it was never a strain. And it was never insincere. Ever. He cared about these people, their struggles and triumphs, their opinions. And the people sensed his caring.

I remember the first time I went on a call with my father to pick up a deceased person. I was about twelve years old. Dad said, “OK. We’re going in that house, and we’re going to pick up this lady. There’ll be family in there, and they’ll be crying.” And then he said: “I just want you to act as if that is your mother you are picking up. We’re going to treat her like she’s your mother.”

In the same spirit of service, my dad was president of just about everything in his hometown: school board, PTA, Lions, Elks. He was just a leader. But it benefited his business, too. He built one of the larger funeral homes in the state of Wisconsin—which is very close to impossible to do when you’re in the small town of Antigo. But then, John Bradley was the funeral director of choice for counties around.

He cut a dignified figure in the town, but there was no vanity connected to his elegance. After he died, my mom gave me a money clip of his that bore his initials, “JHB.” She commented that a salesman must have given it to him, because it would have been too flashy for him to have his initials inscribed. I countered, “But Mom, Dad had tailor-made suits, tailor-made coats, beautiful shoes. He always spent on his appearance.”

She answered: “Yes, but that was for the business. He had to look good for his business.” She was right: All his life he drove new Cadillacs. But those shiny new cars were used at the funeral home. After he retired he drove the smallest, least-equipped Chevy station wagon.

He ran his funeral home with a total commitment to quality and service. Everything was spotless, meticulously maintained. Once, when I was working there, he told me to clean the car that had just been used to deliver leftover flowers to the nursing homes. I cleaned and cleaned and shined and shined. At last I proudly announced that it was ready for his inspection. My dad walked to the garage, his wingtips crunching the tiny stones on the blacktop. He opened the back door, raised the floor, took the spare wheel out, and pointed to a single flower petal.

“I thought you said this was clean,” he said. I got the message. I thought that was fair. Clean to the highest standards.

And the highest standards had to be met when dealing with the public. It wasn’t about subservience or projecting a false image, it was about rendering true service. He didn’t articulate it but you understood that people were important. They deserved respect.

My dad’s natural leadership set an unspoken standard in the household. My older brothers were presidents of their class. In grade school and high school, the morning announcements were often read by a Bradley. The spokesperson for the school was a Bradley. I was president of my class for six, seven years in a row. It was an assumed thing. The Bradleys were leaders.

Dad never seemed to cultivate his leadership. He led a conservative life. He was not a star in any sense. But everyone liked John Bradley. Maybe part of his secret was that people felt safe talking to him. Maybe it was because of the way he listened to them. Those big ears of his, that got even more prominent toward the end of his life, were more than mere decoration.

He was a believing, practicing Catholic. He went to Mass every Sunday, he confessed his sins, he believed the dogma. “Jeepers Christmas!” was the worst oath he ever swore. Church for him was a bright soothing presence. The priests were figures of respect. The sacraments marked births and adulthood and death. All of it was straightforward, practical, solid—just like John Bradley. We all knelt down and said the Rosary. It wasn’t that Dad insisted we do these things. He never spoke to us about faith. But his actions always spoke louder than words.

His actions, in fact—the day-to-day actions of his long, quiet, worshipful life as a pillar of the Antigo community—spoke so loudly that the words we all wanted to hear never broke the surface: the words that would explain to us what the war had been like for him. What Iwo Jima had been like. And what it was like to have been a figure in The Photograph. This was the way John Bradley wanted it. His actions would be what defined him to us. The words we sought would have to come from someplace else.

For decades—for an entire generation—those words remained unspoken. And so they grew unimportant, at least most of the time. We all knew about the photo, but we knew of no story behind it to give it meaning for us. Statues had been made with John Bradley’s figure in them, but my father wore no statue-shaped belt buckles; he lit no cigarettes with a statue-shaped lighter. His Navy Cross he kept out of sight; none of us knew he had been awarded it until after he had died.

Neither I nor any of my five brothers and two sisters ever read a book about Iwo Jima while my father was alive.